Friday, October 21, 2011

Real Plan for Restoring America

GOP presidential candidate has a wonderful plan entitled "Restore America," He aims to cut $1 trillion in spending during his first year in office, in part by "eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels."

Some other elements include using block grants for states to solve their own problems with Medicaid and other welfare programs; cutting the federal workforce by 10 percent, as well as the pay of congressional members and the president; lowering the corporate tax rate from a crippling 35 percent to a more competitive 15 percent; eliminating the death tax; and repealing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank financial regulations.

Thus, Mr. Paul in one year would cut federal spending by about the same amount that the woeful and misnamed congressional super-committee supposedly is struggling to cut in a decade. More importantly, the Paul plan would make a significant start on cutting the federal government back to the size and scope provided for by the Constitution. 

Because he has no hope of winning the presidency or even his party's nomination for election to that office, the admirably Quixotic congressman is free to propose and promote an ideal program that would eliminate multitudes of sacred cows that none of his party's viable candidates are willing to take on . . . or even to discuss or mention. Accordingly, the best we are going to get is a bit of trimming at the fringes.

All this is spelled out in greater detail, along with a description of the magnitude of the federal government's still expanding expenditures and the pathetic efforts that pass for, and are bragged about as belt tightening in Washington, D.C. in this essay.

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