According to analysis out from the fiscally conservative Citizens for Government Reform, lawmakers could balance the federal budget in as little as one year simply by eliminating corporate welfare, cronyism and waste.
In its report “Prime Cuts 2016,” the group identifies 618 areas where the government could make substantial spending cuts. In total, the recommendations could save the government $644.1 billion in one year and $2.6 trillion over the course of five years.
One example of a cut the group is advocating is an end to the Market Access Program (MAP), an agricultural program to promote U.S. products overseas.
“MAP is really a corporate welfare program that funnels millions of dollars to large, profitable corporations and trade associations that can well afford to pay for their own ads. Eliminating MAP would save taxpayers $1 billion over five years,” according to the organization.
The group contends that government officials should also do away with many agricultural subsidies.
According to the group, eliminating sugar subsidies would save American taxpayers $1.2 billion in just one year.
From the report:
The U.S. sugar program is an outdated, Soviet-style command-and-control program that uses import quotas, loans, marketing allotments, price supports, and tariffs to artificially inflate the price of sugar. The federal government establishes a minimum price for sugar in the U.S., which averages roughly double the world price. The government also imposes marketing controls, limiting how much sugar processors are allowed to sell. These allotments are enforced and administered by a small cartel of sugar processors.
Consumers are paying about $3.5 billion more each year in artificially inflated prices for commodities that use sugar, including baked goods, beverages, candy, cereal, dairy products, snack foods, and hundreds of other products. The program has been costly to the economy as well. Between 1997 and 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in sugar-using industries. For every sugar growing job that is protected under the program, about three manufacturing jobs are lost.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, the group reports Congress could save taxpayers $4.3 billion in a year by simply demanding an end to improper Medicare payments.
“Medicare is plagued with the highest reported amount of improper payments of any federal program,” the report states. “Because of its chronic vulnerability to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, the [Government Accountability Office] has for 20 years designated the Medicare program as ‘high risk.’”
Here’s the full report:
//www.scribd.com/embeds/317164719/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-m02yj41FEt1NDuIc62X8
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