Senator Pryor asks for Spending Cut Suggestions! Here are a few!(Part 142)

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.

On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:

Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.

Here are a few more I just emailed to him myself:

GUIDELINE #8: Convert several remaining programs into vouchers.

Government programs should not be bloated bureaucracies that shepherd recipients into one-size-fits-all programs. Voucher programs, which allow individuals to purchase goods and services on the open market rather than receiving them from the government, have two distinct advantages:

Choice. Instead of forcing program recipients to take what a bureaucracy provides, vouchers allow them to shop around and find the goods and services that fit their needs.
Efficiency. Providing health insurance or housing vouchers is much less costly to government than the construction and maintenance of government-owned hospitals or housing. Competition among private firms for vouchers would bring about lower prices than government monopolies.

Some policymakers believe that low-income individuals cannot be trusted to make intelligent economic decisions with their vouchers, condescendingly implying that government employees know best how to run the lives of poor families. Those worrying that private markets could not accommodate the influx of voucher-wielding families fail to recognize that vouchers create markets by strengthening demand and thereby inducing new supply.

Food stamps provide the model for a successful voucher program.29 Instead of building a bureaucracy to grow and distribute government food to low-income families, the program simply provides families with vouchers to purchase food themselves. Housing vouchers that subsidize private rent costs have proven better for low-income families than dilapidated, dangerous public housing. Most child-care programs subsidize the private facilities that parents choose instead of forcing them into government-run facilities. Federal student loan programs exist as a type of education vouchers.

Vouchers can provide choice without bureaucracy in many other areas. Medicare and Medicaid could be made more like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), in which federal employees choose between competing private health plans with the federal government subsidizing the premium. More public housing programs can be replaced with rent vouchers.

This is how bad it is getting:

Despite increased borrowing, record-low interest rates have kept net interest costs down.
Under the President’s budget, the combination of rising interest rates and a doubling of the national debt would nearly quadruple inflation-adjusted net interest costs over the next decade.
By 2020, net interest costs would account for a record 16.1 percent of the federal budget and 4.1 percent of GDP. Net interests costs would be nearly three-quarters the size of the entire $1,041 billion deficit.

The Daily Hatch