GIMMEE !

When it comes to slashing taxes I side with the Teddy Roosevelt/Lizzie Borden School of Thought: Walk softly but carry a big ax. Unfortunately, politicians and bureaucrats do not share this enlightened point of view. It’s not as if they’re spending their own money, you know.

But what if it was their own money?

What if we would cut them in for a percentage of any money that they could trim from their budgets without weakening departmental efficiency?

We could call the program Government Incentives to Manage Money and Ensure Efficiency, or GIMMEE.

GIMMEE acknowledges that when it comes to money the dominant human trait has always been greed. Why not use it to our advantage?

The way things are now, if a government or military official has any money left over at the end of a fiscal year, he’ll scurry about until he’s managed to spend it all.

If he doesn’t, he’ll not only be unable to request a bigger budget for next year but he might even find his budget trimmed by the amount of his previous surplus.

GIMMEE would give incentives to all government workers on every level, civilian and military, to trim their budgets of each unnecessary dollar. Assuming that we cut them in for as little as 10% of the amount saved in the first year, a worker who saves the government $1 million--not very difficult in a multitrillion-dollar economy--can take home $100,000. To sweeten the kitty, let’s make that $100,000 tax-free. And, as an incentive on the other end of the spending scale, if the amount saved is less than $1,000, we can make the finder’s fee a flat 50%.

We’ll have to devise safeguards both to prevent people from deliberately asking for inflated, trimmable budgets and to prevent vital areas from getting trimmed just so that some pig can bring home extra bacon. But these rules can certainly be worked out. One rule will have to stipulate that any item getting cut can’t be revived later. And we’ll need some device to make sure that bosses don’t claim credit for their underlings’ ideas--and vice versa.

Naturally, with a program like GIMMEE in operation it won’t be long before everyone wants a government job to be closer to the action. Suddenly, fierce competition will develop for any kind of opening on the city, county, state and federal levels. Then, following the law of supply and demand, salaries for these positions will nosedive as would-be workers frantically scramble to get in on the ground floor.

By the end of the first year the military manpower shortage will be history and we won’t have to worry about reinstituting the draft. Citizens will actually pay the government for the privilege of working in even the lowest-level public jobs, thus lowering everyone’s taxes further. Eventually the Supreme Court will rule that all government jobs are national resources and order a lottery instituted to distribute them fairly.

By that time, of course, all the big money will have been made. However, just as nature abhors a vacuum, governments by nature abhor vacuous budgets. Before long the bureaucracy will grow top-heavy again, like a renewable resource, providing golden opportunities for our grandchildren, too.

As John F. Kennedy should have said:

“Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your 10% off the top!”