Obama said he'd cut with a scalpel, not a hatchet. Which programs should be cut?
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471 votes
Tax subsidies to big oil companies
Oil companies receive billions of dollars per year in tax subsidies. This is an easy cut to make given their exorbitant profits.
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415 votes
The Iraq War
The Iraq War costs almost $300 million per day. It's time to bring home the troops.
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213 votes
Swap farm subsidies for renewable fuel investments
Seems more in the national interest to focus on renewable fuels/energy sources than just direct payments to farmers and agricultural companies.
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166 votes
Demand off the shelf pricing for medical goods.
Medical goods and services are priced absurdly due to the idiosyncrasies of the current system. Gauze in a hospital should not cost $50. This will save medicare and medicaid lots of money
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110 votes
Eliminate Farm subsidies for all but "family" farms.
The big Corporate farms don't need it and the USA needs to start cutting back on these givaways.
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92 votes
IRS! Institute the Fair Tax.
The Fair Tax will eliminate all tax for the poor and eliminate all tax breaks for the rich, while eliminating almost all enforcement costs! Sounds lke a no brainer to me!
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73 votes
The drug war
How much money do we spend on non-violent drug crimes and imprisonment?
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69 votes
spending on new roads and highways.
This money would be better spent maintaining our existing infrastructure.
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64 votes
Daylight Savings Time
The US practices daylight saving time or DST, shifting one hour ahead in the spring and one hour back in the fall.
Academics on the NYT Op-Ed page, state that there is little scientific proof that this reduces energy consumption. It also turns out that this practice could be wasteful. In fact an Indiana study, showed an overall increase of 1 percent in residential electricity use with occasional increases of 2 to 4 percent in late spring and early fall.Time to lose this outdated idea.
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59 votes
Cut corn subsidies
Why are we subsidizing corn production over other crops?
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57 votes
military hardware research and development
Ballistic Missile Defense has never worked and most experts say it never will. It destabilizes the nuclear arms situation and encourages those who already have missiles to acquire a very large number ot defeat the system. And a real nuclear attack would almost certainly use a small "suitcase" device that's not traceable back to any nation-state. Researching small nuclear bombs is also madness as the long term result of this is almost certainly that one goes off in an American or NATO city - open societies being vastly more vulnerable to infiltration than dictatorships. And continued research into offensive bio-weapons, whether masked as "defensive" or not, is far better put into the public health system that would deal with any large-scale epidemic, attack or not.
Land mines also need to be banned and so do all other weapons that primarily target civilians. Civil law should allow vendors of these to be sued by any civilian harmed by them after the war is over.
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45 votes
Welfare and food stamps
People deserve second chances, but this system is still badly abused by drug addicts and mooches. Spend that money on education, and fix the system!
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40 votes
Sugar Subsidies
We eat too much sugar in this country.
Every year the U.S. subsidizes sugar cane production to prop up the price, and is extremely protectionist against other countries that produce sugar...
We need to produce less sugar and more arugula!
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35 votes
military/defense spending
According to http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy09/pdf/budget/tables.pdf , over half of discretionary spending is going to defense. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures , we spend more than twice as much on our military as Europe (not just the average country in Europe -- all of the EU, combined! We spend about 10x as much as the UK, for example).
Our budget deficit is about $450 billion. The amount of yearly interest we pay on our national debt is about $450 billion ( http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm ). We need to make extremely massive cuts in spending, and we can't expect to do that without massively cutting the one item that accounts for over half of the discretionary budget.
We can't expect that increased efficiency will cut the cost of our military in half. The reason for the huge cost is that we try to exert influence on far-away places more than other countries do. We have to bite the bullet and realize that we simply cannot afford to remain as powerful as we are today.
Therefore, we must pursue a much less aggressive foreign policy -- by comparison with our current policy, an "isolationist" one. Completely pull out all units from the entire Middle East, and from most other foreign lands. Dramatically cut the size of the military. Over time, this will lead to savings.
We are paying $450 billion a year in interest. We don't have a choice, we have to make drastic cuts. More than half of our discretionary spending is on defense. We are spending $400 billion more than the EU does on defense. The conclusion is forced.
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32 votes
The Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve's function is to conjure money into existence. And it does so at the behest of politicians who require this money in order to pay for the programs, bubbles, and wars that they know we can't afford.
As the Fed inflates the money supply, it erodes the value of our citizens' real savings and retirement. And its artificial injections to boost one market (stocks) leads to bubbles in others (housing), which ultimately crash.
While the Fed exists, we will never live within our means. All other cuts are just rearranging the deck chairs.
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20 votes
Department of Education
Let's return responsibility for education back to state and local government. The current DOE budget is $58 Billion/Year.
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18 votes
Reform the tax code: Flat Tax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax This is something that could be used in seeing if everyone pays their share of the tax burden. It would be great if the tax return was like one page lone, then not so much would be spent every year on stress and time during tax season.
