Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Saturday, August 21, 2010 4:15:40 PM
You Cut Ideas: Send Congressman Eric Cantor your vote each week for your favorite budget cut choice and then submit your ideas for other budget cuts. Mr. Cantor promises to bring recommendations to the House floor for a vote.
Buster is running an on-going thread of ideas, including some that he would like to see in the Republican campaign this fall although they may not technically be about budget cuts.
8-21-2010 - Adopt the ideas in an August 18, 2010, article by Victor Davis Hanson: “With a Whimper or a Bang — or Not at All?”
- A flat income tax would save trillions through simplification and greater compliance.
- End academic tenure. It was designed to promote free speech, and ended up ensuring coerced uniformity of thought.
- Raise the Social Security retirement age; if we live far longer and are healthier, why draw retirement at the same old age?
- Start encouraging natural gas usage for transportation. It is a clean, abundant transportation fuel that would save us billions in decreased imported oil fees, and would increase jobs. We should build ten nuclear reactors a year, especially if we are to charge hybrid and electric cars.
- Don’t cut defense. Eighteen-year olds come out four years later better educated and disciplined by the military than most on federal loans who stretch out the undergraduate years to their mid- or late-twenties. America has never regretted being overarmed; in 1860, 1917, 1939, 1950, and 1980, it regretted greatly vast cutbacks in military preparedness.
- End affirmative action. Given intermarriage and the diversity of races and tribes, it is beginning to look like the racial codes of the Old South. Can someone tell me why the third-generation light skinned half-Mexican-American with a last name of Lopez qualifies and second-generation darker Tarsam Singh does not? An entire class of operators has mastered the system and created a level of cynicism that erodes public confidence.
- Insist on a national exit test for BA degrees. A simple test of common knowledge would do. When Johnny does not know what the Parthenon is, but thinks Harriet Tubman, not Grant and Sherman, won the Civil war, we are in deep trouble.
- Provide incentives for clean living. Those who are on federal assistance or Medicare, should receive bonuses for weight control, good blood pressure, and not smoking—either increased benefits or reduced copayments.
- Build the fence, fine employers who hire illegal aliens, and beef up security. Without an influx of illegal aliens, the pool is static, and the formidable forces of assimilation begin to work while we fight over amnesty, guest workers, remittances, and anchor babies.
- Freeze federal spending and insist on revenue neutral, pay as you go, new legislation.
8-17-2010 – AEI's Alex J. Pollock and Peter J. Wallison are right about housing finance: They want to privatize mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so taxpayers do not have to pay billions for bailouts. The Republican Party should agree with them and promise to cut the cord that connects taxpayers to the housing mortgage business.
8-15-2010 - The House should stop leasing cars for House members at taxpayer expense. The Senate doesn't use taxpayer money to lease cars for Senators. A House cut would be a way to show seriousness, practice shared sacrifice, and gain some credibility--while saving some money.
8-15-2010 – The Heritage Index of Economic Freedom: a blueprint for Republicans in 2010: The Republican party promise to voters in 2010 is that Republicans will move America from 8th place (and falling) into first or second position in each of the ten categories of the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom and into first or second place overall. Republicans will do what it takes: we will cut, reform, reduce, and clear away troublesome and redundant regulatory hurdles and taxes so entrepreneurs can, in the words of Arthur Brooks in “The Battle”, pursue economic freedom.