Let This Summer Bring Some Beautiful Sunsets

Please oh please let this happen (subscription required):

Ronald Reagan used to quip that the closest thing to immortality in this life is a government program. We’d add one modern caveat, which is that under Beltway budget rules tax cuts automatically expire after five or 10 years, but spending programs and tax increases live forever.
The latter would change, however, if a group of House Republicans led by Texan Jeb Henserling and Mike Pence of Indiana succeed in pushing new rules to sunset out-of-date federal programs. Under their proposal that has been promised a vote this summer, Congress would have to reauthorize agency budgets every five years, or they would die. The legislation would also create a sunset commission to recommend program terminations, and Congress would vote up or down on the package. . . .
In the private sector, worker productivity growth in 2005 hit its highest level in 50 years. What a contrast with government, where agency performance audits by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) have found enormous waste and financial mismanagement in every operation from the Pentagon to Medicare. (Here’s just one outrage GAO uncovered: One in six foodstamp dollars goes to an ineligible recipient.) The private sector operates under Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.” Mr. Henserling quips that in Congress “we get a lot of creation, but never destruction.”
In Washington, “fiscal discipline” has become a code phrase for raising taxes, never for rolling back the $2.7 trillion annual federal budget. Yet a new analysis by Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation indicates that balancing the federal budget is possible within a few years with even modest spending restraint. Thanks to the surge in federal tax revenues in the past 18 months, if Congress were simply to hold federal spending to the rate of inflation over the next six years, the budget would be balanced without a penny of new taxes. Meanwhile, sunsetting useless agencies would mean that high priority services could be fully funded.

I read recently that entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were costing Americans $3 billion a day.
$3 billion. A day.
And I won’t even mention that spending on these programs is growing at about an 8% annual clip.
Anyone who thinks that kind of spending is sustainable is out of their gourds.
This sort of mandatory review of government spending is exactly what this country needs. It may not directly address the problem of spending on the more mammoth government programs like Social Security, but it will allow for an opportunity for other programs that have outlived their usefulness to be put out to pasture.