Aid to the poor. Save $13 billion a year by arbitrarly restricting eligibility for Section 8 housing (cutting the number of vouchers in half) and eliminating heating-bill assistance for low-income households. Again, arbitrary cuts that evince no concern for the impact of those cuts.
Social Security. Doesn't touch Social Security at all. This may be politically expedient, but even minor tweaks — raising the eligibility age and lowering the income limits for benefits, for example — would save huge amounts of money.
GOOD IDEAS
Agriculture. Cut lots of subsidies and programs at the Dept. of Agriculture. The whole agricultural subsidy structure could be thrown overboard and the country would be better off for it.
Medicare. Cut $63 billion a year from Medicare, by raising premiums and means-testing benefits. This is a reasonable approach and politically courageous. But they also propose limiting cost increases to a percentage point below medical inflation. Hospitals and doctors are already reluctant to take Medicare because it pays so little; this will just make that worse. Arbitrary caps in general make little sense.
Legislative reforms. They advocate a line-item veto, earmark reform, strict sunset provisions on most federal programs, a discretionary spending cap and restoring pay-as-you-go provisions. All of those are excellent ideas, and the only question these ideas raise is "why aren't they already in effect?"
Bad programs. One of the strengths of the document is specifically identifying a lot of wasteful or useless programs that could be eliminated. Doing so usually doesn't free up a great deal of money, but it should be done on principle. Of course, people will disagree on what's wasteful or useless. Perhaps Congress could establish a bipartisan committee whose sole job was to eliminate bad programs. Objective criteria would be used whenever possible; a committee vote could settle more contentious cases, with a tie meaning the program lives.
Once you read the budget, you can see why they didn't trumpet the specifics. Budget cutting, of course, will require pain, and they do have some good ideas; but by ignoring defense and Social Security and heaping the cuts on social programs and other conservative pet peeves, they undermine their credibility.
It's a start, but it's only a start.
Article comments
1 - Dave Nalle
Fascinating stuff, Sean. I have a sinking feeling that no one in Washington is going to pay any attention to this at all, but I sure wish they would.
IMO some of these cuts are way too mild. I bet they aren't cutting nearly enough from farm subsidies. And I'm with you that energy is one area where cuts aren't at all sensible.
Dave
2 - Sean Aqui
The RSC made a mistake by including so many conservative pet peeves on the cut list. That makes it too easy to dismiss the entire document as a meaningless political exercise. If they were seriously interested in budget reform they would have taken a hard look at defense, proposed at least modest Social Security changes, and focused the rest on demonstrably wasteful programs and demonstrably virtuous reforms. I know conservatives hate the NEA and the Education Dept., but they should have left the culture wars out of this.
3 - Dave Nalle
Yeah, I was surprised you didn't find something more substantive on Social Security reform. I'd be as happy as anyone to see the NEA go away. It really serves no useful function. But the cust you point out in housing assistance and healthcare seem unnecessary and purely ideological to me.
Dave
4 - Sam Jack
"Eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities and cut the Dept. of Education by 30 percent."
It would be a shame to eliminate CPB, NEA, and NEH just because the Republicans don't like the kind of things those groups say and do.
5 - Sean Aqui
Yep. It's one thing to have a principled debate over what the proper role of government is. But eliminating a program simply out of personal animosity isn't good policy.
6 - Dave Nalle
CPB could function on its own with minor changes. They already get 94% of their funding from licensing, advertising and viewer donations.
Dave