PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Little Joe on December 28, 2024, 07:43:15 AM
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The title and the poll says it all.
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Balance budget amendment to the constitution.
Include pay penalties to Congress and the senate if it’s delayed.
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Bring back the gold standard.
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Bring back the gold standard.
That’s what I always thought but I just read the money chapter of Peter Zeihan’s book and now I’m all confused. There is a fixed amount of gold (Relatively speaking. You can mine more but that’s not practical, we’ve already mined about 80% of all the gold in the world), and if you fix the price it limits the money supply, with a rapidly expanding population and hence rapidly expanding economy like we had post WW2, you need to be able to increase the money supply to keep up.
How that would apply if our population stops expanding and our economy stops growing is another question. How will it work in general with a truly fixed pie? Can you even have a growing economy with a fixed or declining population? No need to build more houses and so on?
According to an article I just read, we were actually only on a true gold standard for 50 years out of all the thousands of history. I’m going to have to think about this because all my life I’ve thought we need to go back on the gold standard and now I have to decide if I should revise my opinion.
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Balance budget amendment to the constitution.
Include pay penalties to Congress and the senate if it’s delayed.
Congress shall make no laws that don't apply to them equally.
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Balance budget amendment to the constitution.
Include pay penalties to Congress and the senate if it’s delayed.
I think that a balanced budget amendment would be good. A 2/3 vote for an emergency deficit in case of war, pestilence, or famine. (We already have sloth and that's not a good thing.)
The biggest argument against a balanced budget amendment (https://www.cbpp.org/research/constitutional-balanced-budget-amendment-poses-serious-risks) is that the government won't have enough money to pay all the things it pays for. Well, that's the POINT! The government spends too much money on stuff that it shouldn't spend money on. Drop back to the government doing only the things that the Constitution says it should be doing. Leave all the rest up to the states or to the individual.
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Congress shall make no laws that don't apply to them equally.
Exactly. Too often congress passes a bill but excludes themselves in the preamble of the bill.
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I think that a balanced budget amendment would be good. A 2/3 vote for an emergency deficit in case of war, pestilence, or famine. (We already have sloth and that's not a good thing.)
The biggest argument against a balanced budget amendment (https://www.cbpp.org/research/constitutional-balanced-budget-amendment-poses-serious-risks) is that the government won't have enough money to pay all the things it pays for. Well, that's the POINT! The government spends too much money on stuff that it shouldn't spend money on. Drop back to the government doing only the things that the Constitution says it should be doing. Leave all the rest up to the states or to the individual.
Exactly. We don't have an revenue problem, congress has a spending problem.
Another solution is the line item veto. Every bill presented should have this. If the President vetoes a line, make congress go through the procedures to over ride it.
And no more secret ballots in congress, for anything. They work on our behalf, therefore we should have total transparency.
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Exactly. Too often congress passes a bill but excludes themselves in the preamble of the bill.
Yep. Ain't no way you make $10 million on a $163,000 salary in a couple years if you don't inside trade, take bribes, etc.
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I'm sure others have though of this before, but I have a suggestion for getting a handle on the budget and deficit.
All spending bills need to have a section on how the bill will be financed.
- It could contain specific tax increases to pay for it.
It could implement various user fees.
They could divert the funds from another Federal spending program.
They could even vote to raise the debt limit.
But the point is that funding needs to be identified before the spending is authorized.
This way Congress would have to decide how important it is before authorizing it.
Current way: This spending bill looks good. I vote YEA.
My way: This spending bill looks good. Now how will we finance it? Uh, maybe it's not that important.
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I'm sure others have though of this before, but I have a suggestion for getting a handle on the budget and deficit.
All spending bills need to have a section on how the bill will be financed.
- It could contain specific tax increases to pay for it.
It could implement various user fees.
They could divert the funds from another Federal spending program.
They could even vote to raise the debt limit.
But the point is that funding needs to be identified before the spending is authorized.
This way Congress would have to decide how important it is before authorizing it.
Current way: This spending bill looks good. I vote YEA.
My way: This spending bill looks good. Now how will we finance it? Uh, maybe it's not that important.
Why no mention of cutting spending to eliminate deficits and reduce debt?
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I'm sure others have though of this before, but I have a suggestion for getting a handle on the budget and deficit.
All spending bills need to have a section on how the bill will be financed.
- It could contain specific tax increases to pay for it.
It could implement various user fees.
They could divert the funds from another Federal spending program.
They could even vote to raise the debt limit.
But the point is that funding needs to be identified before the spending is authorized.
This way Congress would have to decide how important it is before authorizing it.
Current way: This spending bill looks good. I vote YEA.
