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We found $900 billion to $1.5 trillion worth of ways to trim the fat marbled throughout government. And these are items that government officials say should be cut. Government officials whose salaries are paid for with taxpayer dollars are spending their days telling taxpayers how the government can cut waste.

But instead of cutting $1.5 trillion, the government now wants to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion to pay its bills. If it passes, the national debt would reach $14.3 trillion, equal to the size of the U.S. economy

It would be fair to say that the analysis referenced above is not something new. Even within the article the author points to earlier work included in this report. But that in no way suggests the ideas are not common sense and useful. What it does suggest is related to the first paragraph from the Fox Business excerpt. Politicians often talk about cutting spending and waste but rarely doing anything about it. When they do reduce spending or waste little time elapses before those savings are cancelled out by new spending and waste.

Much of the money to be saved in the report above deals with government infrastructure. The same infrastructure that porkulus proponents suggested spending more of your money on to produce make work jobs. Granted, those infrastructure targets were partly roads and transportation. But rather than using more tax dollars to pay for it they could have sold some of this infrastructure (in the report) and have sort of a win/win.

But the sad part is that did not happen and the first quarter of the porkulus package went to education and Medicaid expenditures. The education part was to keep ‘programs’ and ’staff’ meaning a payoff to the NEA. But I digress.

Read the article above and mention it to your elected reps. Then ask them why they cannot propose such things. You can interrupt their response by informing them that is a rhetorical question.

Both major parties are of course guilty of this sin of omission.

Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Public Affairs, Money Matters, wordpress, Politics, News Media, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.