It is time to get serious about actually cutting the deficit and stop talking about it. The three week continuing resolution (CR) just passed by the House with very modest cuts in order to keep the government running while negotiations with the White House and Senate Democrats proceed should be the last olive branch. And the cuts should also include some lefty sacred cows such as elimination of funding for public broadcasting.
Moreover, it should come with a warning – no more CRs, and no authorization for raising the debt ceiling unless at least $60 billion are cut in total in the current year’s budget and there is an ironclad commitment to cut at least $100 billion in the next year’s budget (which is still less than 10 percent of the current deficit).
It is absolutely ridiculous, for example, to be debating whether to cut all government subsidies for National Public Radio. It should be done immediately, without any equivocation.Yet, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out on the “O’Reilly Factor” last night, the Left is insisting on maintaining the funding. Their argument is that since NPR delivers a good news product – a dubious proposition in itself – they should continue to receive taxpayer money to keep their operation going.
This is the mentality of the Left in a nutshell. If they deem something worthwhile, the rest of us should be more than happy to pay for it whether we like it or not. Forget the marketplace. Consumers are too dumb to know what is best for them.
As Krauthammer put it, in a clip shown on “the Factor” from his debate with NPR’s Nina Totenberg, the tax-payer subsidized correspondent who once infamously expressed a wish for then-Senator Jesse Helms and his grandchildren to get AIDS from a blood transfusion:
if the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the state?
Here is what Totenberg said during that debate:
There is a reason that we are the only news organization other than Fox with a growing audience. It’s because of our product, which is straight-shooting, factual and spends an enormous amount of money gathering news from all over the country and the world. Judge us by our product.
