Downsizing Government
Our friends at the Cato Institute, the only think tank in DC dedicate to personal and economic liberty, have launched a new site, DownsizingGovernment.org, committed to cutting waste from the federal budget.
From the press release:
The research on the site also exposes that many public outlays—though vigorously defended by the politicians who created them and the constituencies they purport to help—are remarkably ineffective at achieving their core aims.
“Some people have lofty visions about how government spending can help society,” said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute and the project leader for DownsizingGovernment.org. “But the essays on this website put aside such bedtime stories about how government programs are supposed to work, and instead focus on how they actually work in the real world.”
DownsizingGovernment.org is an ongoing project that launches today with detailed information on five cabinet-level agencies: Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development. Subsequent departments will be added as they are completed in the coming months.
The site offers detailed examples of inefficiency, ineffectiveness, redundancy and corruption inside federal government agencies. It provides charts showing federal spending by department, federal aid to states and the number of subsidy programs.
You can follow Downsizing Government on Twitter @DownsizeTheFeds and you can become a fan on Facebook.
As long as the downsizing includes significant cuts in military spending designed not for defense of the homeland but to try to manipulate politics around the globe, I’ll consider it. Otherwise it’s the same old “downsize the policies we oppose, keep funding those we think worthwhile.”
Still miffed about us bottling up Soviet Expansion, I see.
I am all for cutting unnecessary pentagon waste as well, It is, after all, a government agency and there are none of those that can’t stand to trim a lot of fat.
And lest you accuse me of also being a typical republican in bed with big business. The FIRST things I would cut is all corporate welfare and all agriculture subsidies.
And the NEA. And there’s the Solomon Amendment …
How would this be different from the 1982 Grace Commission, or Clintoon’s “Re-inventing Government”?
The way to eliminate “corporate welfare” is to eliminate the corp income tax. Corporations do not pay taxes, the end user pays the taxes in the price. The corporation is just the tax collector.