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.

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

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:

Since 2008, we’ve had the largest macroeconomic “stimulus” since World War II, but the slowest economic recovery. The government’s stimulus has been much larger than just the $800 billion spending bill passed in 2009. In Keynesian theory, the stimulus has included a total of almost $5 trillion of federal deficit spending since 2008. Despite that colossal stimulus, we’ve had a horrible jobs market and very sluggish growth.

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 legislation signed by President Obama on Tuesday, as a solution to the debt ceiling debate, includes the possibility of cuts to military spending. But as Chris Preble points out, the legislation guarantees no defense cuts. Republicans will try to dump all the required cuts on non-defense areas. And the White House has already distanced itself from the prospect of any real defense budget cuts, as did Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Both support only the first round of cuts, which will at best halt Pentagon growth at roughly inflation.