CUT GOVERNMENT! Spending just naturally declines...
And not just across-the-board cut and cap. Abolish entire executive departments and agencies.
Not only do you save on salaries and rents, but much more importantly, the various departments' clientele/constituencies — the trough feeders — lose access to the federal taxpayers' wallets when their "patrons" go away.
For example, Congress would find it problematic to legislate sugar subsidies if there's no Department of Agriculture there to administer them.
Plus don't forget that Congress delegates regulatory powers to these departments and agencies — which are staffed by appointed officials who are not accountable to voters....
My candidates for outright abolition:
Department of Education
Department of Agriculture
Commerce Department
Housing and Urban Development
Department of Energy
Health and Human Services
Environmental Protection Agency
Plus these items would be helpful:
Privatize the Post Office
Restrict the Department of the Interior to National Parks management. Disband the Bureau of Land Management — which increasingly seems to be the tool of the cattle interests....
Fire the 36 or so "czars" in the Executive branch and their staffs
Except for the Post Office (which ran a deficit of something like $7–8 billion last year), which of these departments/agencies has any constitutional basis for their existence?
Oh, well Commerce maybe, by virtue of the interstate commerce clause (Article I, Section 8)....
But where in the Constitution does it say that the federal government has a warrant to be in, say, the healthcare business? Or in education? Urban development? The energy business? Etc.
Seems to me most of these activities fall under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments....
Instead of disastrous consolidation of these activities in Washington — which drastically diminishes individual liberty and the constitutional rights of States — it seems to me the Framers had a different idea — hence, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which are premised in the idea of subsidiarity: the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.
IOW, let decisions be made by the lowest competent decision maker. If an individual is competent to decide a thing, then his State should not be deciding it for him. Likewise, if a State is competent to do a thing, then Washington shouldn't be doing it.
One of the reasons I like Rick Perry a lot is he often speaks of the importance of the Tenth Amendment in our federal constitutional structure, as indispensable to the preservation of liberty and prosperity.
This is a conversation the American people need to be having right about now: Washington under 0-bot has "crowded out" the private sector, which is suffocating under unreasonably high rates of taxation, centralized regulation, and acute uncertainty WRT the federal government's fiscal position. This is the reason why we're in for another recession before too long (IMHO FWIW).
Meanwhile, the current compromise to deal with the debt crisis is a total "cr*p sandwich." It is a magnificent tribute to the malfeasance and cynicism of people who are supposedly "public servants," sworn to uphold the Constitution on behalf of We the People.
Hopefully, their day of reckoning will come in November 2012....
Well, I can dream, can't I?