Balancing the Budget

In my opinion balancing the budget is simply not possible at this stage of the game.  Asking the Congress and the White House to pass meaningful financial reform would be as successful as asking them to reduce their salaries to $10,000 per year and forcing them to give up their pensions and perks.  The only way they seem to want to balance the budget is to increase revenue (and the only way a government does that is to increase taxes, they have no other method).

The problem with fixing an out of balance budget with increased revenue is that is simply eliminates temporarily the symptoms of financial irresponsibility, but it doesn’t do anything except strengthen the problem.

I have been assured that if California legalized and taxed marijuana, it would have enough money to last forever.  Not so.  It would have enough money to last until the government saw how much money they had.

The plan to balance the budget by increasing collections cannot work on a federal level any better than it would work in a state like California.  So you have to reduce expenditures.  Most people would propose what they call “spending cuts’ or ‘spending freezes’.  But in all of Government history we have never seen effective budget balancing levels of spending cuts, everyone has their pet project that needs to remain on the books.

What I intend to promote will be seen as a radical solution, almost impossibly difficult and certainly painful.  But because we have let ourselves get into our current financial condition rather than fixing it earlier with easier and less painful solutions, I believe we have run out of easy and painless options and have to knuckle down and do some real work before we have no options at all.

I propose that I use the time of my staff to look through all funded projects of the Federal Government (starting with the most expensive) and see if legitimate Constitutional challenge can be made.  Government workers are necessary, but it takes three private sector workers to support a government worker at the same pay, so the fewer government workers there are, the better.

Slashing spending by removing programs, bureaus, projects, departments and whole arms of administrations is the first and most necessary step toward setting the country back on firm financial ground.  But it will not be enough.

The Federal Government has been the largest hindrance to the growth of private sector jobs (those are the ONLY type of jobs that fund the Government, by the way).  By reducing the roadblocks the private sector faces, and encouraging private industry to take over and grow industries around the jobs that the Government would lose, you both decrease Federal Government cost and increase revenue from reasonable taxation of expanding private-sector incomes while at the same time opening employment arenas for more people than would lose their government jobs.

These two steps would go a long way to helping bring the financial death spiral under control, but it would not eliminate it.  The next step would be to give the Government back the constitutionally mandated job of minting and controlling directly the National Currency (the US Dollar).  The current private bank which is in charge of producing and controlling our currency (with interest, of course, and fees and charges just like any other bank charges any other customer) would have to be fired, of course, and the current debt interest would have to be favorably renegotiated in the process.  But that second step would make a large step toward returning financial sanity to our country, even if it did leave a few bankers with only several billion each to retire on.

The next thing that has to be done, distasteful as it is, is to reduce our military expansionism costs.  Legitimate military operating costs are a necessity of life, and one of the few legitimate reasons for a Federal Tax of any kind.  But those costs must be controlled.  We have the ability to deliver troops to anywhere in the world with very short notice, and we would not have to reduce the size or efficiency of our military by recalling all but the essential soldiers and administrators back to US soil.  Since the salaries of the soldiers are only a small part of the expenses incurred by our out-of-country posts, we can save a whole lot of money.

And that money needs to be returned to the American people in the form of drastically reduced taxes.  When the people have more money, they stimulate private sector economy, and create larger revenue even at a reduced tax rate for a Government.  In order to avoid falling into the trap again of constant police actions draining millions an hour from our treasury, I would propose legislation that would require the American people to vote on a temporary but significant sales tax each time a war was declared, in order to ‘pay as you go’ for military action.  This would have several consequences.  First, it would limit knee-jerk military reaction and give pause for thought.  It would assure that the people were involved and supportive of the effort, and that Congress and the Administration would not be left hanging.  And it would provide incentive to use the military only when all other options were exhausted, to use them fully and efficiently, and to inspire the commanders and those who would have to answer to the people to move quickly, decisively, and return home as quickly (time is money) as possible.

Only with a serious approach to slashing spending on domestic projects, removing regulatory obstacles for private sector commercial success, firmly renegotiating our debts with our biggest creditor and using our largest and most expensive national assets more efficiently can we ever hope to leave our children and their children with both a manageable bill and the kind of opportunity that defines the American Dream.  It is the kind of work that might seem impossible, but with the current financial status and the projections of our spending levels and increasing deficits for the extended future, we do not have the luxury of taking easy steps like we might have been able to 20 or more years ago.

Christopher Nogy