GOP should lead war on fiscal waste

Republicans need to regain the offensive on fiscal issues. The GOP has somehow allowed big-spending Democrats to get to the right of them on the issue of financial responsibility and balanced budgets.

Polls show that Democrats are now more trusted on balancing the budget than Republicans. That’s like losing an arm wrestling contest to Nancy Pelosi.

The big first step for Republicans to regain American trust on fiscal responsibility is for President Trump to deliver a nationally televised prime-time speech from the Oval Office to announce an allhands-on-deck war on Washington waste.

Declare a debt-spending emergency. If Americans believed Trump were seriously committed to this initiative, he would be regarded as a fiscal superhero. The issue is teed up right now because the spending trends have been so alarming. The Congressional Budget Office just announced that the government is now spending $2 billion more than it takes in every day. Don’t even think about blaming the tax cuts. In 2018, the estimated $3.4 trillion raised in federal revenues was the highest level ever in American history — even with the tax cuts. The problem is a spending avalanche that now exceeds $4 trillion of outlays a year.

Several weeks ago, a taxpayer watchdog group called Open the Books published an open letter signed by former Sen. Tom Coburn, Tom Smith and Adam Andrzejewski and sent to the president urging a waste war, and it listed hundreds of examples of taxpayer dollars being flushed down the drain. Open the Books estimates $125 billion in waste at the Pentagon alone.

When Trump was shown these lists of white elephants he responded: “I thought we already took care of this.” Unfortunately, no. The bureaucratic blob made sure it wouldn’t happen.

Open the Books wants Trump to require every agency to list all spending items as little as $100 to be listed on a government website so we can monitor how the money is being spent. They want the president to report to the American people each month how much progress is being made in every agency in cutting their budgets.

A government that is going broke and yet still spends tens of thousands of dollars a year on pianos, hundreds of millions of dollars a year on public relations firms (to advertise what a great job they are doing spending money?) and millions of dollars a year sending Social Security checks out to dead people isn’t serious about balancing the budget or spending taxpayer money with care.

That’s the whole money problem in Washington in a nutshell.