Originally posted at RazShafer.com

I’m all about giving props to liberals when they get something right…even if it’s a little thing. While I don’t agree with a lot of the article, the author raises a great point about the YouCut Project: even if every budget item that was given as an option in the YouCut project was eliminated from the federal budget, the total would barely be equivalent to a rounding error!

At it’s core, the idea of allowing another level of transparency to the spending/cutting process is good but in an effort to engage conservatives and build a contact database several Republicans showed their unwillingness to put much on the line when it comes to spending cuts.

The fact of the matter is that if we are going to attempt to stop the hemorrhage of spending out of Washington, DC, big cuts are going to be required. Yet no large or controversial programs were included on the list of possible cuts for constituents to vote on. Representatives steered well clear of cutting anything that might step on people’s toes.

We need conservatives in Congress to stand up against government waste and overspending in a substantive way, not just building their pre-election email list. Show some stones Congressmen!

The fruits of Eric Cantor’s new “YouCut” project made it to the House floor last week, with results entirely predictable: nothing passed, and it did so amid great partisan kerfluffle. But according to the House Minority Whip’s office, some 280,000 people voted online or via text on the particular measure they’d like to see deleted from the federal budget, in what Cantor’s new media guy described as “the most direct use of technology to establish a more direct democracy in the history of the federal legislature.” Mission accomplished? Not quite.

YouCut is dishonest on a second level, too: even if the programs on its list were to die tomorrow, they wouldn’t make the slightest difference in the federal budget or the federal deficit. In a budget in which a billion dollars is a rounding error, killing a program that costs a few million a year may be worse than useless, since it lets activists FEEL like something substantive has been accomplished when nothing has, other than to deprive the people who received benefits under the program in question. It’s like the classic promise to cut the budget by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” — if that were all it took, we’d have been out of the fiscal woods a long time ago. Read more at www.epolitics.com