Thursday, November 17, 2016

Budget Committee

This would make a great standing committee for an incoming president to set up with little or no fanfare, to examine the federal budget and suggest elimination of parcels that really don't need to be there. Mr Trump has noted that the Department of Education qualifies as such a parcel and has suggested that if it were to go unfunded, no one would likely notice, beyond the people working there who would suddenly find their positions to be surplus.

This isn't a big item with the current asked budget being about $126B out of about $4T or about 3.6%. Still you save a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money. If you were looking for a topic to bring up with your congress people, here's one. Write and ask them to support abolishing the Dept. of Ed. Follow up would be to reduce federal taxes by half the amount saved, and allocate the remainder to paying off the debt. There are lots of other places, most easily identified by the title "Department of.." in front of the descriptor that would be easily done away with reaping the attendant savings. There's an interactive chart here that breaks out a lot of this.

1 comment:

David Aitken said...

The best way to do this, IMO, is to get Congress to fund it as a stand-alone bill, and then veto it on 10th Amendment grounds. If Congress overrides the veto, sue Congress, again on 10th Amendment grounds. We'll then find out if the 10th Amendment has any meaning.