Given President Obama’s abdication in presenting select priorities to the Congress, Selfish Citizenship took the initiative to spell out the top seven legislative priorities for 2013 at the beginning of the year.

The federal government should increase its sale of federal assets, such as land. Such revenue should be directed to paying federal bonds held in the Social Security Trust fund, which will reduce the size of the federal debt by paying off old bonds without borrowing new funds for those obligations.

To get fair value for these assets, the federal government will need to repeal statutes and regulations that diminish the value of such assets. For example, consider the sale of Amtrak and the train car full of government interventions that devalue that asset.

In summary of the seven legislative priorities, Congress needs to take the lead in fixing the problems created by prior Congresses. All of these man-made problems were the predictable consequence of choices made in the Congress. Now is the time for Congress to choose differently and these seven New Year’s Resolutions for Congress are a solid start.

Links to all the priorities that Congress should set:

#1 Reduce Regulations

#2 Block Grant Funds to States

#3 Eliminate Small Programs

#4 Sell Federal Assets

#5 Tax Reform

#6 Oversight

#7 Defund ObamaCare

Extra Point: The privatization of federal land as suggested by Nobel Prize economist Vernon Smith, and two coauthors, in a 1999 policy analysis titled, “How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands”, which begins:

Fully a third of the land area of the United States is owned by the federal government. Although many Americans support the preservation of those lands, analysts on the left and the right agree that the federal government has done an exceedingly poor job of stewarding those resources. Indeed, the failure of socialism is as evident in the realm of resource economics as it is in other areas of the economy.