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From: http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/0...sh-the-state/5
Looks good to me. There is only a couple of things that I think non-libertarians would find outrages to cut. Either way it's a start if we ever get a government serious about cutting the size of government.
Thoughts?
Looks good to me. There is only a couple of things that I think non-libertarians would find outrages to cut. Either way it's a start if we ever get a government serious about cutting the size of government.
Thoughts?
How to Slash the State: 14 ways to dismantle a monstrous government, one program at a time
Like sequels to Saw, the government just keeps coming, growing larger, more expensive, and more appalling each year. In times of economic distress, even at the increasing risk of default, the size, scope, and cost of federal, state, and local governments continue to balloon, swallowing everything in their path. For 10 solid years, and especially since September 2008, spending has boomed, the Federal Register has exploded, and Congress altered American life at an accelerating pace.
Yet loud critics of big government—especially but not only Republican politicians—are often reduced to an awkward stammer when put on the spot by the all-important question, “So what would you cut?” Well, stammer no more...
1. Overhaul Medicaid
Imagine a government-run health care program that limits medical access for millions of patients, is racked by uncontrollably rising costs, and in many instances produces health outcomes demonstrably worse than having no insurance at all. The program exists, and it’s called Medicaid.
Created to provide aid to the country’s poorest and sickest individuals, the joint federal-state program was initially intended as a low-cost bulwark against further government intervention in the health care system. In 1965, its first year in operation, the program cost about $9 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. But instead of heading off further government intervention, it became the vehicle for much of the government’s expansion into the health care sector. Between 1970 and 2000, the program grew from $29 billion to $250 billion in 2010 dollars.
This year the Department of Health and Human Services expects the total cost of Medicaid to top half a trillion dollars. And according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, it will account for more than 20 percent of total state spending...
2. Bring the Troops Home
You can’t make a serious dent in government spending without tackling the military budget. And the quickest way to reduce Pentagon spending is to end, as fast as physically possible, our ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So far those two wars have cost well over $1 trillion—on par with this year’s federal budget deficit—almost all of it spent through off-budget, fiscally reckless “emergency” supplemental bills that smuggled in all sorts of nonemergency weapons pork and social programs. And if the wars had never been fought we could have saved something more precious than taxpayer money—tens of thousands of human lives....
3. Erase Federal Education Spending
In August the Obama administration gave the states a $10 billion bailout to save teachers’ jobs —even though the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that teachers aren’t losing them. After 30 months of recession, local education employment has suffered less than a 1 percent decline. In fact, education hires rose in 21 states between 2009 and 2010. By contrast, the private sector saw a 6.8 percent decline in employment.
In addition, the president has proposed a $78 billion education budget for 2011, a whopping $18.6 billion more than in 2010. Federal education spending has increased by close to 80 percent in real terms since 2001, but test scores in reading and math among 17-year-olds have been flat since 1971, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress...
4. Slash State Budgets
As usual, governments have been slower to adjust to harsh economic realities than the rest of us. The private sector shed nearly 8.5 million jobs during the recession, while governments at all levels actually added more than 100,000 employees, as of December 2009. This growth ensures that state governments will be struggling to balance budgets long after any private-sector recovery is under way. And it means that they will continue to come begging to the federal government—and their own taxpayers—to cover the shortfall.
In a July report, the National Conference of State Legislators determined that the states face a collective budget gap of $84 billion for fiscal year 2011, with 24 states reporting deficits of at least 10 percent of their general fund budgets...
5.End Defined-Benefit Pensions
The funding shortfall of public employee pensions at the state and local level exceeds $500 billion. Annual pension contribution costs have grown exponentially in the last decade from coast to coast. There is a simple way out of this government-manufactured mess: bankruptcy. As the city of Vallejo, California, discovered in 2009, bankruptcy protection can provide an avenue for governments to renege on their crushing pension commitments.
Unfortunately, the bankruptcy option is available only to cities and counties, not states or the federal government. And public employee unions in California and elsewhere are working time-and-a-half to change bankruptcy laws to stop future Vallejos from declaring insolvency, or at least to rig the settlement terms to labor’s benefit.
So what are the realistic solutions? California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has a good idea: end defined-benefit contributions—in which taxpayers, rather than the employees, fund retirement plans—for all new government hires. Instead, public servants of the future should be put into 401(k) plans like the rest of us, with responsibility to contribute to and manage their own retirement nest eggs...
