It’s Thanksgiving week. At Taxpayers for Common Sense, we thought we’d do what so many Americans do at this time of year – take stock of those things for which we are thankful. But we did it with a bit of a TCS twist. We were going to list all the things we’re grateful the Congress did this year, but we like to give you around 600 words of content and to be blunt, the 114th Congress’s accomplishments can be described in two: “not much.”

Yes, the 114th Congress struck a deal regarding the debt limit, but that also included an increase in the budget caps offset with gimmicks and phantom pay-fors. They also enacted an extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program, but we already told you how that program badly needed reform, and we didn’t get it. So they didn’t do much that we believe was good for the American taxpayer and not much at all in fact.

So after brainstorming for a while, we came up with a twist on the list. A twisticle, if you will. Here are the things we would be grateful for, if only the Congress would do them:

  1. Judge bills by a budget score based in reality and not some fictitious baseline.
  2. Require the Congressional Budget Office to review previous scores of major legislation (like the Farm Bill) after two, five, and ten years to evaluate their scoring techniques.
  3. Pay for something, anything, with real pay-fors be they immediate cuts or revenue increases that actually happen, not projections. And don’t use ten years’ worth of offsets for one or two years of spending.
  4. Let the Export/Import Bank expire and stay expired (they haven’t revived it yet, but the legislative reviving paddles are charged and it is attached to the pending transportation bill).
  5. Address the pending entitlement challenges even if Congress doesn't do it quite as well as they should. As we know, the first step is to admit you have a problem.
  6. Stop passing continuing resolutions. No, no, don’t shut down the government, but actually draft, debate, pass, conference, and enact the dozen annual spending bills on time.
  7. Ditch tax extenders, the narrow tax provisions that get extended for a year or two at a time, masking the true costs and avoiding scrutiny.
  8. And speaking of scrutiny, review the more than $1 trillion of tax expenditures (roughly as much money as the entire discretionary budget) to determine their efficacy, use, and need. While they’re at it, enact comprehensive tax reform.
  9. Abolish the practice of evading budget caps at the Pentagon by adding money through the off-budget Overseas Contingency Operations account.
  10. While on the topic of the hated budget caps (as Wastebasket readers know, the budget caps are just that, not the dread sequestration which are across-the-board cuts). Come up with legitimate spending, entitlement, and revenue reforms and offsets to get rid of the Budget Control Act, but do it in an way that gives taxpayers the $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction they were promised.
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We know we’re asking for a lot, but if you’re going to dream, dream big. So, if Congress would do these things, all taxpayers could be more thankful this year.

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