… is entertaining and informative. I can’t say I’m as optimistic as Hassett about the prospects of reducing travel costs for federal employees, and I’m more sympathetic, at least in the short term, to federal support for local law enforcement. But I did appreciate the opening section on how to rethink support for farmers:

Canada has experimented with a program that provides government matching funds for farmers’ deposits into savings accounts that help them buffer their incomes against the ups and downs of farm prices. Such a program in the U.S. could achieve the objective of helping family farmers survive while enabling policy makers to withdraw billions of subsidies to big agriculture.
These changes, plus closing the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Foreign Agricultural Service, would save about $19.5 billion. Not a bad start.

Hassett then goes on to call for cuts to energy subsidies:

Next, target energy subsidies, which might make us feel good but make little economic sense. As I’ve written before, if Congress wants to encourage innovation in energy, it should tax carbon, not subsidize politically favored approaches such as ethanol. Riedl says cutting energy subsidies would save about $6.5 billion. (We could go after the tax-credit subsidies too, which technically aren’t spending.)

Jeffrey Leonard, CEO of the Global Environment Fund, has a lengthier treatment of a related idea in the latest issue of the center-left Washington Monthly:

If President Obama wants to set us on a path to a sustainable energy future—and a green one, too—he should propose a very simple solution to the current mess: eliminate all energy subsidies. Yes, eliminate them all—for oil, coal, gas, nuclear, ethanol, even for wind and solar. It will be better for national security, the balance of payments, the budget deficit, and even, believe it or not, the environment. Indeed, because wind, solar, and other green energy sources get only the tiniest sliver of the overall subsidy pie, they’ll have a competitive advantage in the long term if all subsidies, including the huge ones for fossil fuels, are eliminated. And with anti-pork Tea Partiers loose in Washington and deficit cutting in the air, it’s not as politically inconceivable as you might think.

I don’t agree with all of Leonard’s prescriptions. For example, I’m not sure about the appropriate status of the foreign tax credit against royalty payments made to foreign governments in the extractive sectors, and I think that certain subsidies for nuclear power might make sense. But his essay is worth reading regardless.