The Liberty Papers

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has set up a website called YouCut to solicit ideas from regular people for suggestions on specific programs and policies that should be cut or eliminated.

From the website:

YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project – is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact. Each week that the House is in session, we will take the winning item and offer it to the full House for an up-or-down vote, so that you can see where your representative stands on your priorities. Vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington’s culture of spending into a culture of savings.

YouCut appears to be similar to President Obama’s Change.org site – hardly “first-of-its-kind” as boasted in the paragraph above. And like Change.org I doubt any suggestions like “legalize marijuana” (which was the top suggestion at Change.org but I’m not sure if this is still the case) will be taken all that seriously by House Republicans. Even if more “libertarian” suggestions are discarded, however; the way I see it, if they ask for our input we should give it to them rather than simply bitching and moaning on blogs about how nothing ever changes.

I haven’t taken the opportunity to offer any suggestions so far but I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with a few ideas. Any policy or program that takes liberty away from the individual would be an ideal place to start. Even such “pipe dreams” as ending the war on (some) drugs, ending the TSA, DEA, ATF, and various other alphabet agencies that do essentially the same redundant things*, bringing all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan (and most of the rest of the world for that matter), phasing out Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, cut defense spending, selling federal land to private entities, and other policies that the Republicans may or may not be in favor of should be at least suggested. All these actions would result in significant savings for the taxpayer as well as restore lost liberties.

There have already been some interesting suggestions on the site. If you do make any suggestions to YouCut, be sure to post them here as well.

*Do we really need a DHS, CIA, and half a dozen other intelligence agencies for example?