6. Declare Defeat in the Drug War
As Sting recently observed, channeling John Stuart Mill, the war on drugs by its very nature tramples on “the right to sovereignty over one’s own mind and body.” It also squanders taxpayer money while causing far more harm than it prevents.
To enforce drug prohibition, state and federal agencies spend more than $40 billion and make 1.7 million arrests every year. This effort wastes resources that could be used to fight predatory crime. But the direct taxpayer costs are only part of the story. While imprisoned (as half a million of them currently are), drug offenders cannot earn money or care for their families, which boosts child welfare costs.
7. Cancel the Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversees everything from TV and radio to wireless phones andInternet connections. But none of these tasks is a core government function. From regulating speech to subsidizing broadband, just about everything the FCC does is either onerous, constitutionally dubious, ineffective, or all three.
Take its role as broadcast censor: Under a policy that was recently overturned by a federal appeals court, the agency has spent decades enforcing an arbitrary, inscrutable code governing what speech and images are acceptable on the public airwaves. Are four-letter words forbidden or not? Which ones? And when? What about breasts or bottoms, or lower backs? Does it matter if the context is medical, accidental, or unattractive?...
Yet the FCC is bent on expanding its reach whenever and wherever possible. The agency’s recent actions include investigating the approval process Apple uses for its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks, and passing regulatory judgment on various consumer devices of minimal importance. Many of its recent efforts have been focused on finding ways to regulate Internet traffic.
When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that its existence was justified by airwave scarcity. In an age of information overload, with a wide array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can credibly be made...
8. Uproot Agriculture Subsidies
Farm subsidies and price supports offer something for people of all political stripes to hate. They distort markets and spark trade wars. They make food staples artificially expensive, while making high-fructose corn syrup—the bogeyman of crunchy parents, foodies, and obesity activists everywhere—artificially cheap. They give farmers incentives to tamper with land that would otherwise be forest or grassland. They encourage inefficient alternative energy programs by artificially lowering the price of corn ethanol compared to solar, wind, and other biomass options. School lunches are jammed full of agricultural surplus goods, interfering with efforts to improve the nutritional value (and simple appeal) of the meals devoured by the nation’s chubby public schoolers.
Enacted in the 1930s as temporary emergency measures in a time of scarcity, subsidies of such staple crops as corn, wheat, and soy have managed to survive into the current era of abundance. Congress hands about $20 billion a year in direct farm support payments to a small group of powerful agricultural companies, while American consumers and firms double that amount in inflated prices at the supermarket, restaurant table, and even at the gas pump...
9. Unplug the Department of Energy
On April 18, 1977, four months into his new administration, President Jimmy Carter delivered a somber speech in which he declared the “moral equivalent of war” on the “energy crisis.” The centerpiece of Carter’s energy policy was
the creation of a new Department of Energy (DOE), which would implement sweeping proposals to transform the way Americans produced and used energy. Just four months later, the new department, centralizing some 50 scattered federal energy agencies, was approved by Congress.
One of the chief functions of the department was to administer price controls on oil and natural gas. The DOE would also dispense billions of dollars in research and development subsidies aimed at jump-starting alternative energy technologies such as coal gasification and solar power.
So what about the DOE today? In 2010 more than half of the department’s $26 billion budget ($16 billion) was devoted to managing the federal nuclear estate, which consists mostly of facilities that make and dispose of materials used for nuclear weapons. The next biggest chunk of DOE funding, $5 billion, is targeted at that old standby, energy R&D. But payoffs on government-supported research have not been impressive. Three previous programs costing a couple of billion dollars failed to produce automobiles that ran on electricity (1992), hydrogen (2003), or gas at three times the efficiency (1993)...
10. Dismantle Davis-Bacon
For nearly 80 years, contractors working on federally funded construction projects have been forced to pay their workers artificially inflated wages that rip off American taxpayers while lining the pockets of organized labor. The culprit is the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which requires all workers on federal projects costing more than $2,000 to be paid the “prevailing wage,” which typically means the hourly rate set by local unions.
Davis-Bacon was born as a racist reaction to the presence of Southern black construction workers on a Long Island, New York, veterans hospital project. This “cheap” and “bootleg” labor was denounced by Rep. Robert L. Bacon (R-N.Y), who introduced the legislation. American Federation of Labor President William Green eagerly testified in support of the law before the U.S. Senate, claiming that “colored labor is being brought in to demoralize wage rates.” The result was that black workers, who were largely unskilled and therefore counted on being able to compete by working for lower wages, were essentially excluded from the upcoming New Deal construction spree.
