-By Warner Todd Huston
President of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR.org), Grover Norquist, wrote about having an “anti-appropriations committee back in June n the American Spectator.
Norquist talked of Democrats, Republicans and “the appropriators” in congress and proposed an idea to take the starch out of the appropriator’s assumed sense of entitlement to spend our money with abandon.
Hearkening back to the board that identified needless spending during WWII, spending congress then cut from the budget, Norquist suggested a similar board today that would look over the budget and decide in a non-partisan way what was worth the spending and what should be cut.
Since June a coalition of groups have come together to urge congress to create a new committee to do just that. ATR talked about it in a recent post…
Today, Americans for Tax Reform and its Center for Fiscal Accountability, joined by forty-six groups representing millions of taxpayers, urged Speaker-Elect John Boehner to institute a new committee to cut spending. This Anti-Appropriations Committee would focus only on reducing spending and balance the spending interests of the other panels tasked with appropriating and authorizing new outlays. Republicans, who have outlined in their Pledge to America the efforts they plan to take in leading the House of Representatives in the 112th Congress, should adopt this new committee to ensure comprehensive federal spending reform. The coalition wrote to Speaker-Elect Boehner:
This “Anti-Appropriations Committee” should be modeled on the Joint Committee on Nonessential Federal Expenditures, which was operational from 1941 until 1974. Commonly referred to as the “Byrd Committee” after its creator, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. (D-Va.), the committee focused exclusively on cutting spending, much in the same way the standing committees today focus on sanctioning new spending. As such, the panel was able to net real savings for taxpayers, cutting over $38 billion (in 2010 dollars) in waste and inefficiencies.
Many efforts to reduce government spending have been undermined by the distraction of spending and taxes – history shows that only when the temptation of spending is removed can fiscal prudence take center stage. The success of the Byrd Committee was due to this singular nature; tasked only with cutting spending, rather than appropriating, the committee was able to propose targeted and effective rescissions.
A .pdf of the letter can be found in its entirety here.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.