What Can We Cut to Balance the Budget
Published on Oct 16, 2012
Will Rogers has a great quote that I love. He noted, “Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago”(Paula McSpadden Love, The Will Rogers Book, (1972) p. 20.)
If the U.S. government cut all government services except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and payments on the debt, federal spending would still outpace revenues. Prof. Antony Davies argues that there are not specific cuts that will enable government to balance the budget. He says, “Nothing less than a redesign will solve this problem.” That redesign should begin by determining what the proper role of government is.
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We got to cut wasteful spending out of the government and here is another fine suggestion from the Heritage Foundation.
March 12, 2013 at 5:40 pm
Newscom
The massive spending bill, or continuing resolution, released by the Senate this week continues spending on programs which are inappropriate or wasteful and fails to adopt good policies in many areas. Here’s a rundown of some of the worst offenders in the Senate bill:
Energy. The Senate CR continues to fund a failed energy policy that empowers Washington bureaucrats instead of American families and businesses. Though it does cut some programs minimally, it does the equivalent of removing a used napkin from a full trash can. There’s much more waste that needs to be removed. For example, section 1203 reduces Department of Energy (DOE) funding by $44 million when more than $5.3 billion could be cut. The $44 million is equivalent to 0.8 percent of what should be cut.
Perhaps most egregious is the meager $11 million cut from the $1.8 billion request for Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. In total, the DOE budget funds applied-research programs on conventional fuels, renewable energy sources, and nuclear energy that the private sector should be undertaking. American families and business are far better equipped than government to determine what types of energy technologies work for them. Eliminating these programs alone would save $3 billion in taxpayer money and help to return energy choice back to Americans.
Though the bill cuts $10 million from nuclear energy spending, based on the 2013 request, it would still fund over $150 million for nuclear waste disposal and management programs. None of this funding would go toward Yucca Mountain, the waste repository mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended. Given the complete lack of any nuclear waste disposal or management policy by the Administration and its insistence on terminating the Yucca project, there is little justification for this spending. Instead, Congress should provide $40 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to finish its review of the DOE’s Yucca Mountain permit application.
—Jack Spencer, Senior Research Fellow, Nuclear Energy, and Nick Loris, Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow
Funny Cartoon about Washington’s “Spending Cut” Charade
May 26, 2012 by Dan Mitchell
Last year, I made fun of the Washington Post for biased reporting when they used the world “slash” to describe a budget proposal that would have trimmed $6 billion out of a giant $3,800 billion budget.
I wrote that this was the budgetary equivalent of “going on a diet by leaving a couple of french fries in the bottom of the bag after bingeing on three Big Mac meals at McDonald’s.” A couple of other bloggers then had some fun by doing the exact calculations of what this would mean.
Now we have a cartoon version of Washington budgeting, authored by Gary Varvel.
Keep in mind, though, that this cartoon actually is inaccurate because it implicitly accepts the dishonest Washington definition of a budget cut (having spending grow, but not as fast as previously planned).
Every budget plan, even the very admirable proposals put forth by Sen. Rand Paul and the House Republican Study Committee, merely restrains the growth of federal spending.
So the cartoon should show Uncle Same with some clippers, simply seeking to keep the weed from growing even faster.
And if we replaced Uncle Sam with Barack Obama, instead of scissors or clippers, he’d be holding fertilizer.
The Daily Hatch 