The legislation hasn’t come cheap for taxpayers. According to 2008 research by economists at Suffolk University, Davis-Bacon has raised the construction wages on federal projects 22 percent above the market rate. James Sherk of the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates that repealing Davis-Bacon would save taxpayers $11.4 billion in 2010 alone...
11. Repeal the Stimulus
Government inefficiencies sometimes pop up in surprising places. For instance, in spending money quickly. You’d think Washington bureaucrats, of all people, could figure out how to inject $794 billion in stimulus money into the economy, but as of early September, 18 months after the stimulus was passed, an estimated $301 billion remained unspent.
That money should be banked, not wasted. While more than half of those funds are already promised to specific programs, they could be rescinded because the projects haven’t begun yet.
If you believe the administration’s stimulus tracking website, Recovery.gov, stimulus projects had created 749,142 jobs as of June 30. In related news, unemployment has increased 1.3 percentage points since the stimulus was signed into law, from 7.7 percent then to 9.5 percent in July 2010. If you include underemployed workers, the overall rate of unemployment a year and a half after the stimulus was 16.5 percent, compared to 14 percent before. And a year and a half after approval of a stimulus that was supposed to create or save 3 million jobs, the labor force had contracted by nearly 850,000 people—individuals who aren’t counted in the unemployment numbers because they have given up hope of finding work anytime soon...
12 .Spend Highway Funds on Highways
Congestion causes gridlock on urban expressways, costing an estimated $76 billion per year in wasted time and fuel. The 50-year-old Interstate highways are starting to wear out and will need reconstruction costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The funding shortfall just to maintain the Interstate Highway System at a decent level is $10 billion to $20 billion per year.
The federal Highway Trust Fund was created in 1956 with a promise that all proceeds from a new federal gasoline tax would be spent on building and maintaining the interstate highways. But Congress reneged on the deal. First it extended federal aid to all sorts of other roadways. Next it allocated 20 percent of those “highway user taxes” to urban transit. Today a quarter of the total is used for such nonhighway purposes, including sidewalks, bikeways, recreational trails, and transportation museums.
So the Highway Trust Fund is effectively broke, spending more than what comes in from gas tax revenues. To some, the remedy is a big increase in those taxes. But why not revive the original deal?...
13. Privatize Public Lands
The U.S. Forest Service owns more than 156 million acres west of the Mississippi River—an area nearly the size of Texas—making it one of the largest landowners in the West. Letting the states manage this land instead would take up to $5 billion a year off the federal books. It would also devolve decisions about how to use the land to officials who are more accountable to local citizens, be they environmentalists or businessmen.
Deficit-riddled states are certainly in no position to purchase this land outright today, but a payback period of 25 to 30 years (as with a standard home mortgage) could make these deals feasible. Once in state hands, some land could be sold off or put to better uses, though there would still be political pressure to keep large portions of it undeveloped. And states could choose to partner with the private sector.
Private companies currently operate the commercial activities—lodges, shops, restaurants, and the like—in such treasured national parks as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. Similarly, the Forest Service makes extensive use of concessionaires to operate and maintain complete parks and campgrounds more effectively and efficiently than government...
14. End (or at Least Audit) the Fed
At the height of his 2009 P.R. offensive against the audit-the-Fed bill sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that opening the Fed’s books would diminish the central bank’s political independence and “could raise fears about future inflation, leading to higher long-term interest rates and reduced economic and financial stability.”
The audit-the-Fed and end-the-Fed movements have lost some steam since that time, and the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, which has 320 House co-sponsors, died a quick, quiet procedural death in the Senate. But the chairman’s words are worth remembering—because if there’s one thing that needs raising, it’s fear about future inflation.
The Fed more than doubled the monetary base in 2009. The depth of the deflationary spiral (primarily in real estate), a continuing “liquidity trap,” and a novel policy in which the central bank has begun paying private banks interest on their reserves have so far kept all that new money from causing significant price inflation. But the massive infusion of cash has also failed in its ostensible purpose of jump-starting economic activity. By keeping its foot on the gas, the Fed is already blazing a path toward a repeat of its disastrous behavior after 2001, when the central bank responded to the deflated tech bubble by creating an even more destructive housing bubble.
