{"id":12037,"date":"2011-11-15T18:32:46","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T23:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=12037"},"modified":"2011-11-16T10:19:05","modified_gmt":"2011-11-16T15:19:05","slug":"perry-comes-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/12037\/perry-comes-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Perry Comes Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rick Perry got some\u00a0(admittedly earned)\u00a0grief last week after <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZxARkcy4ui8&amp;feature=related\" target=\"_blank\">a cringe-worthy moment <\/a>at the CNBC Republican Presidential Debate in Michigan, when he couldn&#8217;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 &#8212; the one he blanked on &#8212; the Department of Energy).<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0At <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rickperry.org\/news\/text-of-gov-perry-uproot-and-overhaul-washington-speech\/\" target=\"_blank\">a speech in Iowa <\/a>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Term-limiting federal judges<\/li>\n<li>Converting Congress into a part-time legislature, with half the salary and half the staff<\/li>\n<li>Tying legislative pay to balancing the budget<\/li>\n<li>Bringing federal spending down to 18 percent of GDP<\/li>\n<li>Passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution<\/li>\n<li>Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac<\/li>\n<li>Privatizing the TSA<\/li>\n<li>Dramatically scaling down and repurposing the EPA<\/li>\n<li>Performing a full audit of the federal government<\/li>\n<li>Creating an across-the-board moratorium on new federal regulations and auditing all regulations from the past five years<\/li>\n<li>Freezing federal salaries (Except for military and law enforcement) and cutting the president&#8217;s salary in half until there is a balanced budget.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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&#8217;s hope that the eventual Republican nominee has the good sense to co-opt this agenda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rick Perry got some\u00a0(admittedly earned)\u00a0grief last week after a cringe-worthy moment at the CNBC Republican Presidential Debate in Michigan, when he couldn&#8217;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 &#8212; the one he blanked on &#8212; the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1803,3190,3191,1065,1441,608,3189,3188,838],"class_list":["post-12037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-balanced-budget-amendment","tag-congressional-pay","tag-department-of-commerce","tag-department-of-education","tag-department-of-energy","tag-epa","tag-federal-judiciary","tag-federal-pay","tag-rick-perry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12037"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12043,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12037\/revisions\/12043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}