$1.5 Trillion Ways to Cut the Deficit


January 25, 2010 09:38 AM EST by Elizabeth MacDonald


First in a three-part series on Fixing America

Don’t you feel that if you hear another rant about the deficit, about reckless spending, about the Supersize-me government, without policy ideas to fix this mess, that your head is going to explode?

Don’t you feel like you are grinding your teeth into Tic Tacs every time you hear these debates?

Fox Business is changing the debate.

We found $900 billion to $1.5 trillion worth of ways to trim the fat marbled throughout government. And these are items that government officials say should be cut. Government officials whose salaries are paid for with taxpayer dollars are spending their days telling taxpayers how the government can cut waste.

But instead of cutting $1.5 trillion, the government now wants to raise the nation's debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion to pay its bills. If it passes, the national debt would reach $14.3 trillion, equal to the size of the U.S. economy.

The nation’s overall debt just soared over the $12 trillion mark for the first time this past November.

Taxpayers are looking towards the President's State of the Union address, and whether he will address reckless spending at the hands of a government that has led to staggering abuses of taxpayer money, with no end in sight.

We found plenty to cut, and we're not talking just about cutting pork, or the annual $60 billion to $200 billion in annual Medicare and Medicaid fraud and waste, which law enforcement is already hunting down, and we're not talking about expensive tax credits to support industry, like those for the solar companies, which have yet to photosynthesize into industry profits.

We found the fat with expert help from the Heritage Foundation—Brian Riedl, Erin Kanoy, Matthew Streit, Alison Fraser, JD Foster, and Steve Keen—along with research help from Fox Business producer Barnini Chakraborty and Fox News analyst James Farrell along with data and analysis from the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and Citizens Against Government Waste.

Bureaucracies exist by feeding themselves. When companies fail, they get smaller (usually). When governments fail, they get bigger, as one analyst noted.

“Simply eliminate the wasteful spending, earmarks, and corporate welfare, and..consolidate the duplicative programs,â€