Kerby Anderson

The Federal government has a spending problem. Yesterday, I talked about the problem and discussed two ideas Stephen Moore proposes to shrink the federal budget. The two ideas mentioned yesterday were to use presidential impoundment authority and to require a super-majority vote to raise taxes. Here are two other ideas he proposes.

The first suggestion is what he calls the millionaire subsidy elimination act. This was proposed many years ago by the late economist Walter Williams. The argument is simple: no individual with an income over $1 million should be eligible for federal aid payment, and no business entity with more than $1 billion in revenues should be eligible for federal corporate welfare subsidies. Why should Warren Buffett or Bill Gates receive Social Security? Why should financially successful corporations receive federal benefits?

Second is the budget stamps solution. This was proposed by an economist in the Reagan Administration. Under this plan, the government would issue a special blue currency called “budget stamps.” This would be given to all recipients of federal spending. Recipients of federal assistance this year would receive $6 trillion in budget stamps.

The value would fluctuate based on how much money was collected in taxes that year. If tax collections were estimated to be 90 percent of spending, the budget stamp would be worth 90 cents, not a dollar. This would provide a significant incentive to Congress to balance the budget.

These last two days we have talked about four ways to shrink the federal budget. We need to do something to bring fiscal sanity to our government.