You Cut's Latest -- Defund NPR!

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, 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.
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While some members of Congress are grandstanding about cutting NPR, Minority Whip Eric Cantor and his team at You Cut went to work making the defunding of NPR an item on You Cut.  We believe it will end up the number one item this week to cut:

Terminate Taxpayer Funding of National Public Radio


Savings of Tens of Millions of Dollars (potentially in excess of a hundred million dollars)

National Public Radio's (NPR) recent decision to terminate commentator Juan Williams contract because of comments he expressed on another station have brought new found attention to NPR's receipt of taxpayer funds.

NPR receives taxpayer funding in two different ways. First, they receive direct government grants from various federal agencies, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Over the past two years this direct funding has totaled approximately $9 million. But NPR also receives taxpayer funds indirectly. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting makes grants to public radio stations. While some of these grants can be used for any purpose, some can only be used to acquire and produce programming. Often this programming is purchased from NPR. Indeed programming fees and dues paid by local public radio stations to NPR accounts for approximately 40% of NPR's budget or about $65 million last year. A portion of these funds were originally federal tax dollars provided to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to the local public radio stations.

If you haven't already done so, sign up today at You Cut to start voting on items for cutting or better yet submitting your suggesting for cutting waste in the Federal Government.

For those naysayers saying Republicans won't cut Government when they take over the House, they have not bothered to see what they are already doing with You Cut which is just the beginning.  They want to hear from taxpayers for ideas on what to cut -- they are listening.

The YOU CUT Citizen Review of Government by House Republicans

This is a great idea, but help is needed to identify the waste that is inherent in most government agencies. This new program by the Republican Conference is starting with the National Science Foundation (NSF). Will be interesting to read what people turn up in their search about wasteful spending at NSF. Looking forward to their getting to the Defense Department which will take an army of volunteers to root out the waste.

We are launching an experiment - the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.

First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) - Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects - $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don't think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

Step One: Look for Questionable Grants

Click here to open the National Science Foundation website. In the "Search Award For" field, try some keywords, such as: success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc. to bring up grants. If you find a grant that you believe is a waste of your taxdollars, be sure to record the award number.

Step Two: Submit Award Numbers

Visit You Cut Review of Government to fill in the form to submit the potential cuts you find.

The Promise of Bipartisanship aka Democrats Lie

The following email, 2 August 2010, from Eric Cantor, House Republican Whip, concerning Democrats and You Cut details why you cannot trust Democrats for their vote even when they are voting on their own idea(s):

The YouCut project is focused on solutions - when we ask for ideas to cut spending, we don't ask if it is a Republican idea or a Democrat idea, we just ask if it is a good idea.

This week's YouCut item had the promise of bipartisanship. Last week, four House Democrats proudly announced their own ideas for spending cuts - we took one of their ideas and offered it on the House floor for a vote. We didn't change their proposal.

Three of those four then voted against one of their own ideas, which they had proudly supported at a press conference less than a week before. Click here to see where your Representative stood on this vote.

When we first heard that a small group of our colleagues from the other side of the isle were interested in cutting spending, we were optimistic that they would work with us on actually getting it done. Sadly, it was not to be - they will even vote against their own ideas, simply because the motion to vote is from another party.

They talk about cutting spending, but they haven't voted that way. We will continue to present them with opportunities to follow through on their rhetoric - your vote each week gives us the ability to do that. Click here to vote on the next five cuts, which are already up on the YouCut website.

Our country is at a critical crossroads. Either we will make the difficult decisions and approach the challenge posed by our staggering national debt like adults, or we will continue down the dangerous path of reckless spending - burdening our children and grandchildren with the cost.

Regards,

Eric Cantor
House Republican Whip

If you haven't signed up at the You Cut site, please do so today so you can vote on the items to be cut and/or offer your own suggestions for cutting spending. This House Republican Project You Cut under the leadersip of House Republican Whip, Cong Eric Cantor (R-VA), has already passed the 1 million vote mark and is well on the way to the 2 million vote level.

Tonight we learn from Cong Cantor that some Democrats are willing to support cutting the budget and will even submit items for You Cut BUT when the chips are down, they vote with Speaker Pelosi against their own suggestions. This group of Democrats seems to have little core values and instead have the values of Speaker Pelosi which is not representative of most of their constituents or America as a whole. What does Pelosi have on these people that will sell out their votes in order to continually vote with leadership even when it is a vote on their own idea? Don't remember that happening in previous sessions of Congress. Whatever Pelosi wants, she gets from these House Democrats which makes you wonder what they are getting in exchange for their votes.

Here are the list of You Cut weekly winners previously chosen by voters on You Cut to be brought to the House Floor for a vote:

Week One: Cut the New Non-Reformed Welfare Program ($25 Billion Savings)

Week Two: Eliminate Federal Employee Pay Raise ($30 Billion Savings)

Week Three: Reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($30 Billion Savings)

Week Four: Sell Excess Federal Property ($15 Billion Savings)

Week Five: Prohibit Hiring New IRS Agents to Enforce Health Care Law ($15 Billion Savings)

Week Six: Taxpayer Subsidized Union Activities ($1.2 Billion Savings)

Please sign up at You Cut to vote or offer your suggestions for cutting!

Eric Cantor: You Cut: The Road to 1,000,000 Votes

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. 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.

Read More and See this week's candidates for cutting at: You Cut
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This past week's winner about the signs for the stimulus was the perfect idea to save money. In fact we had stimulus signs put up for some of our local road projects that our town had passed bond issues for several years ago and road work had ZERO to do with the stimulus. That fact didn't stop the Democrat Governor and his fellow Obama supporters from trying to get credit for Obama by wasting our money on the stimulus signs. Signs lasted less than 24 hours as the residents complained.

Please submit any ideas you have to save money. You Cut
is one of the best ideas we have seen out of this Congress, but we don't see Democrats jumping on board this Republican idea. It is about the Country not the Party but the Democrat Congressional leadership unfortunately does not see it that way. Their agenda is Party over Country and the first priority is to do whatever Obama wants.

YOU CUT: Cong Tom Price Announcement

Support the Republicans in the House by casting your vote on what should be cut! Sign up at You Cut to be notified of these votes. It is time to show House Democrats how you cut spending actually way past time!



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. Together we can begin to change Washington's culture of spending into a culture of savings.

The response to this project has been unprecedented - within less than a week, over 280,000 people cast their votes. It's clear that the American people - fed up with the culture of spending in Washington - have embraced YouCut as a vehicle to make their voices heard.

FIRST WINNING CUT:

The House will be voting on the following spending cut, chosen by the American people, later this week.

New Non-Reformed Welfare Program$2.5 billion in savingsThe program was recently created to incentivize states to increase their welfare caseloads without requiring able-bodied adults to work, get job training, or otherwise prepare to move off of taxpayer assistance. Reforming the welfare program was one of the great achievements of the mid 1990s, saving taxpayers billions of dollars and ending the cycle of dependency on welfare. This new program, created in 2009 is a backdoor way to undo those reforms. The program currently costs approximately $2.5 billion a year. (Also proposed as part of the RSC Sunset Caucus.) Click here to learn more about this program.