Back to Work - Bill Clinton [21]
Partial implementation of just two of these recommendations—collecting just one-fourth of the taxes that are owed but unpaid every year, $345 billion, and putting one-third of the approximately $170 billion in no-bid contracts the government approves every year up for competitive bids—could reduce the annual deficit by more than $100 billion a year, or more than $1 trillion over a decade. Over the last fifteen years, switching from no-bid to competitive bid contracts has saved the taxpayers a lot of money, lowering their costs, on average, 25 to 30 percent. Both these changes are harder to make than they sound, but these recommendations and others in the GAO report, even if only partially implemented, could reduce the debt and actually improve performance.
We’re also ripe for a review of the clarity, efficiency, and costs of federal regulation, building on the groundbreaking work Al Gore did with the Reinventing Government initiative or what Erskine Bowles did at the Small Business Administration, where he reduced loan applications from one-inch thick to one page front and back and cut the waiting time for approval from ten to three weeks. President Obama has ordered an ongoing review of regulations and has received the first set of proposed changes, which are designed to save $10 billion and to be especially helpful to small businesses. Congress, with a large bipartisan majority, has already voted to reduce the most onerous small-business reporting requirements in the health-care law.
This is all work that would save taxpayers time and money. A good conservative (or a good progressive!) could have a field day just working through the GAO report and acting on its findings.1
BUT IF YOU THINK THAT TO balance the budget, we should eliminate virtually all government departments, including the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commerce Department, the Energy Department, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Agriculture Department, the Interior Department, and the national parks—if you’re against them all, you can be a leader in the antigovernment movement’s next struggle! It won’t, however, make you a leader in bringing down the debt that twenty years of combining tax cuts with more spending ran up. Because that’s not where the money is.
And it’s not in foreign aid either. For decades, every time the American people have been asked how to balance the budget, the first thing they say is “Cut foreign aid.” When asked how much of the budget we should spend on foreign aid, people normally say about 10 percent. When asked how much we do spend, they say between 15 and 25 percent. The difference is a lot of money. The problem is that for decades our spending on foreign assistance has been around 1 percent of the budget. That’s where it still is, even with substantial development spending in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost all other wealthy countries spend a higher percentage of their budget on foreign assistance than we do. In many countries, especially in Africa, China is spending more than we are in absolute terms, building highways, rail systems, and other infrastructure projects in the hope of gaining access to Africa’s metals, minerals, and other materials