At Forbes Adam Andrzewski proposes ten ways that the incoming Trump Administration can cut waste in the federal government:
Donald J. Trump won the presidency by giving real hope to millions of voters that their situation could improve. Now he and Congress have a chance to take action and deliver real results. One way to encourage economic growth is to stop wasting taxpayer dollars on activities that do nothing to create wealth.
At OpenTheBooks.com we believe that in order to make America great again we need to hold government accountable again. Here are ten steps the president elect can take to eliminate wasteful spending and rein in an out-of-control federal government…
The ten ways are:
- Disarm federal regulatory agencies
- Fire EPA lawyers
- Blockade federal funds for sanctuary cities
- Cut funding for agency self-promotion
- Direct small business funds … to small business
- Eliminate the Export-Import Bank
- Reduce Federal Funding for the Ivy League
- Finish the task of VA reform
- Open the books on federal employee pensions
- Cut federal funding to municipalities paying lavish salaries to public employees.
I agree with all ten of them but, sadly, if all ten were done tomorrow it would barely be a rounding error in federal spending. The overwhelming preponderance of federal spending goes to a bare handful of line items: healthcare, Social Security, military spending, interest on the debt. Federal healthcare spending is right around $1 trillion per year. If just 2% of that is waste and/or fraud, that’s $20 billion.
All of the measures listed are on the expenditure side of the ledger but there’s a tremendous amount of waste on the revenue side as well. Just look up “tax expenditures”, what to you and me are loopholes. GE doesn’t have 1,000 employees in its tax department through benevolence.
Don’t be surprised if, when the dust has settled, little or nothing is done by the Trump Administration to curb waste in the federal government. Each and every spending item or tax deduction has a constituency for whom its a matter of life and death. If this stuff were easy it would already have been done.
Looks more like a list of things conservatives just want eliminated, not an effort to save money. BTW, I have secret access to the first draft of these proposals. Number 7 was actually, “Reduce Federal Funding for the Ivy League and Increase it for the SEC”.
Dave-You forget Medicaid. I think we can expect an effort to cut that. That said, I kind of think their preferred method, block grants, may be problematic. I mean, the whole purpose behind block grants is to just give the states less, but when they really try to do this they may run into problems because Medicaid is not just for young, lazy, poor people. It is also a primary source of funding for nursing home care. Still, I think they at least pursue it.
Steve
The overwhelming preponderance of federal spending goes to a bare handful of line items: healthcare, Social Security, military spending, interest on the debt.
I’ve tried arguing about this with people in the past. They just don’t believe it, no matter what you show them.
Number 7 was actually, “Reduce Federal Funding for the Ivy League and Increase it for the SECâ€.
Yes, the Trump Administration is just overflowing with good ol’ boys.
The House tax plan contains a list of tax expenditures to be eliminated, but also some to be made permanent. The list is on pages 26 through 30 of this analysis of the Ryan plan from the Tax Policy Center:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/2000923-An-Analysis-of-the-House-GOP-Tax-Plan.pdf
The analysis calculates an average of around $17 billion per year in revenue from proposed treatment of corporate expenditures. This doesn’t include the effect of the loss of deductibility of interest on new loans, which is treated together with the provision on immediate expensing.
Spending is high because people want more government. They don’t know they want more government, they would of course deny they want more government, but in a democracy if you keep getting more of something it’s because you want more of it.
The Right wants more bombs, cops, repression of Muslims, more aid for Israel, more subsidy for various pet industries like coal; the Left wants more welfare, more child care, more health care, more subsidies for pet industries like green energy. Both sides want more of theirs and less of the other guy’s. This can be made to look like a consensus for smaller government, but it’s not, it’s just beggar-thy-neighbor. Which is why the government never gets significantly smaller, and why the levels of government seem to grow in direct proportion to how representative they are: local outpaces state outpaces federal which has for decades been effectively flat as a percent of GDP.
The public has an extremely distorted notion of who writes the checks and who cashes them in this country.
I think the”working” public has a better idea of spending versus overspending – at least far more than the non-revenue producing government does.
People want more of anything they don’t have to pay for.
That makes sense, but it doesn’t explain the ratio of state and local to federal. Presumably more people pay property and sales tax than pay federal income tax. That suggests they’ll pay for ‘near’ more willingly than ‘far.’ Given that they are more likely to see the results of that taxation – a new school, a road repair, better drainage – it again suggests that people want more government not less, so long as they can see tangible results. They understand the benefits of ‘pothole repair’ so they want more, and do not understand the benefits of, ‘research into ocean currents’ so they want less of that. They don’t mind nursing at the government tit so much as they mind someone else doing the same.
There are any number of explanations for that. For one thing they aren’t paying at the state and local level, either:
State and local governments with growing tax bases can be okay under those circumstances. State and local governments with shrinking tax bases like Illinois and Chicago can’t. If there’s an obvious relationship among borrowing, future revenue expectations, and state or local GDP, I don’t know what it is.
States have tended towards single party rule. That’s a formula for corruption. That’s even more pronounced at the local level.
PD- I am assuming that Trump won’t be adopting Ryan’s plans wholesale since Ryan didn’t support Trump. However, if you really want to go after tax expenditures, you need to go where the money is, the health care deduction and mortgage deduction. Ryan’s list, just like the one Dave cites, is heavily dominated by stuff conservatives don’t like, while avoiding anything they do like, or will actually save enough money.
ICE- Who voted for him? Anyway, made my self look at the guy’s bit on the Ivy League Schools. Looks like he just wants to eliminate any federal money that goes there, regardless of merit. Never mind that some of the best researchers in the country work at those places. Send the money to SEC schools instead so they can make football great again! (Just an example. Old classmate is working on developing narcotics that would be free of respiratory depression. For an idiot like the guy DAve is citing it is govt funded so it must be bad, but no one in the private sphere is looking at this. If what they are doing works, it saves thousands of lives, probably well into the 6 figures every year, and billions of dollars.)
Steve
The only ways to save a genuinely large amount of wasted money are by going after the big ticket items (SSRI, healthcare spending, military spending) or popular tax expenditures. That’s why we don’t do it. I don’t care how much bloviating goes on about it but Trump won’t do it, either. Even if he were to propose it (doubtful) he’d meet with overwhelming Congressional opposition.
Like everybody else Trump wants to pay for his tax cuts and additional spending through growth.
According to Steve Moore there will be battles over addressing some of those loop holes too.
Steve, the number of SEC football fans envious of Ivy League football is zero. Try reading a sports page once in your life.
Partisan plans are partisan – no surprise there. Coherence and value are not part of the calculation.