As millions of Americans do every year, Congress should jot down some New Year’s resolutions. But instead of waiting until January, these can be tied to the 2012 fiscal year that starts October 1st. And instead of resolving to shed a few pounds or cut back the swearing, they can resolve to get the budget in shape and stop the gridlock and waste that leads taxpayers to fill their swear jars.The resolutions should be straightforward and simple.

Pass Our Bills On Time – One of Congress’s only constitutionally mandated duties is to write the checks to fund government every year. Lawmakers jealously guard their “power of the purse” but seem to forget that with power comes responsibility. This is the second year in a row that not a single one of the twelve spending bills that fund government is signed into law before the start of the fiscal year. Congress needs to do its job and stop helping create the dysfunction and waste in the federal government that lawmakers like to rail about.

Don’t Be Penny-Wise And Pound-Foolish – We need budget cuts . But we need to be smart about this. Some of the greatest tools on Congress’s fiscal tool belt are the independent, non-partisan agencies that advise them, like the Congressional Research Service, Congressional Budget Office, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress and helps root out waste, fraud, and abuse through hundreds of publicly available reports every year. Unfortunately lawmakers in both chambers, but particularly the Senate, are trying to cut nearly $50 million (just shy of 10%) from the agency’s requested budget. Some lawmakers, apparently, don’t like what comes out of the unbiased investigators mouths. Sometimes the truth hurts, but it’s important to hear. With $14 trillion in debt and a fed-up public, taxpayers are demanding an increase in accountability, not its abandonment.

Stop the Fuzzy Math – Both the President’s recent cuts proposal and the budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) tapped savings from drawing down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as savings in their 10-year budget projects. This is no chump change, totaling more than $1 trillion over those ten years. But let’s face it, the plan was not to spend that money, so counting it toward cuts to the projected budget totals is bogus and little more than budgetary smoke-and-mirrors. Similarly there are lot of budget gimmicks to be sworn off, from double counting offsets to counting revenue and spending cuts (like cuts to the Medicare physician reimbursements) that are never going to happen. Just like manipulating the scale to look like you made your weight loss goals, horsing around to make the budget deficit look better doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run.

Stop the Pandering – Both parties are guilty of telling people what they want to hear instead of owning up to the cold hard truth–for too long we’ve lived beyond our means and now we must find new revenue, cut spending, and reform entitlements. There is no way around it . We can’t step back from the fiscal brink by holding defense , entitlements , taxes , or [insert your favorite policy here] as untouchable. We need shared sacrifice and we can’t achieve that if politicians keep telling their own constituencies that the buck stops over there. It’s time to gore a whole herd of oxen, lest we all stampede off the fiscal cliff.

All we are asking of Congress and the Administration is to do the job they signed up for honestly and vigorously. Washington has shirked responsibility for too long while pointing the finger at the other guy. It’s time for leadership and statesmanship. This year, let’s resolve to make government work .
 

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TCS Quote of the Week

“We are concerned that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is being unfairly singled out with both excessively deep cuts and overly burdensome new mandates that will consume the agency’s more limited resources for no apparent benefit” – Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), along with Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), John McCain (R-AZ), and Scott Brown (R-MA) in a letter to the members of the Senate Committee on Appropriations. ( ABC News )