Paul Revere is in his 20s, and is concerned about the impact of the growing national debt on his generation. Not much younger than when his namesake made his historic ride, he works in the wake of a tea party to warn his fellow patriots of impending doom - unless they exercise the courage to act now.
On Friday I addressed a few hundred billion in annual federal budget waste. Today I will aim for more substantive and long-term reforms that will save the taxpayer much, much more.
- Adjust federal pay. A 2010 paper by James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation estimates $47 billion is spent paying federal workers more than their private sector equivalents.
- Shut down some percentage of America’s 800-plus military bases around the world. While some, such as in Japan or South Korea, can be argued as necessities given the geopolitical nature of the current world, why are we pretending we need multiple bases in nations such as Germany and Italy? World War II and the Cold War are long over, and even defense hawks such as Ed Morrissey recognize Europe should be able to take care of itself.
- Eliminate the mostly ineffective Head Start and DARE programs, which cost the taxpayer over $7 billion annually.
- Get rid of the new health care law. Raising taxes by $50 billion a year and double-counting various taxes and programs (to the tune of at least a few hundred billion over the next decade) to fix the books are always unacceptable, but especially since the law does not address medical tort reform, health care fraud, anti-competition laws and Medicare’s costly payment program system. (I have other issues with the law, such as its inclusion of the individual mandate and its wide open possibility to abortion funding, but I am focusing on the budget issues for the moment.)
- Institute a deficit-neutral solution to the Doc Fix. Created under the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, ignoring the necessity of fixing the problem is increasingly an issue for the taxpayer (to the tune of $300 billion over ten years and growing), doctors (whose livelihood is regularly threatened) and patients (who rely on Medicare and Medicare-paid doctors for health care).
- No more bailouts. Beyond my philosophical opposition to them, circumventing the natural rise and fall of businesses in a working market through policies such as the bailout of GMC not only cost the taxpayers tens of billions but also set the government up to grow in size, as both GMC and Chrysler are now government-run. Furthermore, “Too Big To Fail” mindsets set up economic bubbles that, when they pop, hurt the working American and substantially drop the amount of taxes paid to the government. This increases deficits, and adds to the debt. It also sets up the opportunity for the government to spend billions (or, in the case of the current recession, trillions) in inefficient efforts to halt the natural flow of markets. Recessions happen, as do recoveries, but overly-burdensome government regulations and interferences increase the size of the recessions and decrease the speed and quality of the recovery.
- Begin audits of the Federal Reserve, and diminish or eliminate its power over the next few years. As Representative Paul noted on Fox, the Fed can do more damage than Congress when it comes to our debt, and many argue it already has. Its interest rate policies alone were a primary cause of the housing bubble and subsequent crash, and its new goal of “quantitative easing” is designed to increase inflation— in other words, legally steal the value from our diminished paychecks while lowering confidence in the dollar.
- Pull all existing bailout monies from Freddie Mac; Fannie Mae; GMC; Chrysler; and AIG. The TARP program would have actually made money, despite its philosophical wrongness, had it not been used as a slush fund for these companies. In October 2010 CBO estimated the taxpayers would lose $50 billion, whereas the Treasury estimated slightly over $100 billion on their investment. This is money that could be better invested in repaying our debt.
In my list on Friday, I eliminated well over $200 billion from the budget this year, and once we start a new fiscal year that number would be well over $300 billion annually. My medium-term cuts and reforms would save a minimum of $150 billion the first year alone, and by 2015 be saving well over that as costs associated with defense and the health care law would never materialize.
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