Deregulation and Limited Government

The U-T article by James Durfee alleging partisanship by the Tea Party in Sunday's paper kicked off something of a food fight in the comments section. Leslie Eastman calls out the lie that is central to the article:

If all Tea Party Participants are "Republicans", then how do you explain the 13% of us DEMOCRATS who are involved in this citizens movement? Data Here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20001743-503544.html

Over 40% of SCTRC's members are Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, undeclared or are not otherwise connected to the GOP.

What also caught my attention was the frequently posted criticism that the Tea Party candidates do not have specific plans for spending cuts and deregulation. Leslie again responds:

True -- but I understand their hesitancy. Anything the candidates say that indicate specific programs (like Social Security), are distorted into vile, ineffectual attack ads by their opponents. Citizens need to research candidates thoroughly, and not rely on party literature, when selecting representatives.

But I also wanted to point to specific programs of cost cutting and deregulation that could easily be proposed, along with pointers to Tea Party candidates with specific proposals. Here are some easy ones from your author.

Really easy spending cuts:

• End all stimulus spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• End all TARP spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• Freeze the pay of federal workers, since the CPI stayed flat last year, so too should have federal pay, but it went up. (Full disclosure, I work for the federal government.)
  
• De-Fund all of the committees, czars and regulatory boards for Obamacare.
• De-fund the Department of Education, for starters, since it doesn't educate anyone.

Really easy deregulation:

• Repeal Obamacare. It is chock full of regulations.
  
• Simplify banking regulation by ending too big to fail, and requiring increasing capital reserves the larger any financial institution gets. Little additional regulation would be required.
• Simplify clinical drug trials, by only requiring that safety be proved, not efficacy. This will lower the cost of drugs.
• Require a cost benefit analysis be conducted for all new regulations proposed by any federal agency. Require a public comment period and allow court challenges to new regulations on the basis of lack of benefit commensurate with cost.

There, that wasn't too hard, was it?