The GOP is unveiling legislation for the House and a companion bill for the Senate that would cut $2.5 trillion over 10 years in an ambitious attempt to cut out deficit by cutting spending by the federal government.The legislation would bring spending by our government back to 2006 levels and would eliminate or reduce the spending for over 50 government programs.
The Daily Caller provides details:
Jordan’s “Spending Reduction Act” would eliminate such things as the U.S. Agency for International Development and its $1.39 billion annual budget, the $445 million annual subsidy for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the $1.5 billion annual subsidy for Amtrak, $2.5 billion in high speed rail grants, the $150 million subsidy for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and it would cut in half to $7.5 billion the federal travel budget.
But the program eliminations and reductions would account for only $330 billion of the $2.5 trillion in cuts. The bulk of the cuts would come from returning non-defense discretionary spending – which is currently $670 billion out of a $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year – to the 2006 level of $496.7 billion, through 2021.
Going back to 2006 levels would reduce spending by $2.3 trillion over ten years. It is a significantly more drastic cut than the one proposed by House Republican leadership in the Pledge to America last fall, which proposed moving non-defense, non-mandatory spending for the current fiscal year back to 2008 levels, which was $522.3 billion. Jordan’s proposal includes the recommendation from the Pledge for the current fiscal year, which ends in September.
The proposal would cut the federal work force by 15 percent and freeze automatic pay raises for government employees for five years.
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Some would call this overly ambitious and I would have to agree. There is no way the spend spend spend Democrats which still control the Senate would agree to cut spending this drastically, but as an opening volley to start negotiations, this is a good and shows the GOP's seriousness in cutting spending and getting our $14 trillion deficit under control.
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