Eric Cantor, the GOP Whip, brings you YouCut. According to the site (and a town hall I saw with him on CSPAN), YouCut is a site which allows you to vote on a particular spending cut that you would like to see implemented. Each week, the GOP Leadership will take the winner to the floor and offer it to the house "for a full up and down vote".
I think this is a step in the right direction for two reasons. One, it allows us, the taxpayers, to have a greater say in certain spending decisions that we would like to see enacted. More importantly, I think its a great step that politicians are using technology to get feedback from the populace.
Check out the link to YouCut below.
Nice. I voted for this weeks.
Dude is an awesome guy. I know his kid pretty well and he seems to genuinely care about the fiscal state of the country...or he's just a good politician. Either way, I voted as well.
It's a retarded stunt. Democracy is a stupid system; there's a reason we chose a republic. As far as I'm concerned, opinion polls are grievous enough, but this is just insulting to the Founding Fathers. Firstly, the average person has no idea what the Federal budget does, or where there is waste; for instance, most people are in favour of cutting foreign aid, but opposed to cutting military spending, when foreign aid is far more useful for national security than defense spending on a dollar to dollar basis. More importantly, this idea excludes non-discretionary spending, which is where the real problem lies. It's a God-damn disgrace, and Representative Cantor should be ashamed that he's abusing the deficit for political gain, and is unwilling to have a serious conversation about what needs to be done.
Silver Banana's for voting.
I just voted for the first option because it seems to be the easiest option to implement.
Interesting concept, but poorly executed I'd say. They should list ALL the initiatives rather than just ask you to pick your favorite out of 3.
I agree with this. Its like having an election without a primary
OK, I love this as a concept, but the execution is a joke. "Eliminate Excess Congressional Printing" to save $35 million? Really? The budget deficit is $1.2 fucking trillion dollars for 2011!!! Making a few less photocopies is not going to close that gap. Again, the idea is a good one, but how about we propose some spending cuts that will actually close the gap? Oh, I remember why we can't do that - because everyone's going to get all butthurt about cutting anything that actually matters.
Fuck that CaptK, think about it like running a small business. If they can save $35 by not printing everything out they'll do it because the 35 there adds up with all the other money they save by, say, cutting an hour of work for each employee every week, or buying Maxwell House coffee and brewing it themselves instead of Sbux every day.
The small things won't get us out of debt, but it's a start and it's indicative of a change towards saving money versus spending freely. Plus, $35 million/year is the equivalent of paying ~600 federal employees every year.
I definitely understand what you're saying here, but cutting costs has to start somewhere
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost........
Every snowman starts out as one handful of snow..........
It's better to be moving in the right direction slowly than not at all
Broadcast facility grant. Scissors. Great idea. Big things start small.
Thanks for posting. I voted as well. Gotta start somewhere.
You guys have got to be kidding me. Do you understand how insignificant $35 million is to the federal budget deficit? You would need to cut about FOUR MILLION individual $35 million dollar items to close the budget deficit for just a single year! We have a word for that in finance - immaterial.
EDIT: My god I just re-read it - it will save $35 million over 10 years! That's $3.5 million a year. IMMATERIAL!
Politicians are playing you guys like fiddles. They're distracting the public talking about feel good cost cutting items like reducing print waste to save a few pennies - stuff that doesn't offend any one. Because people are notoriously bad at understanding large numbers, they think $35 million is a lot, and vote the politicians back into office because they're doing such a good job cost cutting - after all, we saved $35 million! Meanwhile our deficit explodes because we don't have the fucking balls to talk about the massive state-sponsored bloat like Medicare ($490B), Medicaid ($265B), defense spending ($548B), social security, and welfare that needs to be curtailed to actually salvage the financial disaster that is our budget and national debt.
Why don't politicians talk about that stuff and actually make some progress? Because those are hard conversations that piss people off and don't get you re-elected. Monkeys, I hope that if anyone actually does have the balls to make the hard business decisions, that it would be the folks on this board. Don't be distracted by the rhetoric, we need to make actual, hard changes.
Both of you make valid points. Obviously cuts have to start somewhere. Capt K is right about the insignificance though, some congressman from shitsville can have a pet project costing more than $3.5/yr and easily wipe away that cut.
I'm surprised the printing hasn't already been cut, you'd think these clowns could go electronic and save both time and money. Hence, our inefficient government.
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