President Should Target Waste, Fraud Abuse in Budget

Congress, the president and the press are back in town and while the new TV season is about to begin, politics will be a re-run of a very familiar plot.

Liberal Democrats are accusing the White House of squandering the surplus and raiding Social Security to pay for new spending on defense. They want more money for education, but they're getting the biggest increase in the federal education budget ever. They've never tied money to education performance; otherwise we'd have the best-educated kids in the world because we spend more than anyone else.

The problem for Republicans is not that they don't know what's coming. It's that they've never had a good enough counter-offensive. My suggestion is that they focus on waste, fraud and abuse. Hundred of billions of dollars are lost every year to these three evils - waste, fraud and abuse. The president should make these his focus and say before anyone spends another dime, the misspending should be resolved first. People understand that. People would understand it if the president made it the major focus of his strategy to counter liberal Democrat attacks. We'll see if he does.