YouCut being one of the Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s big plans to let people take the control of federal budget cuts.

I just heard about YouCut from the end of this Roll Call article:

“It’s been a tremendously successful program. Every week there is introduction of a new measure under the YouCut program as a result of the participation,” Cantor said.

That was the plan, anyway. After Cantor handed off the program to three hand-picked freshman lawmakers in May, it has stalled.

Only nine rounds of YouCut voting have commenced, less than the promised rate of once per legislative week, resulting in only a single piece of legislation being introduced. That bill awaits consideration by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

I went over to Cantor’s website and, as far as I could tell, I can still vote on what should be cut. He provides three items: 1) “Eliminate The Ready To Learn Television Program”; 2) “Prohibit The National Institutes Of Health From Publishing Cookbooks”; and 3) “Terminate Federal Grants For Studying ‘Endangered’ Languages.” You click on the one you dislike the most –– “Damn you, healthy living!” “Screw you, educational tools!” –– give your email address, and then presumably you get to vote. I say “presumably” because I didn’t want to be the one who sank the study of languages in the United States for the next ten years.

Option #3 is one that really doesn’t sit well, because it seems so vital. The description from Cantor’s own website:

The National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities jointly manage a program that seeks to document obscure human languages which may disappear as native speakers of those languages cease to use them. The program seeks to document in digital audio and video format the world’s 7000 human languages. In addition, the program funds development of lexicons, grammars and text samples of dying languages. Grants also fund field work for recording native speakers of obscure languages. Eight to 12 grants worth up to $150,000 each plus 12 fellowships for academic researchers worth up to $50,400 per year are funded by the program.

That sounds pretty cool. Maybe you should give them more money.

The selection of programs to chose from in this round all seem iffy, but the project is even more so. With three descriptions under 200 words a piece, U.S. citizens are supposed to decide policy in some way.

The internet gives us so many interesting ways to figure this stuff out. The NYT’s “Fix the Budget” interactive feature was a great way to visualize the problems at hand. Ideas like these are better suited to that: informing people rather than asking them to take under five minutes to decide which program will get axed.