OPINION:
Federal spending continues to increase, despite Washington’s talk of “trillion-dollar cuts.” That’s because politicians refuse to kick their expensive habit. Perhaps the best way to change the culture of spending is to dismantle one piece of our $3.6 trillion federal budget at a time.
To be sure, Congress has put the largest share of that amount, $2 trillion in entitlements, off-limits. That shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to allow self-serving bureaucrats to continue blowing the rest on pointless projects just because the cost may only be measured in the thousands or millions. If Capitol Hill doesn’t have the guts to make cuts when the price tag is low, it’ll never be able to work up the courage to tackle the big ones.
Sen. Tom Coburn’s latest edition of the Wastebook offers 100 outrageous programs that serve as a great place to start cutting. The Oklahoma Republican listed $113,277 in federal grant money poured into a video game museum. That industry generated an estimated $69 billion in hardware and software sales last year; it can afford to build its own memorials without picking the public’s pockets. The same is true of the federally funded tributes to magic, horsedrawn carriages, puppetry and the history of skiing.
Likewise, it makes no sense for Uncle Sam to send $17.8 million in foreign aid to China, a country to which we are $1.1 trillion in debt. Worse, the money is meant to bribe China into adopting the same left-wing social engineering policies that are bankrupting our own nation.
House Republicans had the right idea when they created YouCut, which enlisted the public’s help each week in selecting a preposterous program deserving of the ax. Early last year, the House - often by overwhelming margins - voted to force the government to provide more documents electronically (reducing printing costs), to terminate the Presidential Election Campaign Fund that subsidizes politicians, to stop the federal government from spending $1 billion in buying foreclosed homes and to repeal $17 billion for media campaigns authorized by Obamacare.
Momentum for the effort has been lost. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has predictably blocked these measures in the upper chamber, although a few ideas have been pushed through the Nevada Democrat’s roadblock on “must pass” legislation. Even so, the House needs to reinvigorate YouCut and force Mr. Reid to defend each silly program, one-by-one.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office promised more YouCut votes in the weeks ahead now that committees have finished work on a handful of bills. One would stop the United States from bankrolling the United Nations Population Fund, which is used to pay for abortions. Another would use attrition to slice the number of federal employees by 10 percent.
Washington needs to get serious about treating every dollar of the public’s money with care and respect. Until Congress and the administration can admit that Uncle Sam shouldn’t endow magic shows and preserve Pac Man for the ages, our economy will have little hope of true recovery.
The Washington Times
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