Walker: Government should be ‘small enough to succeed,’ not ‘too big to fail’

Scott Walker is running for president hardened by four years of fighting for fiscal pragmatism and public sector reform as governor of Wisconsin. Those bruising battles, and his victories in them, underscore nearly every position he has staked out on the road he hopes will take him to the White House.

He touts legislative accomplishments in a blue state, his defeat of militantly hostile unions, and his reversal of the state’s budget deficit. Walker slashed wasteful spending by forming a special commission tasked with rooting out abuse, and forced the state government to publish its expenditures online.

Candidates often talk about waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. But Walker’s promotion of big, bold reforms during his gubernatorial tenure suggests that fixing Washington’s waste would be high on his presidential agenda, and that he’d tackle it the same way he did in Wisconsin.

Examiner: What do you see as the most wasteful use of taxpayer dollars in the federal government today?

Walker: I don’t know if there is any one thing. I think if you look across the spectrum, certainly, if you look at a lot of these individual earmarks over the years, they are pretty amazingly wasteful. But it’s not just the item-by-item, it’s where’s the best use of those dollars? My belief, my push, my thought is about pushing money from Washington back to the states and even, in some cases, back to local governments.

Shift power to states

I’d do it for everything from Medicaid to transportation, workforce development, environmental protection, education. I think a fair amount of the waste is not just those areas, but the fact that they could be done in a way that is much more effective and efficient and definitely more accountable at the state and the local level. That’s one of the things that I am going to try to push for in the first hundred days: the particulars, that kind of a fundamental reform shift.

Continue reading the interview…

Source: Walker: Government should be ‘small enough to succeed,’ not ‘too big to fail’