Junto Boys

HERITAGE FOUNDATION'S BUDGET PROPOSAL

The Heritage Foundation has a great proposal to get runaway spending under control.

Build a constituency for limited government and lower taxes.

Interest groups are always ready to defend their special-interest subsidies. Taxpayers rarely fight wasteful spending because they do not believe they will ever see the savings. Policymakers can organize taxpayers in opposition to wasteful spending by linking specific reforms and spending reductions to specific tax cuts, such as legislation to:

-Terminate corporate welfare and use the savings for capital gains and business tax cuts;

-Reduce outdated and duplicative programs and use the savings to reduce income taxes across the board;

-Privatize federal corporations by offering current public employees stock options at below-market prices;

-Commercialize air traffic control duties and privatize airports, targeting the savings to airline security; and

-Devolve programs to states while alleviating federal mandates and reducing federal taxes.

Make the states pay for their own pork.

State and local governments, which often consider federal grants “free money,” also lack sufficient incentives to spend this money well because they did not have to extract the taxes themselves. (Many seem to forget the high federal taxes that local residents paid for this “free money.”) Consequently, local officials rarely object to federal grants for unnecessary projects.

Few local governments, for example, would consider taxing their own residents to fund the following pork-barrel projects found in the 2004 federal budget: [2]

-$725,000 for the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;

-$200,000 for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio;

-$150,000 for a single traffic light in Briarcliff Manor, New York;

-$100,000 for the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee;

-$500,000 for the Montana Sheep Institute; and

-$50 million to construct an indoor rainforest in Coralville, Iowa.

Privatize government institutions.

Candidates for privatization are numerous. Congress should:

-Sell the remaining Power Marketing Administrations through a stock offering ($155 million, D);

-Require that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund itself as all other television networks do ($437 million, D);

-Privatize the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation ($14 million, D);

-Allow government agencies to accept bids on government printing jobs instead of having to use the

-Government Printing Office (GPO) ($130 million, D);

-Shift the National Agricultural Statistics Service to the private sector ($124 million, D);

-Sell Amtrak through a stock offering ($1,334 million, D);

-Privatize the next generation high-speed rail program ($27 million, D);

-Turn over the foreign market development program to the assisted industries ($24 million, M);

-Privatize ineffective applied research programs for energy conversation research, fossil fuels, and solar and renewable energy ($1,640 million, D);

-Sell many of the federal government’s 1,200 civilian aircraft and 380,000 non-tactical, non-postal vehicles;

-Shift the Energy Information Agency’s duties to the private sector ($78 million, D);

-Privatize the Architect of the Capitol ($534 million, D); and

-Privatize Air Traffic Control operations and fully fund with user fees.

These things go on forever and you can hit the link if you want to read more. I'm going to write my congressman tonight and see what he thinks of the proposal.