The Washington Post’s editorial board issued a challenge to the president and his Republican opponents: “show us your plans” for deficit reduction. In fact, the Post says it would be “delighted” to receive plans from its readers. However, the Post isn’t interested in “meaningless promises” to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse”—it wants specifics:

Two polls of likely voters released by Rasmussen Reports today indicate that the federal government’s corporate welfare programs should be prime targets for spending cuts.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s latest call for the federal government to soak the rich was prominently – and rather uncritically – featured on the major networks’ evening news last night. President Obama promptly jumped on Buffett’s op-ed in the New York Times to bolster his argument that Washington needs to generate more revenue.

It’s darkly comical that the same entity responsible for killing countless private sector jobs with its taxes and regulations operates job training programs. Cato has been documenting the failures of federal job training programs for decades, but “do something” policymakers in Washington refuse to accept the reality that they’re not the solution to problems that they help create.

An essay on terminating the Small Business Administration has been added to Cato’s Downsizing Government website.

David Boaz’s post on bizarre and utterly preposterous claims that the federal government’s “social safety net” has been shrinking brought to my mind James Madison’s position that “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

The U.S. Postal Service just posted a $3.1 billion loss for the third quarter and the outlook for the rest of the year is bleak. The USPS wants to save money by closing post offices. I recently examined this issue in an op-ed for the Daily Caller:

A new Cato video examines the federal government's credit rating, which was just downgraded by Standard & Poor, and explains that Washington has a debt problem because it has a spending problem:

The following chart looks at total projected federal spending according to the Congressional Budget Office’s adjusted March baseline and its score of the debt deal. The chart only considers the reduction in outlays resulting from the deal’s cap on discretionary spending, which the CBO says will save $917 billion over the next ten years.  It does not consider the $1.2-$1.5 trillion in future “deficit reduction” that Dan Mitchell discusses here.

These are the times that try budget analysts’ souls—especially budget analysts who’d like to see Washington dramatically cut spending. The debate over lifting the debt ceiling has produced a number of proposals from Capitol Hill—none of them have been worth celebrating. We can now add House Speaker John Boehner’s latest proposal to the pile.