The Fed is the biggest bastion of central planning in the American economy, and eliminating it would both move us toward a freer market and remove history’s most powerful enabler of government waste. If that’s politically impossible, auditing the Fed would at least peel away the bank’s veneer of inscrutable wizardry to reveal the feckless dithering at the heart of U.S. monetary policy.
Like sequels to Saw, the government just keeps coming, growing larger, more expensive, and more appalling each year. In times of economic distress, even at the increasing risk of default, the size, scope, and cost of federal, state, and local governments continue to balloon, swallowing everything in their path. For 10 solid years, and especially since September 2008, spending has boomed, the Federal Register has exploded, and Congress altered American life at an accelerating pace.
Yet loud critics of big government—especially but not only Republican politicians—are often reduced to an awkward stammer when put on the spot by the all-important question, “So what would you cut?” Well, stammer no more...
1. Overhaul Medicaid
Imagine a government-run health care program that limits medical access for millions of patients, is racked by uncontrollably rising costs, and in many instances produces health outcomes demonstrably worse than having no insurance at all. The program exists, and it’s called Medicaid.
Created to provide aid to the country’s poorest and sickest individuals, the joint federal-state program was initially intended as a low-cost bulwark against further government intervention in the health care system. In 1965, its first year in operation, the program cost about $9 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. But instead of heading off further government intervention, it became the vehicle for much of the government’s expansion into the health care sector. Between 1970 and 2000, the program grew from $29 billion to $250 billion in 2010 dollars.
This year the Department of Health and Human Services expects the total cost of Medicaid to top half a trillion dollars. And according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, it will account for more than 20 percent of total state spending...
2. Bring the Troops Home
You can’t make a serious dent in government spending without tackling the military budget. And the quickest way to reduce Pentagon spending is to end, as fast as physically possible, our ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So far those two wars have cost well over $1 trillion—on par with this year’s federal budget deficit—almost all of it spent through off-budget, fiscally reckless “emergency” supplemental bills that smuggled in all sorts of nonemergency weapons pork and social programs. And if the wars had never been fought we could have saved something more precious than taxpayer money—tens of thousands of human lives....
3. Erase Federal Education Spending
In August the Obama administration gave the states a $10 billion bailout to save teachers’ jobs —even though the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that teachers aren’t losing them. After 30 months of recession, local education employment has suffered less than a 1 percent decline. In fact, education hires rose in 21 states between 2009 and 2010. By contrast, the private sector saw a 6.8 percent decline in employment.
In addition, the president has proposed a $78 billion education budget for 2011, a whopping $18.6 billion more than in 2010. Federal education spending has increased by close to 80 percent in real terms since 2001, but test scores in reading and math among 17-year-olds have been flat since 1971, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress...
4. Slash State Budgets
As usual, governments have been slower to adjust to harsh economic realities than the rest of us. The private sector shed nearly 8.5 million jobs during the recession, while governments at all levels actually added more than 100,000 employees, as of December 2009. This growth ensures that state governments will be struggling to balance budgets long after any private-sector recovery is under way. And it means that they will continue to come begging to the federal government—and their own taxpayers—to cover the shortfall.
In a July report, the National Conference of State Legislators determined that the states face a collective budget gap of $84 billion for fiscal year 2011, with 24 states reporting deficits of at least 10 percent of their general fund budgets...
5.End Defined-Benefit Pensions
The funding shortfall of public employee pensions at the state and local level exceeds $500 billion. Annual pension contribution costs have grown exponentially in the last decade from coast to coast. There is a simple way out of this government-manufactured mess: bankruptcy. As the city of Vallejo, California, discovered in 2009, bankruptcy protection can provide an avenue for governments to renege on their crushing pension commitments.
Unfortunately, the bankruptcy option is available only to cities and counties, not states or the federal government. And public employee unions in California and elsewhere are working time-and-a-half to change bankruptcy laws to stop future Vallejos from declaring insolvency, or at least to rig the settlement terms to labor’s benefit.
So what are the realistic solutions? California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has a good idea: end defined-benefit contributions—in which taxpayers, rather than the employees, fund retirement plans—for all new government hires. Instead, public servants of the future should be put into 401(k) plans like the rest of us, with responsibility to contribute to and manage their own retirement nest eggs...
6. Declare Defeat in the Drug War
As Sting recently observed, channeling John Stuart Mill, the war on drugs by its very nature tramples on “the right to sovereignty over one’s own mind and body.” It also squanders taxpayer money while causing far more harm than it prevents.
