House Republicans unveiled a bold strategy to cut 0.017 percent from the $3.7 trillion federal budget this week. Republican Whip Eric Cantor unveiled the GOP’s “YouCut” website, which includes five possible spending cuts for citizens to vote on. Mr. Cantor promised to take the favored cut to the House floor next week for members to consider.
The basic idea of YouCut is a good one — getting citizens actively involved in solving the government’s giant deficit problem and focusing congressional attention on cutting the bloated budget.
But the GOP leadership make themselves look silly by offering such small cuts. The suggested cuts on the new website average just $638 million in annual savings, which is just 0.017 percent of total federal spending. Put another way, it is just $1 of cuts for every $5,800 of federal spending. The average YouCut savings idea is just 0.04 percent of this year’s federal deficit of $1.6 trillion. So we would need 2,500 cuts of this size to balance the budget.
It’s a mystery why the Republican leadership can’t offer more than tiny spending reforms. They’ve got lots of sharp staffers who know how wasteful many large programs are and understand the need to terminate whole agencies. It’s true that YouCut will offer new cuts every week, but so far the cuts are very timid.
The second-largest YouCut idea this week is to refocus “community development” spending on those cities that are the most needy. But the whole idea of the federal government spending money on local projects such as parking lots is both economically absurd and an obvious violation of the Tenth Amendment.
Come on Republicans, you can do better. Terminating all of HUD’s $13 billion in annual community development spending, for example, ought to be an easy vote for any member claiming to be a fiscal conservative.
Some Republicans do understand the nation’s fiscal emergency and the need for bold action. Paul Ryan, for example, has his excellent roadmap proposal. But thus far with YouCut, we have the Empire State Building engulfed in flames and Mr. Cantor sending in a toddler with a squirt gun to solve the problem.
Still, the House Republicans have created a tool that citizens can use to get the message across about the need for much larger reforms. The YouCut website encourages people to send in their own budget-cutting ideas. I’ll be sending some in, and folks, feel free to borrow ideas from the “Spending Cut” tables on www.downsizinggovernment.org.
I don’t think conservative voters, tea party activists, and other citizens concerned about the nation’s economic future want to cut 0.017 percent from the budget. I think they want to cut 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, or more. So send your suggestions into YouCut, and we will see whether the GOP puts away the squirt guns and pulls out the fire hoses.
