I would suggest five simple ways “out”:
1. Limit Senators and Representatives to 100 days in DC, unless the President convenes them for an emergency.
2. Limit all of them to a maximum of twelve years of service in DC.
3. Dissolve the eight thousand pages of tax code, and limit everyone to a plain flat tax....to include industry and the private citizen.
4. The President gets a yearly travel budget, and can’t go beyond that limit. If his entourage is up to five hundred folks...there’s something wrong.
5. Give the federal government five years to trim the number of federal employees to sixty percent of what exists today. Once they fail at the task...start limiting Congressional and Senate sessions to one day a week.
Here’s a simpler solution - abolish withholding. EVERYONE writes a check quarterly to pay their taxes.
Things would start changing immediately.
Outlaw re-election. One term and out. No campaigning while in office.
I suggest this would leave the Mandarins in charge, the permanent bureaucracy would be making the rules. See the British comedy "Yes Minister" for an example.
It would be better to remove the Civil Service classification from a great number of upper level Federal jobs. Then these would turn over with every administration turnover. Yes, that was the bad old days, but you got to turn out the current thieves for a set of less experienced thieves. And thieves only steal your money. The power-mad desk jockeys in the EPA, FDA, USDA, DofEd all want to steal parts of your freedom, parts of your life.
3. Dissolve the eight thousand pages of tax code, and limit everyone to a plain flat tax....to include industry and the private citizen.
A flat tax won't reduce the tax code much at all.
There is about 1 page in the tax code describing the 5 rates (or whatever small number it is.) The other 7,999 pages are describing what is and is not income.
An earlier response suggested no withholding, just writing annual checks. As an incentive, I think that would greatly tweak the bozos in DC, but I doubt we have that many taxpayers (which are themselves a minority) willing to put themselves into that much annual pain.
There's some reason to believe the 16th Amendment wasn't really passed. Getting rid of that would solve a great many things. But nobody in DC (or at least not enough) wants to start pulling any skeletons out of the closet. Not the ratification of the 16th, not Obozo's birth certificate, not Benghazi, not anything that would upset the various gravy trains.
Going forward, my guess is that the only thing with a chance of passing is the FAIR TAX, but the compromise will be to add it to the income tax, not replace the income tax. Thus the Republicans can claim they fixed things, while at the same time introducing the USA to European/confiscatory levels of taxation.