To enforce drug prohibition, state and federal agencies spend more than $40 billion and make 1.7 million arrests every year. This effort wastes resources that could be used to fight predatory crime. But the direct taxpayer costs are only part of the story. While imprisoned (as half a million of them currently are), drug offenders cannot earn money or care for their families, which boosts child welfare costs.
7. Cancel the Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversees everything from TV and radio to wireless phones andInternet connections. But none of these tasks is a core government function. From regulating speech to subsidizing broadband, just about everything the FCC does is either onerous, constitutionally dubious, ineffective, or all three.
Take its role as broadcast censor: Under a policy that was recently overturned by a federal appeals court, the agency has spent decades enforcing an arbitrary, inscrutable code governing what speech and images are acceptable on the public airwaves. Are four-letter words forbidden or not? Which ones? And when? What about breasts or bottoms, or lower backs? Does it matter if the context is medical, accidental, or unattractive?...
Yet the FCC is bent on expanding its reach whenever and wherever possible. The agency’s recent actions include investigating the approval process Apple uses for its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks, and passing regulatory judgment on various consumer devices of minimal importance. Many of its recent efforts have been focused on finding ways to regulate Internet traffic.
When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that its existence was justified by airwave scarcity. In an age of information overload, with a wide array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can credibly be made...
8. Uproot Agriculture Subsidies
Farm subsidies and price supports offer something for people of all political stripes to hate. They distort markets and spark trade wars. They make food staples artificially expensive, while making high-fructose corn syrup—the bogeyman of crunchy parents, foodies, and obesity activists everywhere—artificially cheap. They give farmers incentives to tamper with land that would otherwise be forest or grassland. They encourage inefficient alternative energy programs by artificially lowering the price of corn ethanol compared to solar, wind, and other biomass options. School lunches are jammed full of agricultural surplus goods, interfering with efforts to improve the nutritional value (and simple appeal) of the meals devoured by the nation’s chubby public schoolers.
Enacted in the 1930s as temporary emergency measures in a time of scarcity, subsidies of such staple crops as corn, wheat, and soy have managed to survive into the current era of abundance. Congress hands about $20 billion a year in direct farm support payments to a small group of powerful agricultural companies, while American consumers and firms double that amount in inflated prices at the supermarket, restaurant table, and even at the gas pump...
9. Unplug the Department of Energy
On April 18, 1977, four months into his new administration, President Jimmy Carter delivered a somber speech in which he declared the “moral equivalent of war” on the “energy crisis.” The centerpiece of Carter’s energy policy was
the creation of a new Department of Energy (DOE), which would implement sweeping proposals to transform the way Americans produced and used energy. Just four months later, the new department, centralizing some 50 scattered federal energy agencies, was approved by Congress.
One of the chief functions of the department was to administer price controls on oil and natural gas. The DOE would also dispense billions of dollars in research and development subsidies aimed at jump-starting alternative energy technologies such as coal gasification and solar power.
So what about the DOE today? In 2010 more than half of the department’s $26 billion budget ($16 billion) was devoted to managing the federal nuclear estate, which consists mostly of facilities that make and dispose of materials used for nuclear weapons. The next biggest chunk of DOE funding, $5 billion, is targeted at that old standby, energy R&D. But payoffs on government-supported research have not been impressive. Three previous programs costing a couple of billion dollars failed to produce automobiles that ran on electricity (1992), hydrogen (2003), or gas at three times the efficiency (1993)...
10. Dismantle Davis-Bacon
For nearly 80 years, contractors working on federally funded construction projects have been forced to pay their workers artificially inflated wages that rip off American taxpayers while lining the pockets of organized labor. The culprit is the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which requires all workers on federal projects costing more than $2,000 to be paid the “prevailing wage,” which typically means the hourly rate set by local unions.
Davis-Bacon was born as a racist reaction to the presence of Southern black construction workers on a Long Island, New York, veterans hospital project. This “cheap” and “bootleg” labor was denounced by Rep. Robert L. Bacon (R-N.Y), who introduced the legislation. American Federation of Labor President William Green eagerly testified in support of the law before the U.S. Senate, claiming that “colored labor is being brought in to demoralize wage rates.” The result was that black workers, who were largely unskilled and therefore counted on being able to compete by working for lower wages, were essentially excluded from the upcoming New Deal construction spree.
