The country does not need sequestration or a government shutdown to identify ways to eliminate wasteful programs. What we need is a Congress that conducts oversight and makes difficult decisions.

When the Budget Control Act was passed in 2011, Taxpayers for Common Sense started a series of reports to help Congress, culminating with Sliding Past Sequestration, which identified $2 trillion in deficit reduction. We know where we can save money: cutting unlimited subsidies for crop insurance, tax breaks for favored industries, and failed weapons programs like the V-22 Osprey, the list goes on.

Every single dollar the government spends was authorized by Congress, and Congress has both the ability and the responsibility to make sure that programs continue to achieve their goals and that the goals are indeed still what we want as a country.

There are lessons to be learned from the shutdown and sequestration. First and perhaps most obviously, is that these decisions to bring spending and revenues in closer alignment are difficult. The super committee on deficit reduction failed. Congress can’t pass appropriations bills on time. There has been lots of talk about tax reform, but the Senate Finance Committee leadership was so worried about public reaction that they promised to keep reform proposals secret for 50 years. Congress even has difficulty eliminating programs which should be easy to cut – like direct payments in the Farm Bill, a 17 year old “temporary” program that pays land owners whether or not they farm. Legislating is hard work, and for all of the suggestions from groups like ours and others, only Congress can actually make these decisions.

Second, if in fact politicians are concerned about our long term fiscal outlook, as so many claim to be, our problems can’t be solved simply by fighting over where to spend a million or even a billion dollars through the annual appropriations process. Even if we eliminated the entire $1.2 trillion discretionary budget (which funds everything from the Pentagon to national parks to Head Start), we would still be facing future fiscal crises. We need to do significant tax reform that simplifies the code and makes it more fair. And we need to make hard decisions about the programs that make up the $2.3 trillion mandatory budget: which funds everything from Social Security and Medicare to those direct payments in the Farm Bill.