In February of last year (2010 for the calendarially challenged) over at NewsRealBlog.com there was a piece titled
New York Times Conspiracy Nuts Attack Tea Party Movement As A Right-Wing Uprising
Among the responders was one "Norris Hall" who opined:
"I think Tea Party is a jokeThey want to cut spending ...except when it comes to defense. Supporting fiscal responsibility and strong defense is like an alcoholic promising to cut out the hard liquor but keep drinking beer.If you want fiscal responsibility you take a meat ax first to the biggest spending items...then tackle the smaller ones.Cutting , say, 17 billion in pork projects to make much of a dent unless you are willing to cut into the pentagon's 600 billion dollar a year price tag."
In the process of answering him I began to muse on the proper role of government as set out in the constitution. I began by advising him that national defense is one of the few legitimate purposes the federal government was supposed to have - at least in the minds of the framers of the constitution. I told him to look to the preamble of the constitution - the document's raison d'être.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
In those few sentences I believe that the founders set out what they considered to be the legitimate functions of government. The Articles of Confederation were hastily written and badly flawed hence they were replaced "in order to form a more perfect Union". From there on the purposes of government were listed as being to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to [them]selves and [their] Posterity". Until the beginning of the 20th Century presidents ROUTINELY vetoed spending bills that failed to meet the test of falling under one of those headings. Many worthwhile projects were foregone because they only benefited one section of the nation and thus failed to "promote the general Welfare".
So the place to trim the federal budget would be any programs that do not either 1) establish Justice, or 2)insure domestic Tranquility, 3) provide for the common defense, 4) promote the general Welfare or 5) function in some manner so as to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. Bridges to nowhere do not promote the general welfare. Interstate highways do - along with providing for the common defense. Construction of lavish airports that do not even help the people of the area where they are built clearly does not thing to promote the common welfare. A fence along the border(s) would serve a purpose in helping to establish and preserve justice, along with having a legitimate defense purpose. These are but a couple of examples.
The 20th and now the 21st centuries have been times of unprecedented growth of the Federal Government. That growth has been accompanied by deficit spending and skyrocketing national debt . That growth also coincides perfectly with abandonment of the principles of governance that prevailed for the first 125 or so years of the nation's existence. The constitution was ordained and established to LIMIT the central government. It details specific functions and roles for the government to perform and then explicitly limits that government to those -AND ONLY THOSE -roles and function. The 9th amendment specifically and explicitly states that the rights of the people ENUMERATED in the constitution are not all the ONLY rights the people have. The 10th amendment limits the powers of the central government to those specifically delegated to by the Constitution and reserves all others to the States respectively, OR TO THE PEOPLE. Unless some power is specifically prohibited by the constitution to the states then the states have that power BY DEFAULT and without the need of any explicit enumeration. The constitution exists to CONTAIN the central government; to establish boundaries beyond which the central government may - NO! MUST NOT! - go. The founding fathers considered the principle of a controlled and limited central government so important as to devote TWO of the original TEN amendments to establishment and reinforcement of that principle. Of ten amendments, ONE 5TH of them are devoted to keeping the central government "on the reservation" as it were. Just as a retired racing greyhound can easily lose its way if it gets out of its own yard, so the federal government loses its way - I would submit already HAS already lost its way - when it goes outside the constitution.