http://cop.senate.gov/documents/cop-090909-repo…

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087…

But back to the original post (which doesn't try to assign blame, just fix the problem), I like your ideas. I especially like the idea of holding government accountable when it takes out a loan for some program. If a business did that, people would write up reports to try to estimate whether the investment would be dividends and analyze the risk, and then would be held accountable if it didn't work out. In government, we don't see that kind of accountability. We are told we need to do this or that because it will benefit us in the future, but rarely do we see any numbers. And once the bill is passed, we don't see any follow-up to determine if it's working out the way it was predicted.

It's almost like there should be a body of independent people who's job it is to report on what the government is doing and keep the public informed. We could call those people “reporters.”

Now, how much did that “peace dividend” pay?

Well, gee, nothing.

What about the cost savings of withdrawing our troops from Germany, nope, still got about 40,000 people there.

Well, when did the Japanese peace treaty get signed? Oh, about 1952, so we pulled out those military occupation troops? Nope,
still got somewhere between 30 and 40,000 people still there.

Give me a good goddamn honest reason to not retire every single military person with full pay, allowance and quarters in the usa, and, also, lay off all of the hourly “defense” industry workers at full pay and allowances.

Look, the government is totally sold to the plutocracy and the merchants of death.

How bad can things be in the world when we out spend every other nation and twice as much as the next 5 nations on “defense” work?

The nation is bled to death for dollars. Single payer will not bankrupt the usa but only the rich invest in insurance companies.

The VA needs to hire, at a minimum, 25,000 psychiatrists. They need to retire with full pay and allowances all of the current psychiatrists. They are burned out. How can they possibly deal with the burden of the new war PTSD cases? They have all spent too much time on the front line and PTSD is catching, dealing with 6 PTSD cases a day, they are stretched beyond human boundaries.

Yet where does the money go? To the rich, with 100,000 vets living on the street, 7,000 of them women that “joined the military to improve their lives.”

America’s sole priority is to increase the riches of the richest people on earth.

The cost of the wars is unbearable. Yet, how many “news” sources, who can instantly tell you how many people are on “welfare,”
can tell you how much of the budget is pure waste for benefit of the top 1 per cent of the people?

DLS says “Neither party is interested in a balanced budget.” Why, no, a balanced budget would never keep them in power. The government is almost totally corrupted. This makes the Grant and Harding administrations look like angels.

This makes someone like me who was raised on the propaganda of the 1950s feel like puking.

How could I have been so ignorant as to believe the crap they peddled?

And, yes, I did spend 11.5 months in Vietnam, because I was a patriot.

Also see here, for example.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gr…

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-defici…

And

http://www.winkydog.net/2009/08/25/deficit-graph/

Actually, I was thinking that Obama is acting like Bush lite. What major changes, in spending and taxation has he made? None. All he has done is make the line keep climbing vertically. Same thing Reagan and Bush did when they were in office.

For a diagram of the national debt as a percentage of GDP where you can see the line, check out this chart:
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

and see this one for spending as percentage of GDP:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_cen…

That is the medium-term (with lib Dems this year) to long-term (ordinarily) prospect many of us anticipate, especially once we approach a “debt trap” or we reach unprecedented levels of the size of federal government and its expenditures (which the Obama administration chose to omit from previous years' Trustees Reports on Social Security and Medicare, for some interesting reason or reasons of concealment).

In this sense, the GOP's decision to act as Dems Lite (with their own historical variant, prior to being totally dwarfed and “dispossessed” by what Obama and the Dems have done this year, of borrowing rather than raising taxes to pay a fraction of the spending), has been noticed and has harmed them in elections from time to time (as in 2006 and 2008).

A second, related issue is that some such as Milton Friedman have emphasized instead that the total level of government spending (and presence in the economy and society) is the most important, and worst, thing about Washington; he would prefer a $1 trillion deficit budget to a $4 trillion balanced budget.

Whatever artificial constructs that are made up are easily bypassed by clever lawyers. For example, states have balanced budget requirements in their constitution, all that means is that they sell more bonds in various ways. Just a subterfuge.

Want to build a road, but don't have the money? Tie the costs to a toll road's income and sell bonds. Same with building or renovating schools. Don't repair them, just let them run down until they need renovating, then sell bonds with what as collateral? Tax collections and “the full faith and credit of the State.”

At the federal level it is even worse. They can print money to make up the shortages.

The only politicians that wring their hands about budgets are the partisans that are out of power. Once they get into power, they follow what Cheney famously said, “Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter.”

Anyway, are you interested in a balanced budget yourself, and do you think the ideas presented here present a starting compromise, or are they no good?

How creative your fiction, and how strongly ruled by your emotions and desires…

Schlesinger's and other liberals' objection to the balanced budget (and to 1994 and “devolution,” etc.), and what was really on their minds, was obvious as well as transparent (and by him, admitted).

“The concept was also used by U.S. businessman and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson to refer to an institutionalized war economy —ie. a semi-command-type economy which is directed by corporation executives, based on military industry, and funded by state social spending. The term refers to the economic component within the Military-industrial complex (MIC) (aka. “the Iron Triangle”) whereby the collusion between militarism and war profiteering are manifest as a permanently subsidised industry.

Wilson had been the CEO of a General Motors subsidiary, and had been impressed with the productivity of U.S. industry during World War II. This period of economic growth brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression,[citation needed] and was driven by the social imperative, called the “war effort,” as directed by the needs of the Department of Defense. Wilson warned at the close of the war that the U.S. must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a “permanent war economy.”[2] “

The most noteworthy opinion I saw published about this issue back then made it to the Wall Street Journal, and was a typical, and revealing, response by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to the 1994 election phenomenon as well as to the balanced budget idea itself. He spoke for many a liberal, who saw things so differently then (as now) than everyone else: “This isn't about a balanced budget. This is all about the size and scope of the government in Washington that we wish to have…”