If you could choose where your tax dollars went...

I'd go with Junior college free, I'd also insist that trade are taught there. High School qualifies you to do virtually nothing, these days.

 

Realistically, there is not a lot of wiggle room in the federal budget, given that 2/3 of all spending is mandatory spending/entitlements (Medicare, Social Security and smaller entitlements like veteran benefits, etc) and another 5% is interest on the debt.

And we do need to dedicate some of the rest to debt reduction as we just passed $18 trillion in debt.

 

The DoD appropriations bill was passed separately earlier this weekend.
Senate approves $585B defense bill | TheHill

It is down a bit from the highs of the Bush administration but still is more than half of all discretionary spending which is outrageous.

And the overall annual deficits have been decreasing as well as a result of the sequestration....a terrible way to make public policy by cutting all programs by a given percent rather than based on the effectiveness of programs or waste/fraud/redundancies, etc.

Followed by this fiasco of an omnibus spending bill.

Yes, we have a dysfunctional Congress and both parties share the blame.

 

Yup. I have long since concluded that virtually everyone in Congress and in the White House-- and maybe half the Supreme Court-- are a bunch of thieves, swindlers, liars, and plutocratic lickspittles: all the bought dogs of corporate interests.

The only reason I still vote is to try and minimize the damage. I no longer believe that there will be more than the occasional random individual elected to national office who is actually reasonably honest and interested in true progress and effective governance.

 

One of the pieces of the DoD bill that just makes me nuts is a piece where they are giving sacred Indian lands to a mining company, Rio Tinto.
The fact that Iran owns 15% of the company isn't really on my radar.
It's that they are going to strip mine an area that is has been sacred to the Apache for generations.
John McCain is largely responsible for this cluster.
This is the kind of thing I sure as hell would not support and would love to see a line item veto passed.


Defense Bill Passes, Giving Sacred Native American Sites To Mining Company

 

I dont particularly like either a line item veto or balanced budget amendment.

A straight line item veto is unconstitutional and even if enacted through a constitutional amendment puts too much power in the executive branch. What might work in theory would be a process where if a president is opposed to a particular provision of a bill, he (she) signs the bill w/o that provision, which is sent back to Congress for an up or down vote. But this could lead to endless single provision votes and more gridlock.

Balanced budge amendment restricts the ability of the government to respond to economic cycles. A better solution is more multi-year budgeting with revenue and spending targets over time (3-5 years) rather than every year.

If we had a balanced budget amendment today, the government would not fund much beyond the entitlements and interest on debt w/o huge tax increases (tax on the top alone would not do it).

But I dont know how to instill more fiscal discipline in politicians in the pockets of big money interests rather than "we, the people."

 

I'm hoping that Bernie Sanders comes out with a balanced budget that he would like to see. I think that if he is going to be the smart alternative to Hillary, he had to take a page out of Paul Ryan's and Rand Paul's playbook and detail down to the city level, where money would be spent and whose money is going to get cut. With a lot of focus on the white working class and poor people along with minorities, immigrants, and outsourcing to foreign workers which neither party is really addressing. Except the Republicans say that tax cuts will help create jobs because it will trickle down.

Now, any candidate can get around the balanced budget thing by saying that since Clinton had a surplus, as long as the government can get to that again with their policies, everything will be fine. Well, until AM radio and Fox News starts wanting the government to give back "their" money as Bush tax cuts since they overpaid because the government had a surplus one year. Yet, no one stood up to them and wanted the national debt paid down, or to repair infrastructure, or push new R&D.