Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Block‐​granting Medicaid would be a good short‐​term reform to get the program’s ballooning spending under control.
• Policymakers who are concerned with bureaucratic duplication and waste should focus their efforts on limiting the government’s capacity to spend.
• Federal spending would still increase in fiscal 2011 if Republicans get the $61 billion in funding cuts they’re seeking.
• The solution to a lot of the problems caused by farm subsidies lies not in changing the direction of the programs, but in abolishing them.
• “Other mandatory” programs are often forgotten in the debate over how to rein in our extraordinary deficits and mounting debt. That needs to change.

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