The way to rein in spending is to disallow progressive income tax rates.
Those taxed the lowest rate (0%) have absolutely no qualms when a power hungry politician proposes a new program. No skin off the teeth of the one not paying for it.
If everyone had skin in the game, those congressional phones would be ringing a lot more often.
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The nation needs a constitutional amendment that limits congressional spending to a fixed fraction, say 20 percent, of the GDP. It might stipulate that the limit could be exceeded only if the president declared a state of emergency and two-thirds of both houses of Congress voted to approve the spending.
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Why the need to give Fedzilla an artificial ceiling (see the current ‘debt ceiling’ BOHICA) when it fails to adhere to the Constitution as it stands? IE: A1S8, gold/silver tender, illegal Ponzi schemes such as SS/MediXYZ
What will MORE verbiage ‘correct’ when plain English ‘shall make NO law’, ‘shall NOT be infringed’, ‘NO property’, ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ is ignored or ‘lawyered’ away?
My issue with the Balanced Budget Amendment is with enforcement. What would happen if Congress passed an unbalanced budget after the adoption of a BBA?
as far as the U.S. is concerned,
Who first proposed deficit spending?
When?
What has been the "national debt" from day one of the republic to the present? Has it ever been zero?
I do acknowledge that discussing this topic as "economists" might is beyond the reach and understanding of normal people, but still...
The theories might be too complex, but the questions and answers are plain common English. Why do they seem to be unanswerable?
Here is where I ended up; I still have no answers.
History of U.S. spending
Office of Management and Budget-Historical Spreadsheets
I DO expect to find historical gaps even in the official records, but the questions still remain...
I will post them later.
Comments on the PDF link are welcome.
How can we support this on one hand and a deal to spend more money than ever in the history of the country on the other?
We need to limit spending, limit taxes (total, Federal, state, and local), and balance the budget.
A constitutional amendment would limit spending like the second amendment limits gun control
To a normal person, this is economist talk, aka smoke and mirrors, accounting sleight of hand, mumbo jumbo.
Calling it "real economic sense" is just adding insult to injury. We're just too ignorant to understand, aka appeal to authority, or as Mark twain, I think, said, Lies, danmned lies and statistics.
It is abolutely possible, I am sure, to determine what the budget was for any year for which records exist, and convert it to, say, 1950 dollars, all the way to last year, and compare what was actually spent compared to the budget for the fiscal year as adopted by Congress as required by the Constitution.
Next subject as obfuscated by our elected politicians (I call them elected criminals.) When did deficit spending (and resulting increase in the National debt) become routine, rather than an emergency rare event?
Who originated it and when? which Congress? Which Party? Which specific politician sponsored the first (no-depression, non-war deliberate) intended deficit? which other elected politicians endorsed it?
Are those questions too difficult or impossible to answer?
I'm talking historical facts, not opinions.
How exactly does dragging the "Gross Domestic Product" fairy clarify understanding rather than obfuscate the relationship between Federal Budgets and and the explosion of the National debt increases?
Wouldn't the amount of unbacked totally worthless paper non-money explain it more clearly?
We could be lucky and have the author of The Black Swan write a book, "Federal Budgets and the National Debt for Dummies for us non-elected Federal Criminals...
They’d just change their formula on calculating GDP
FReepers would run screaming into the night at the size of the military budget under any of these “rein in spending” plans.