The legislation hasn’t come cheap for taxpayers. According to 2008 research by economists at Suffolk University, Davis-Bacon has raised the construction wages on federal projects 22 percent above the market rate. James Sherk of the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates that repealing Davis-Bacon would save taxpayers $11.4 billion in 2010 alone...
11. Repeal the Stimulus
Government inefficiencies sometimes pop up in surprising places. For instance, in spending money quickly. You’d think Washington bureaucrats, of all people, could figure out how to inject $794 billion in stimulus money into the economy, but as of early September, 18 months after the stimulus was passed, an estimated $301 billion remained unspent.
That money should be banked, not wasted. While more than half of those funds are already promised to specific programs, they could be rescinded because the projects haven’t begun yet.
If you believe the administration’s stimulus tracking website, Recovery.gov, stimulus projects had created 749,142 jobs as of June 30. In related news, unemployment has increased 1.3 percentage points since the stimulus was signed into law, from 7.7 percent then to 9.5 percent in July 2010. If you include underemployed workers, the overall rate of unemployment a year and a half after the stimulus was 16.5 percent, compared to 14 percent before. And a year and a half after approval of a stimulus that was supposed to create or save 3 million jobs, the labor force had contracted by nearly 850,000 people—individuals who aren’t counted in the unemployment numbers because they have given up hope of finding work anytime soon...
12 .Spend Highway Funds on Highways
Congestion causes gridlock on urban expressways, costing an estimated $76 billion per year in wasted time and fuel. The 50-year-old Interstate highways are starting to wear out and will need reconstruction costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The funding shortfall just to maintain the Interstate Highway System at a decent level is $10 billion to $20 billion per year.
The federal Highway Trust Fund was created in 1956 with a promise that all proceeds from a new federal gasoline tax would be spent on building and maintaining the interstate highways. But Congress reneged on the deal. First it extended federal aid to all sorts of other roadways. Next it allocated 20 percent of those “highway user taxes” to urban transit. Today a quarter of the total is used for such nonhighway purposes, including sidewalks, bikeways, recreational trails, and transportation museums.
So the Highway Trust Fund is effectively broke, spending more than what comes in from gas tax revenues. To some, the remedy is a big increase in those taxes. But why not revive the original deal?...
13. Privatize Public Lands
The U.S. Forest Service owns more than 156 million acres west of the Mississippi River—an area nearly the size of Texas—making it one of the largest landowners in the West. Letting the states manage this land instead would take up to $5 billion a year off the federal books. It would also devolve decisions about how to use the land to officials who are more accountable to local citizens, be they environmentalists or businessmen.
Deficit-riddled states are certainly in no position to purchase this land outright today, but a payback period of 25 to 30 years (as with a standard home mortgage) could make these deals feasible. Once in state hands, some land could be sold off or put to better uses, though there would still be political pressure to keep large portions of it undeveloped. And states could choose to partner with the private sector.
Private companies currently operate the commercial activities—lodges, shops, restaurants, and the like—in such treasured national parks as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. Similarly, the Forest Service makes extensive use of concessionaires to operate and maintain complete parks and campgrounds more effectively and efficiently than government...
14. End (or at Least Audit) the Fed
At the height of his 2009 P.R. offensive against the audit-the-Fed bill sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that opening the Fed’s books would diminish the central bank’s political independence and “could raise fears about future inflation, leading to higher long-term interest rates and reduced economic and financial stability.”
The audit-the-Fed and end-the-Fed movements have lost some steam since that time, and the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, which has 320 House co-sponsors, died a quick, quiet procedural death in the Senate. But the chairman’s words are worth remembering—because if there’s one thing that needs raising, it’s fear about future inflation.
The Fed more than doubled the monetary base in 2009. The depth of the deflationary spiral (primarily in real estate), a continuing “liquidity trap,” and a novel policy in which the central bank has begun paying private banks interest on their reserves have so far kept all that new money from causing significant price inflation. But the massive infusion of cash has also failed in its ostensible purpose of jump-starting economic activity. By keeping its foot on the gas, the Fed is already blazing a path toward a repeat of its disastrous behavior after 2001, when the central bank responded to the deflated tech bubble by creating an even more destructive housing bubble.
The Fed is the biggest bastion of central planning in the American economy, and eliminating it would both move us toward a freer market and remove history’s most powerful enabler of government waste. If that’s politically impossible, auditing the Fed would at least peel away the bank’s veneer of inscrutable wizardry to reveal the feckless dithering at the heart of U.S. monetary policy.
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