Some optimizations are speculative: they improve execution speed most but not all of the time, or they trade off faster execution for an increase in code size. Other optimizations, such as dead-variable elimination and algebraic simplification, are guaranteed to both reduce code size and speed execution. It makes sense to group all of these ``contracting'' optimizations together in a single phase of a compiler. This paper describes an efficient implementation of these optimizations for a language based on the lambda calculus, where a particularly interesting optimization of this sort is inlining for those functions called only once. And we prove that our contracting rewrites are confluent.