What to do With a Budget Surplus?
One of Steve Daines’ primary goals is to balance the budget by cutting wasteful government spending. Another of those goals is to take measures to revive the economy to put Americans back to work. Achieving both of those objectives would go a long way toward balancing the federal budget and could eventually result in something the state Montana experienced a few years ago; a budget surplus.
What would happen in the event of a federal surplus? Many politicians would take the surplus as an opportunity to start spending on pork projects and other personal favorites. Steve Daines doesn’t operate that way. In response to Montana’s 2007 surplus Steve Daines founded GiveitBack.com, a non-profit organization that called for a return of the surplus to Montana taxpayers.
GiveitBack.com came into being when the state of Montana had collected a surplus of $500 million and was projected to collect an additional $500 million over the next couple of years. GiveItBack.com’s stated mission was to, “…bring a voice of reason, and common sense dialog to address this issue, and propose that much of the money should be returned to Montana taxpayers. To spend most of the surplus, as ours was not only short-sighted, but fiscally irresponsible.”
The non-profit proposed that every Montana tax filer receive a check $1,000 to return most of the surplus which had already been collected. The second action it recommended was to have Montana tax payers call their leaders in Helena and tell them how the projected $500 million surplus should be allocated. Whether the funds were to be saved for a ‘rainy day’, or returned to the taxpayers was essentially up to them. The website enabled people of Montana to sign up and send messages to elected officials.
Steve Daines is not a tax and spend politician. Quite the opposite, he would much prefer that taxpayers keep as much of their pay checks as possible.
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