My way: This spending bill looks good. Now how will we finance it? Uh, maybe it's not that important.
are you suggesting that the big pile of money the feds have needs to be divided into specific funds without crossover? For example, if someone wants $X to pay for some pet project and $Y to pay for some other pet project, that $X and $Y can't be co-mingled?
We have something like that with the DOD budget process. A program, oh say JointSTARS, has an overall budget. And there are projects within the JointSTARS portfolio, say a radio upgrade for the cockpit. There are funds for R&D, funds for production, funds for maintenance, funds for spares. And very very VERY limited means of moving moving funds between them or from year to year. This kind of budgetting insanity caused oh so much waste on many DOD projects. Imagine limited spending on R&D resulting in higher production costs. Or significant maintenance costs that could have been avoided with a little more time and/or money spent in development.
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Why no mention of cutting spending to eliminate deficits and reduce debt?
There's probably a thousand other things I could have mentioned.
But that is a good suggestion. I wonder why nobody has ever suggested that before?
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are you suggesting that the big pile of money the feds have needs to be divided into specific funds without crossover?
Nope. Not saying that at all.
I'm just saying that before Congress votes to spend money, they need to identify, and disclose, how and if it will be funded. Or at the least, determine that certain spending will put us over some artificial limit that Congress has decided to set.
Just voting to spend and spend without regard to the total spent, and then deciding to raise an artificial limit that pretends we can afford it is asinine.
What is your suggestion?
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Nope. Not saying that at all.
I'm just saying that before Congress votes to spend money, they need to identify, and disclose, how and if it will be funded. Or at the least, determine that certain spending will put us over some artificial limit that Congress has decided to set.
Just voting to spend and spend without regard to the total spent, and then deciding to raise an artificial limit that pretends we can afford it is asinine.
What is your suggestion?
You mean like PAYGO ::)
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You mean like PAYGO ::)
Sort of.
The PAYGO compels new spending or tax changes not to add to the federal debt.
I didn't say we couldn't add to the debt. I just said that we need to identify how and if we are to pay for something before we vote to spend the money. If we need to spend money, and it will raise the debt, then we need to vote to raise the limit BEFORE we vote to spend it. That alone will curtail a lot of spending, which I believe is the goal.
Can you explain what was with the "roll eyes" emoji?
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The US doesn't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem, period.
Eliminate wasteful spending, bring agency budgets into line and eliminate government agencies that duplicate state services or that simply have no real purpose. Allocate budget spending to pay down the debt.
This is not hard. No need to increase debt limits.
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My feeling is to keep the debt limit where it is and force these a$$holes to make hard cuts to keep from borrowing. We cannot sustain prolonged borrowing.
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We need to eliminate the "we have to spend all the money before the end of the year or we'll get less next year" attitude that I see all over government agencies.
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We need to eliminate the "we have to spend all the money before the end of the year or we'll get less next year" attitude that I see all over government agencies.
That is hard wired into government. I saw it in my lowly little position. You are given a budget and you better damn well spend it all in the fiscal year or it will be cut next year. Furthermore it's best to come up with reasons you need even more money. It expands your own importance and power over your pathetic little bureaucratic fish pond.
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We need to eliminate the "we have to spend all the money before the end of the year or we'll get less next year" attitude that I see all over government agencies.
That's a good one, but how would you go about it?
I have been guilty of making wish lists of ways to spend money before the end of the fiscal year so we could get more next year. (I was an employee of a civilian company under contract to the government)
Perhaps if we legally bribed the heads of the agencies if they finish the year under budget we might see some improvement. Save a Billion, get a$100k (or $million) bonus.
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That's a good one, but how would you go about it?
I have been guilty of making wish lists of ways to spend money before the end of the fiscal year so we could get more next year. (I was an employee of a civilian company under contract to the government)
Perhaps if we legally bribed the heads of the agencies if they finish the year under budget we might see some improvement. Save a Billion, get a$100k (or $million) bonus.
Yep, it's a puzzle, because you're spending other people's money, not your own. There is NO incentive to spend less money. So maybe create an incentive like big bonuses for cutting spending. I can see where that might be an optics problem with the public though, who might not understand why that person is getting a $100K or $million bonus, even though you tell them they saved a Billion. I have been noticing lately that many people seem to lack the ability to connect two dots.
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and then there is the problem of someone "saving" money because they inflated the actual cost in the first place... how do we prevent that?
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We need to eliminate the "we have to spend all the money before the end of the year or we'll get less next year" attitude that I see all over government agencies.
I used to hate fighting for necessary things all year, only for all the admin staff get new office chairs every year because of needing to spend end of year funds.