Warren Buffett has a possible solution:
"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection."
Now why didn't the Founding Fathers put that in the Constitution? And why hasn't someone already put it out there as a proposed Constitutional amendment?
Peter
6 comments:
I have to disagree with that. They get retirement after one term. Now if they had their salary and/or retirement docked for whatever amount exceeded the GDP that would be effective.
Congress must be made into a part-time occupation. All members of Congress MUST hold other jobs, like the rest of us would like to have. Plus, they must NOT get any pension from their "government" job in Congress. Any retirement they receive would be from the other (non-government) job, or through their own investments. Let them have some actual skin in the game, and I'll bet they they wouldn't go spending our money as foolishly as they do now!
chicopanther
If you can't make them hold other jobs, then pass a law freezing their net worth. They can't leave Congress with a net worth greater than that allowed by their pay.
Another idea would be to completely forbid any other income sources and freeze all assets, no sales or purchases of land or stock.
MechAg94
Similarly the EU has an agreement that all member countries should have no more than 3% of GNP deficit, and 15% of GNP debt.
However only Sweden and Luxemburg meet that requirement...
The problem is, how do you get the guys who submit and vote upon such laws to submit and vote for such a law?
They're quite happy with the trough wide open to themselves; they ain't gonna voluntarily close it, and they ain't likely to do it under threat of getting unelected. Voters seem to have short memories and let the same old idjits do the same old thing term after term.
Wonderful. If such were law, all congress would do is raise taxes to a point that a CBO projection would show that the resulting deficit would be less than 3%. If they had a concern that raising taxes would hurt their reelection chances, then they just move various costs "off-budget" or low-ball the projected costs, e.g., medicare, Obama care, and the projected deficit would be what they say it is.
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