John Stossel has constructed a checklist of things he’s like to cut from government spending:

privatize air traffic control. Canada did it, and it works better. Then privatize Amtrak. Get rid of all subsidies for rail. That’ll save $12 billion. End subsidies for public broadcasting, like NPR. Cancel the Small Business Administration. Repeal the Davis-Bacon rules under which the government pays union-set wages to workers on federal construction projects. Cut foreign aid by half (although we should probably get rid of all of it)…

eliminate the U.S. Education Department. We’d save $94 billion. Federal involvement doesn’t improve education. It gets in the way. Agriculture subsidies cost us $30 billion a year. Let’s get rid of them. They distort the economy. We should also eliminate Housing and Urban Development. That’s $53 billion more. Who needs the Energy Department and its $20 billion sinkhole? The free market should determine energy investments. And let’s end the war on drugs. In effect, it’s a $47 billion subsidy for thugs in the black market.

I’ve already cut more than six times more than President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address. His freeze of nondefense discretionary spending would save only $40 billion.

But my cuts still total only $246 billion. If we’re going to get rid of the rest of the CBO’s projected deficit, we must attack the “untouchable” parts of the budget, starting with Social Security. Raising the retirement age and indexing benefits to inflation would save $93 billion. I’d save more by privatizing Social Security, but our progressive friends won’t like that, so for now I’ll ignore privatization.

The biggest budget busters are Medicare and Medicaid, and get this: the 400 subsidy programs run by HHS. Assuming I take just two-thirds of the Cato Institute’s suggested cuts, that saves $281 billion.

How about the Defense Department’s $721 billion? Much of that money could be saved if the administration just shrank the military’s mission to its most important role: protecting us and our borders from those who wish us harm. Today, we have more than 50,000 soldiers in Germany, 30,000 in Japan and 9,000 in Britain. Those countries should pay for their own defense. Cato’s military cuts add up to $150 billion. I’ve now cut enough to put us $2 billion in surplus…

even a timid Congress could make swift progress if it wanted to. If it just froze spending at today’s levels, it would almost balance the budget by 2017. If spending were limited to 1 percent growth each year, the budget would balanced in 2019.

There are plenty of things to cut at the state level as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 3:24 pm and is filed under business, China, Democrats, Downsize, Republicans, Tea Party, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.