Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Here are a few more I just emailed to him myself at 11:07 pm CST on April 9th.
Mark Pryor made some comments on April 6, 2011 on the floor of the U.S.Senate concerning the possible federal government shutdown. I will provide all of his comments in my next few posts. Here is a portion below:
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to Ronald Reagan. He has some great insights in his article “It’s time for a government shutdown,” Forbes, April 4, 2011.
Health and Human Services, the home of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, is a spending behemoth. Yet if this bureaucracy has any legitimate role, it is a small one. The principal social services safety net should be private. If government steps in, it should primarily be at the state and local level. If there’s any cause for federal intervention, it should be very limited.
For instance, Social Security and Medicare are middle class welfare. Politicians have lied about the programs being social insurance in order to win political support: there are no real trust funds, individual accounts, or legal obligations to pay. Yet the programs are fiscal time bombs, with trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities. Individuals should save their own money for retirement; retirees should buy their own health insurance. People who are poor should be helped because they are poor.
Not much else the federal government does makes much sense. The Agriculture Department is a special interest bureaucracy par excellence, enriching people because they are farmers. Why do the rest of us owe farmers a living? They work hard, but so do most other Americans. Welfare should be for poor people, not influential people. Department buildings should be sold off for condos.
The same principle applies to the Commerce Department. While some bits of the bureaucracy perform legitimate functions (such as conducting a census for legislative apportionment), most of the department’s programs are forms of corporate welfare. American business should make money from customers, not steal money from taxpayers.
The analysis is similar for the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior. Most federal subsidies for energy have been the equivalent of flushing money down toilets at the DOE headquarters. Big Oil and little green like their respective subsidies, but taxpayers have gotten no benefits commensurate to their forced generosity.
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The Daily Hatch 