An American Promise
● A Balanced-Budget Amendment to the Constitution, with appropriate exceptions for times of war and recession.
● A line-item veto, to give the President a fighting chance to eliminate pork and earmarks.
● A limitation on federal spending, to 20% of GDP.-
*** About We Elected You ***
Have Your Say!
- John Lumbard on Problems With a Balanced Budget Amendment?
- Chris Curley on Problems With a Balanced Budget Amendment?
- John Lumbard on How to Fix the Health Care Mess
- Did Government Agencies “Raid” Social Security “Coffers”? « Joejolly’s Weblog on “The Debt The Government Owes Itself For Raiding Social Security”
- John Lumbard on The Antidote
- Gen Y on The Keepers of the Flame
- Chuck Bailey on Amendment Filed. Call Your Congressman!
- Phoebe Addington on Party On!
- FaGaurlwal on Incentives Rule!
- James Schaefer on The ENTIRE Government Runs on Borrowed Money
Topics
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bipartisan reform Archive
Are We Like Greece?
By John Lumbard.
The fear that Europe will drag the U.S. into a recession is ebbing, and it's about time. It's likely that Europe is already in a recession, but we're not---and there's little reason why we should be, because our exports to the continent are only worth about 4% of our...
Read More The Truth about Entitlements
By James Schaefer.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, the lead editorial discusses the problems of government overspending (The Road to a Downgrade, July 28, 2011).
Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid prove Milton Friedman's thesis: we cannot get something for nothing. There is no free lunch; and indeed, it is quite an...
Read More Cut, Cap, and Balance, Explained
Budget proposals are coming fast and furious in Washington these days. Most of it is political chatter, but there HAVE been a number of proposals that aspire to responsible government for the long term. Today's top story in that regard is "Cut, Cap, and Balance" which would smooth over some near-term...
Read More Problems With a Balanced Budget Amendment?
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal Senators Snowe and DeMint wrote an opinion piece (subscription req'd) which points out that none of today's budget negotiations offer anything like a long-term cure for the fiscal irresponsibility that has become the norm in Washington, DC. They argue that this goal is best achieved...
Read More The Most Predictable Economic Crisis In History
That's what Erskine Bowles, co-chair of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, said about our government's ever-so-slowly-developing fiscal calamity in this Senate Budget Committee testimony. The President disavowed the findings of his commission, but it continued on in a scaled-down group of six members (all Senators) called the Gang of...
Read More Building a Prosperous Future
By Tim Munsell.
Our National Debt is over $14 Trillion dollars, and growing by $1.5 trillion dollars a year. That’s $47,500 per second! And the Congressional Budget Office says that unfunded liabilities for future payments of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid add tens of trillions more.
This gigantic debt will have enormous consequences...
Read More Battling Against the Truth
By John Lumbard.
Spending more than you have feels pretty good, so the resistance to balanced budgets---or anything close to balanced budgets---is not surprising. Still, it's always a bit of a shock to read carefully-thought-out opinions, written by smart people, that are nonsensical efforts to bend reality to justify the status quo.
Today...
Read More The Cost of Promises
By James Schaefer.
CalPERS, California's massive state employee retirement fund, has $227 billion invested in the stock and bond markets to guarantee the future promises that have been made to the state's workers.
Those investments generate earnings, and CalPERS has to guess at the rate of return they'll produce to know whether...
Read More Speech On Boston Common
By John Lumbard.
"In the last 75 years there's been a dramatic change in our nation's Congress. Our legislators used to say and believe that they represented the interests of all Americans, and were working to do what what’s best for the nation as a whole. Now they say that...
Read More The Antidote
By Alan Parks.
Business World writer Holman Jenkins, Jr. lays out the case very well in a Wall Street Journal article on April 6, 2011 that the United States is almost certainly going to deal with its massive deficits and unfunded entitlement liabilities by printing fiat money---which could lead to significant, painful...
Read More