Republicans should pass a law mandating that if the federal deficit exceeds a set amount (say, 5% GDP), all members of Congress who voted in favor of increasing spending beyond that amount are ineligible to serve in Congress. We’d never need to worry about deficit spending again.
If there is no limit established by the American people over the amount of money our government can spend and print, we will never have the ability to regain economic stability. In truth, it’s probably already too late.
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This is a start, but there is a structural problem that someone has to figure out how to solve. Namely, lobbyists reportedly get 1% of congressional appropriations they get approved. So they have a strong personal financial incentive to work for increased spending. However, those who wish to cut federal spending have no similar payment scheme–they don’t get 1% of the money saved. If they did, there would certainly be more lobbyists working to reduce the deficit and cut the national debt. What is needed is some financial mechanism to pay lobbyists working to cut spending as much as those working to increase it. I would certainly like to see an expert task force working on this issue. As RFK, Jr. has said, massive government spending is a cause of inflation. During the Clinton administration, Congress actually did cut spending, both military and domestic. It yielded a “peace dividend” and helped the economy. Since then, Congress has made it even harder to cut spending by abandoning regular order and instead passing omnibus spending bills and CRs–which nobody can find out what is in them until after they have passed, when it is too late. Bottom line: find a way to compensate lobbyists for cutting spending to the same extent as those who lobby for increasing it, to bring about a better spending equilibrium. Incentives drive behavior, so the incentives need to be changes, ASAP.
BTW this should not be a partisan issue–Republican Dick Cheney declared “deficits don’t matter.” He’s as much at fault for the deficit as any Democrat.