Let me call to your attention a noble and popular (if perhaps slightly under-baked) political initiative launched by Congressman Eric Cantor and the House Republican Economy Recovery Working Group. It’s called YouCut. The goal is to let people vote for spending cuts they’d like to see Congress enact.
The response has been enthusiastic. Cantor reports that the first week YouCut was up and running, visitors cast an average of more than 3,000 votes an hour. People are also mailing in ideas of their own — tens of thousands of ideas.
Yet so far there have been only two “winners” of the YouCut budget-cut sweepstakes. One winning idea was to cut a redundant welfare program. The other was to drop the latest pay raise for nonmilitary federal employees. These cuts would save several billion in the short run and many more billions down the line.
Great … but why have only two spending-cut ideas passed muster so far? We’ve got trillions in expenditures to eliminate. And it’s really not that hard to find greasy marbled slabs in the federal budget to hack away at. YouCut’s contest rules are way too “conservative.”
Therefore, by the power vested in me as a fellow downtrodden taxpayer, I hereby authorize any and all spending cut ideas vetted by YouCut visitors that earn more than a dozen votes be judged victorious and worthy of immediate implementation.
Congratulations to all you winners.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Can You Cut It?”
Eliminate the Dept of Trans (Ray the Hood) immediately. Sunset all transportation taxes in 5 years. Instruct all tax collectors (airports, oil companies, etc) to pay the federal tax they collect directly to the state in which it is collected. The states have 5 years to replace (or not) the federal tax with a state tax.
For over a generation now, the sole purpose of the Dept of Trans is to bribe congress critters into supporting other bills they would otherwise not support. Removing that system of bribery will reduce spending in non-transportation areas also.
Winners:
State legislators and governors who will now have more power over the transportation dollar.
State bureaucrats
Tax payers
Highway users
Mass transit advocates concentrated in states that will listen
The economy
Losers:
Federal bureaucrats
Federal lobbyists
Leaders of both parties seeking to enforce party discipline
Good idea, next Dept oof Education. Never understood why feds take money, build bureacracy, then tell me to be happy they returned 40 cents on the dollar. They have NO place in education, period.
Throw in the Department of Energy too.