What would you cut back on or completely out of the budget?

bridges to nowhere!

POLITICIANS

Government employee wages. Bring them inline with the private sector.

Make them do "more with less" like all the rest of us have been doing

My top three....


#1 - Bring home our troops...

#2 - Ship all illegals back... If people say that they do jobs that most Americans won't, then give those jobs to the people that are sitting on their asses and collecting welfare. Instead of giving them a FREE check, pay them minimum wage and let them earn their money. Two problems solved!

#3 - Foreign aide.

#4 Stop all free welfare for able bodied adults and restart the CCC and WPA programs.
- If you want public assistance, you will have to work for it.

# 5 Mandatory birth control while on public assistance.
- If you cant even feed yourself you have no business making more mouths to feed.

Audit

I would spend a few million to have an outside, non-governmental accounting firm audit the books of every division and agency.

After that, I would base all cuts and changes on that.

#6 - Drug tests for all people receiving welfare, unemployment, or any other public assistance.

Pensions.

FOREIGN AID
-something like 3 billion a year to Israel? WHY?

War on drugs
-Does more harm than good. Legalize the soft stuff and go after Meth/Crack/Heroine

Public education (Privatize all of it and subsidize)
-public education is the most inefficient and ineffective project we have.

If I were King, I can guarantee no one would have flown to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, got carted around in a fleet of limo's or stayed in any 5 star resorts. That whole scam could have been conducted over Al Gore's interweb.

How would you feel if after 20 some odd years your boss walked in and said he wiped out your pension plan?

I'd lop 25% off the military budget and get rid of outsourcing in the pentagon.

There's many places the private sector can do better than the government. The military IMHO is not one of them.

1 Defense - I know from being in the Navy for the last twenty years there is an enormous amount of waste. Currently, about 67 cents of every dollar spent of defense goes to the personnel. I would overhaul the benifits that we receive so that only the commited receive most of the bennies. Did you know that if you join the armed forces and later decide to marry someone that is in such poor health that they cannot get coverage from anyone that they are automatticaly covered 100% by the government and the the govt. has no say as to whether or not they can be added. We get way too many bennifits in my opinion. If I explained them all to you, you would probably get very pissed.

I know a guy that has been in the Navy for a little under two years. He just married a girl that has had two heart transplants and will need a third pretty soon. Now, just because he decided to get married, the govt. is now getting the bill for all of her issues. So far the Navy has not even broken even on the amount of training and pay this guy receives. Now with his new spouse, he will be red mark inthe financial books for his entire career.


2 Foreign Aid - Fuck'em

Eliminate the IRS, too.

Military spending
Entitlement programs
Foreign aid
space program
government auto fleet
federal politican salaries and benefits
eliminate the environmentalist re-imbursement of attorney fees and court costs when they "prevail" in a case against the government loop hole. (not a lot of money to be saved there, but it sure pisses me off).
Environmental studies for every single thing the government does.

Wouldn't a lot of the government employee's pension been wiped out if the feds wouldn't have bailed out the to big to fails?? They bailed these companies out to save their own pensions.

Funny how nobody with a 401k got that luxury.

Thank you for not answering the question

When I was in the laborers union all my dependents were covered with great insurance, I was married with 4 kids. I worked with a lot of young single guys.

The Filipinos in the Navy used to get citizenship after 7 years, so for those first 7 years they didn't pay taxes, because they were not citizens.... It used to burn my ass they got more money than me. Today, not so much.

It's a small price to pay, for the service you guys do.

Dave, I know better than to rely on anyone but myself for my future.

To answer your question, I would expect my boss to come in at the eleventh hour to tell me my pension evaporated.

Federal workers earning double their private counterparts

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.

Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years

"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks otherwise. "Can't we now all agree that federal workers are overpaid and do something about it?" he asks.

Last week, President Obama ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees. For the rest of the 2-million-person federal workforce, Obama asked for a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike in 2011, the smallest in more than a decade. Federal workers also would qualify for seniority pay hikes.

Congressional Republicans want to cancel the across-the-board increase in 2011, which would save $2.2 billion.

"Americans are fed up with public employee pay scales far exceeding that in the private sector," says Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the second-ranking Republican in the House.

Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., says a pay freeze would unfairly scapegoat federal workers without addressing real budget problems.

What the data show:

•Benefits. Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government's contribution to pensions. Employees contributed an additional $10,569.

•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.

•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.

luckily, i work for city government or you guys would have me canned.

Uh, yeah, what about all the DOE, DOD, Interior-Forestry-Fish & Game, HHS...etc. jobs that are WAY the HELL outta the "Belt-way" and have pay grades like GS1 thru 6?

Thank you.

Do me a favor...slow down for a minute and take a look at the Real World...OUT-SIDE of YOUR World: The VAST majority of Fed-Jobs are NOT Hi-Brow...

You know, you are becoming guilty of the Inside-Belt-Way Disease.

I'm jus' sayin'...

It's the public employees union that spewed that shit.

i am surprised that nobody mentioned all the 'private contractors' , Xe and the like . they are sucking some serious coin out of the tax payer purse .

Federal and State governments expanded their budgets beyond what they needed to do. The cash cow has dried up. I think they should just leave the budget alone, raise taxes and "fees" , print up some extra stimulus money, work on selling their party platform, take a long Mid summer vacation until November and let the Federal Reserve Chairman run the show.