Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Federal Pay’
November 15th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Perry Comes Alive
Posted by Print

Rick Perry got some (admittedly earned) grief last week after a cringe-worthy moment at the CNBC Republican Presidential Debate in Michigan, when he couldn’t recall the third of three cabinet departments he wants to abolish (for the record, they were the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and — the one he blanked on — the Department of Energy).

The media fixation on the gaffe overshadowed a bigger point: Rick Perry is proposing some of the most dramatic reforms to the federal government of any presidential candidate in decades. At a speech in Iowa earlier today, the Texas governor laid out an agenda that makes clear that the cabinet proposals were far from an aberration. Check out this list of proposals from the remarks:

  • Term-limiting federal judges
  • Converting Congress into a part-time legislature, with half the salary and half the staff
  • Tying legislative pay to balancing the budget
  • Bringing federal spending down to 18 percent of GDP
  • Passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution
  • Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
  • Privatizing the TSA
  • Dramatically scaling down and repurposing the EPA
  • Performing a full audit of the federal government
  • Creating an across-the-board moratorium on new federal regulations and auditing all regulations from the past five years
  • Freezing federal salaries (Except for military and law enforcement) and cutting the president’s salary in half until there is a balanced budget.

Perry may be faltering in the polls, but this list reminds us why he was a contender in the first place. At the very least, let’s hope that the eventual Republican nominee has the good sense to co-opt this agenda.