It's about time for the GOP to return to fiscal sanity

House GOP Leaders Set to Cut Spending:

"Since Bush came to office, federal spending had grown by a third, from $1.86 trillion to $2.47 trillion, while record budget surpluses turned to record deficits. Conservative activists, led by talk show hosts and opinion columnists, had begun pressing Republicans hard on what they saw as Big Government Conservatism."

It remains to be seen if this movement can gain any traction in the full House, let alone the Senate or the White House, but I would much rather go into the 2006 elections with a GOP that was at least trying to put the Beast on a diet.

Healthcare is not the place I would start, however. It is a large target and has plenty of fraud, waste and abuse, but it does feed the image of the "heartless Republicans." Revisiting that abomination of a transportation bill would be a good start; Bush should have vetoed it the first time around.

I think it is also time to dust off some old spending cuts, first unveiled a decade ago even if they are mostly symbolic. To zero out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Academy of the Arts and the National Academy of the Humanities will not save a lot of money, but it would send a useful message that entire agencies and functions can be axed.

The next thing I would do is to go for the financial jugular of the Democrat Party by cutting education spending starting with the repeal of No Child Left Behind. Federal funding of local schools is, I believe, well under ten percent of total preK-12 government expenditure and complying with all the rules and regulations that go with those dollars costs a lot of money as well, so the actual classroom impact would be even less.

Republicans should sell this idea by pointing out that we have long since passed the point where increased expenditures improve performance and that many of the justifications for higher spending (lower student-teacher ratios for example) have been shown to be myths. Moreover, it plays to our historic commitment to local control which is far more responsive to local needs.