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15 votes
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11 votes
Lower home mortgage tax deductions
This would need to be done very slowly and carefully, but we shouldn't be encouraging people to carry such huge home mortgage loans forever. Perhaps we just notch the deduction down by 2% per year.
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10 votes
"Use it or lose it" policies
When government gives out money based on the amount used, as opposed to what results the money can produce, it discourages efficiency. I see this waste happening all the time, especially in large public works projects where money gets spent because it can, not because it needs to. The new economic stimulus programs should not just dole out money as quickly as possible to anyone who can "use" it.
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10 votes
wasteful government spending
so many programs can be cut and economies should be made on remaining ones ,people should be encouraged to use electronic transfer for social security checks and payroll and tax refunds
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7 votes
Cut back on maintaining forest service roads
Turn more forest service roads into non-motor vehicle roads, essentially wide bicycle trails, and stop the regular maintainance on them.
This has happened some recently. It might be able to be done more.
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5 votes
The bailouts of giant banks
We should stop bailing out the executives and investors (debt and equity) of Wall Street firms who took giant risks and obscured their accounting so that no one knows what their liabilities are. Now that the market is punishing their reckless behavior, the taxpayer is paying the cost!
We shouldn't bail out any company until it comes clean on what all of its significant liabilities are, so at least we know how deep the pit is that we're trying to fill. AIG, Citigroup, these pits just keep getting bigger.
There are plenty of smaller, healthy banks to step in and take business and employees away from banks who have made bad decisions. -
4 votes
Looks like there's a lot to cut; how about that hatchet!
You can try to use a scalpel to remove a gangrenous limb, but it would take a long time!
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4 votes
Central Intelligence Agency
The CIA has supposedly done some great things for the USA, and I'd applaud them for that, except I don't know those things are because it's classified. The only time we hear about it is when they screw up, and we only hear that 10 years after the fact. The agency is built on an unstable, inherently defective design of secrecy that cannot function effectively in a democratic society.
Furthermore, the nature of their operation is questionable at best. They are in the business of clandestine operations, the sort of things we don’t want to admit to. The CIA has a very ugly track record that left a path of destruction through central America. It’s their job to do thing that we ourselves, other countries, and international agreements all label as illegal. Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?
And there’s the argument that all of these dirty actions have come back to bite us. It’s a term called “blowback”. If you give people a reason to hate you, they will go to great length to harm you. Al-Qaeda needs to be hunted down and destroyed. But it needs to be done in a way that the rest of the world, our children, and the majority of the USA will be proud of. Otherwise they will be martyrs, and their children, countrymen, and brothers of the faith will find us to be “the bad guy” and they will hate us. And they will seek revenge. And our children will witness our past and will have to go through all of this again. So America must be loved. America must give the world reason to love us.
But that isn’t the CIA’s job. The war that the CIA was made for has already been won, no thanks to them. Soviet Russia collapsed under it’s own oppressive weight and when the Berlin wall fell, the CIA had no operative in the country. They had to watch CNN like the rest of the world.
I’d like to tell you how much we could save by removing them, but those funds are black listed. It’s probably a lot.
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3 votes
Let tax payers set budget priorities
This was an idea I advanced years ago in grad school. When people complete their income tax forms (after tax reform simplifying the tax code, of course), let those who pay the taxes (not those who owe no taxes) indicate their preference for proportional spending among several budget categories of spending. This would be a few extra tick-marks on a tax form.
Either: 1) allocate those proportions to accounts of the specified budget categories; or 2) use aggregated statistical ranges to set budget category ranges whithin which the President and Congress must stay when detailing the federal budget.
This has several advantages, without taking actual line item decisions away from our top lawmakers. First, people will get what they want, so they must be careful in making their choices. Second, it gives our leaders a clear signal about how tax dollars should be spend.
I won't go so far as to suggest that this move would make paying taxes more popular, but it would certainly give taxpayers more satisifaction when paying those taxes if they know they have direct input to spending priorities.
I will go so far as to suggest that such an approach could be an alternative to all the "special loophole" deductions that encourage people to spend money in ways the government would like. Rather, have the taxpayer indicate how they would like the government to spend tax dollars.
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3 votes
Federal Contracting
The federal government should eliminate contracting. Contracting companies cost the government about 18 billion dollars more than it would cost to simply hire people. This money is largely funneled to contracting company executives and lobbying efforts.
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1 votes
Revise the "Presidental dollar" ($3) campaign fund.
Obama refused the voluntary "Presidental campaign dollar" funding for his campaign. Indeed, both the major parties have good fund-raising machines, already.
Designate this fund to go only to third party and independent candidates, revising the requirements such that these candidates have easier access to the funds to raise new issues during Presidential elections.
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1 votes
Highway projects designed to move more cars
The Boston Big Dig resulted in more traffic jams, not less. It encourages more sprawl and oil consumption when we should be looking at smarter ways to grow.
Lets cut these highway projects that are intended to move more cars and look at moving people and goods more efficiently instead.
