Eliminate All Federal Subsidies

As of 2018, there are over 2,200 Federal subsidies and we've been adding about 100 new ones each year recently. They cost hundreds of billions of dollars every year – the lowest estimate I've seen is 400 billion dollars a year; the highest estimate is one trillion dollars a year. Elimination of all Federal subsidies would balance the budget and perhaps provide surpluses to pay down our massive national debt. We need to do that now and make it permanent.

Subsidies are hidden in every government departmental budget so that there is no viable way to view all of them together with their annual costs. You can access a general list of them (again without costs) at this URL - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/catalog-of-federal-domestic-assistance-cfda.asp . Essentially, all of these subsidies amount to political bribes to help politicians get elected. All of them need to be eliminated. The largest subsidies, but not all subsidies, go to three major areas - state and local governments to help with the hiring of police and teachers plus other “needs”, farmers, and hundreds of charities. Let's examine each:

State and local governments, by law, must balance their budgets. We should never have given up this needed practice, of forcing state and local politicians to actually make the tough spending and revenue decisions to accomplish a balanced budget that they were elected to do, by allowing them to “out source” some of their spending decisions to the Federal government which is allowed to work without a balanced budget. Most of these subsidies are spent on our largest cities who have managed to avoid the tough decisions on budget balancing. No more. Over a 5 year period, in order to give them sufficient time to adjust their finances, reduce these subsidies by 20% a year, so that they are zero at the end of 5 years.

The average wealth of farmers is two million dollars each. The Federal government should not be subsidizing multi-millionaires. However, the Agricultural subsidy program is so large, that it cannot be withdrawn in one year without creating burdensome chaos. Therefore, cut these subsidies 20% a year to reach zero in 5 years, allowing farmers ample time to adjust to market realities.

Fortunately, most of the hundreds of charities subsidized by the Federal government only cover 10% or less of their annual budgets by these subsidies. Charities should be and are supported by people and businesses, and never should be supported by government. When government supports charities, it is telling all of us individual tax payers that no matter how much you gave to charity, even if it was 10% or more, it was not enough. Therefore, the Federal government is taxing us higher than it otherwise would so that it can force us to give even more to charity. That is just unfair and wrong for government to do to taxpayers. Eliminate all Federal subsidies to charities and do it immediately.

Finally, eliminate every other Federal subsidy immediately.

For each of the 2,200+ Federal subsidies, now growing at 100 new ones per year and costing hundreds of billions of dollars each year, there are legions of defendants and lobbyists for these "free" goodies from government. Meanwhile, our 20 trillion dollar Federal debt ($60,000 for each man, woman, and child in America) keeps growing. We can't afford these politically motivated subsidies and need to eliminate all of them. Yet, the liars who defend these subsidies try to distract us from the real problem by promoting the false concept that cutting government spending means deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Defense, etc. No, we don't have to cut any of them. We have to just cut the Federal subsidies which are deliberately put in every government departmental budget to hide them from American citizens and make it difficult to find and analyze them in total. Simply add a single departmental budget for all these subsidies, show what they all combined cost now and cost in the past, and then re-state all the other Federal departmental budgets, including their cost history, without these subsidies in them so that we know the true costs of these programs without irrelevant subsidies.