Are you a fiscal conservative?

I am a fiscal conservative. That is the main reason I left the Republican Party.

As a fiscal conservative I feel that we should NOT run annual budget deficits. Annual deficits add to The National Debt and cause future generations to pay for both the National Debt and interest on The National Debt.

Many of the people who read this blog are Libertarians; however, there are Democrats and Republicans and Independents as well.

I do not want to increase taxes. In fact, I want to eliminate a lot of taxes and I want to simplify the tax code.

To decrease taxes and not run an annual budget deficit we need to cut a lot of domestic spending. I am going to list five places I feel we can cut spending. I would ask you to do the same in the comments section!

It is hard for me to limit spending cuts to five things; but, here it goes:

1. I would eliminate all pork and earmarks from Federal and State budgets. These projects mainly exist to get politicians re-elected. This would result in annual savings in the neighborhood of 70 billion dollars a year.

2. I would eliminate all agricultural subsidies. This is America and the freemarket should dictate farm prices. Did you know that the US government was subsidizing tobacco farmers at the same time it was suing the heck out of cigarette companies? The subsidies on sugar are staggering. We have limited the number of peanut farmers in the United States. All of this must go... This would result in annual savings of 20 billion dollars per year.

3. I would eliminate the entire Federal Department of Education. It should not exist in the first place. It is a tremendous waste of money. The Federal Department of Education is the main reason the cost of tuition and public education is increasing in the US in my opinion. Remember that The Federal Department of Education imposes a huge number of laws and rules on the fifty states and these laws cost huge sums of money to implement and have not improved education in my opinion. Also realize that all of the money that we have thrown at education have caused the costs of education to skyrocket. Everytime we give more money in grants colleges raise their tuition that same amount. It is an endless cycle. This would save about 64 billion a year.

4. I would eliminate all "no bid" contracts. I do not believe in "no bid" contracts in the first place. Our government ends up paying far more for many items due to "no bid" contracts. I have no idea how much this would save us per year; but, I think it would be a large number.
I would guess, and this is just a guess, that we would save at least 10 billion dollars a year.

5. I would consolidate Federal programs. We currently have far too many Federal programs. We have around 100 Federal programs for education. We have around 60 Federal programs for low income housing. We should consolidate all of these Federal programs immediately. This would eliminate a lot of needless adminstration and it would eliminate a lot of waste. I am not sure how much savings would result from this. I have seen estimates around 50 billion a year, so I will use that. I am not sure how much money this would save...

The above five items would save us around 264 nillion dollars a year. This eliminate much of the current annual budget deficit.

Please let me know what you would cut and please let me know what you think of my five cuts...