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An article in The Wall Street Journal responded to the budget supercommittee’s inability to arrive at a decision. The article suggests the following:

1) Eliminate unnecessary federal programs

The obvious place to begin is repealing ObamaCare and its expansion of spending. Programs like the federal Community Development Fund, which should fall under state and local or private responsibilities, can be axed. So can intercity and high-speed rail grants, which lack plans to make rail competitive, and duplicative education programs.

2) Empower the states

We should also let states experiment with alternatives to our current one-size-fits-all federal solution. The best example is Medicaid, which should be converted into a block grant. Replacing federal matching support with block grants eliminates state incentives to attract additional federal subsidies, while allowing states to manage Medicaid more efficiently. Federal Medicaid costs should be capped at growth of 1% over the inflation rate.

3) Streamline the government

The federal work force can shrink through attrition, and employee compensation can be adjusted to private levels. We should cut costly applied research in fields such as renewable energy at the Department of Energy, focusing only on basic research. And the Davis-Bacon Act, which inflates the price of federal construction projects by requiring high-cost union labor, has to be repealed.

See Full Article Here

Articles like this give me something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving week when it comes to the news.