Five Sure Ways To Reduce The Federal Budget

The media and the few Americans paying attention yawned earlier this year when President Obama dumped his 2015 federal budget on the legislative branch's doorstep. The $3.9 trillion fiscal blueprint was officially unveiled during a visit to an elementary school, where kids still believe in fairy tales.

The budget is little more than a child's fantasy.  Obama knows there is zero chance it will be passed by Congress ahead of the mid-term elections.  His purpose became clear when he repeated his hackneyed talking points on GOP fiscal policies that squeeze the middle class.

In his faux proposal, the president claimed his budget would reduce the federal deficit to $564 billion, a notch below the $649 deficit projected for 2014.  However, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office forecasted deficits would rise to $1.1 trillion annually by 2024 based on the proposed budget.  

It is meaningless to discuss the budget in further detail.  After the mid-term elections, the real budget battle will be waged.  Until then, the bulky document will languish unread in the nether land that is the Senate and House.  Budgets only make news when Democrats and Republicans squabble over cuts.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers will have to continue funding excessive government waste embedded in the budget.  It's a growing problem that politicians and bureaucrats duck to avoid exposing a system that never holds anyone accountable for incompetence, abuse and pork barrel spending.

The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its annual report last month on opportunities to eliminate or better manage overlap, duplication and fragmentation in the federal bureaucracy.  Not a single news organization covered the document in any detail.

In its report, the GAO found 64 opportunities to improve government efficiency across 26 areas that span a broad range of federal operations.  Tens of billions of dollars could be saved if Congress, the executive branch and the government implemented the recommendations in the report.

Yet Democrats and their allies in the media continue to complain about any attempt to shave federal spending.  They want Americans to believe that babies will go hungry, indigent families will be left homeless and schools will be shuttered if a single dime is snipped from the trillions in planned spending.   

Here are five ways to slice billions of dollars from the federal budget without harming any Americans:

• End crop subsidies paid to wealthy farmers.  The government paid $17.5 billion in taxpayers dollars to farmers last year. Eighty percent of that amount went to the wealthiest 15-20 percent of farmers.  The payout was about $14 billion to well-heeled farmers.
• Weed out Medicare fraud.  The Department of Health and Human Services estimated that in fiscal 2011 the Medicare system handed out more than $64 billion in improper payments.  The fraud ranged from overcharges for drugs to bogus insurance claims.  
• Halt the Social Security benefit leakage.  Social Security administrators like to brag that overpayments at the agency are less than half a percent of its budget.  But it's still not chump change.  The Social Security's own inspector general found overpayments were $6.5 billion in a single year. Every year as the budget grows, that number keeps climbing. 
• Stop sending food vouchers to people who do not qualify. Outright fraud accounts for about $1 billion in food stamp program waste.  However, so-called improper payments are more than $3 billion annually.  Those benefits go to ineligible households.  That's a total of $4 billion in waste and fraud.
• Reduce improper payments to individuals who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit.  The treasury lost an estimated $13.3 to $14.6 billion because of errors caused by incorrect information submitted by individuals filing returns.  An investigation revealed the improper error rate for payments was about 22 to 26 percent.  The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration uncovered the mistakes, yet the Internal Revenue Service has done nothing to stop the bleeding.  

Those five ideas, worth more than $100 billion, are just a start. Citizens Against Government Waste, the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating fraud, abuse and mismanagement, has published 557 recommendations to save taxpayers $580.6 billion in just a single year. Over five years, the changes would chop $1.8 trillion from the federal budget.

Federal government tax revenues topped $1.7 trillion at the end of April, setting a record for the first seven months of fiscal 2014.  Yet each federal budget contains higher spending levels that force more borrowing, thus fueling unending deficits.  Tax revenue isn't the problem in Washington.

Americans must demand more accountability from government and elected officials.  Spending is out of control.  More action and less talking is required to reform an fiscally obese government addicted to fattening its budget each year.