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March 10, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward
A bold budget proposal
Conservatives in the House of Representatives have introduced a balanced budget proposal for 2007 that not only gets America’s books in order but provides substantial long-term savings as well.
Under the Republican Study Committee proposal (link in PDF), spending on defense and veterans would increase by nearly $300 billion over five years, while duplicative, wasteful and unnecessary programs would be trimmed by nearly $700 billion. This would provide a total savings over five years of $391 billion. As the budget proposal notes, many of these initiatives were first proposed in 1995 as part of the original “Contract with America.”
“Critics will no doubt charge that this budget proposal is radical and unrealistic,” writes Brian Riedl, Heritage’s Grover Hermann Fellow. “Such sentiment reveals more about the timidity of Congress than the RSC’s plan.”
Among the RSC’s proposals (savings listed are over five years):
- Reform Medicare to keep it from bankruptcy—$217 billion in savings
- Convert Medicaid and children’s health funding into block grants, giving states flexibility to tailor the programs—$92 billion in savings
- Eliminate certain foreign aid programs, including funding to UN peacekeeping—$24 billion in savings
- Eliminate wasteful transportation earmarks—$12 billion in savings
- Permit drilling in ANWR—$6 billion in royalties
- Eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities—$2.5 billion in savings
The first of these, Medicare reform, is obviously the most important. The RSC proposes to cap the growth of Medicare at 5.4 percent, well below its current average growth of 8.5 percent per year. To achieve this, they suggest a number of common-sense proposals, including a means test for the wasteful new Medicare prescription drug plan or even a restructuring of the entire system.
Could this be a wakeup call?
The RSC budget is a far sight better than the one proposed by the Bush administration. As budget expert Brian Riedl explained to The Chicago Tribune yesterday, President Bush “expanded government more than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.”
But while this budget proposal is a solid start, many in Congress still don’t seem to understand that their profligate spending is taking the country ever closer to financial disaster. Some members continue to insist that the dramatic spending increases of the past five years have been only because of defense and homeland security—a falsehood that Heritage’s Brian Riedl has easily debunked since these claims began. And other members have spent time defending earmarks, a wasteful spending practice that is a clear symptom of the larger spending problem.
Getting America Right
On Tuesday, Heritage President Ed Feulner released his new book, Getting America Right, which explains how America can preserve its conservative values and get back on track. Within just hours of its release, it became the top-selling political book on Amazon.com—and jumped easily into the top 15 overall.
Children of guest workers should not be citizens
After last week’s e-mail on immigration reform, several readers wrote in asking about Heritage’s stance on citizenship being granted to the children of illegal aliens and guest workers. This is an important question.
While a guest-worker program “would also permit brief family visits in the United States during periods of program participation,” Heritage’s Ed Meese and Matthew Spalding explained, “children born to temporary workers while in the United States are not automatically United States citizens.”
Finally—Congress reauthorizes the Patriot Act
The House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act, a key law that protects America’s national security. The measure sailed through the House by a 280-138 vote, following a 95-4 vote in the Senate last week. President Bush signed the bill into law yesterday, just one day before 16 key provisions were set to expire.
James Carafano sets Congress straight
Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee last week. Heritage national security expert James Carafano explained that port security, not the nationality of the port’s operators, should concern Congress.
America’s ports, he cautioned, are extremely vulnerable. But a series of reforms, including Coast Guard modernization, would do far more to improve security at ports than would legislation to block Dubai Ports World from running six American port facilities. Nevertheless, the committee voted Wednesday to block the deal, and just yesterday the company announced it would transfer management to an American firm.
Before the deal was scrapped, Dr. Carafano testified again yesterday about foreign ownership of domestic transportation infrastructure, this time before the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation.
The results are in!
A few weeks back, I invited MyHeritage.org readers for their opinions about the war in Iraq. The results have now been tabulated, and they show that readers overwhelmingly support remaining in Iraq until we achieve victory.
In other news
Coming up at Heritage
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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
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