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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (533154)	11/29/2009 10:21:24 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575403

Some good solutions on fiscal sanity offered in the article below.... nationalreview.com The real solution is to change the incentive structure in Congress to encourage frugal behavior on a sustained basis. One idea is to shake up congressional committees, which are the hubs of special-interest-spending pressures on Capitol Hill. Today, members get on certain committees — and stay on them for decades — because such positions give them the ability to direct federal dollars toward programs that benefit their states (or programs that they’re emotionally attached to). Consider that the head of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.), is from a heavily subsidized farming state and that she proudly boasts of her family’s farming heritage. Obviously, Lincoln and other members in similar situations aren’t going to balance federal taxpayers’ interests with those of program recipients in a neutral and dispassionate manner. The solution to this conflict of interest is to have random assignment to all committees in the House and Senate and to impose term limits on committee membership. That would disrupt entrenched lobbying relationships on Capitol Hill, and it would populate committees with at least some members who could take an independent and critical eye to committee business. Another way to change congressional incentives and encourage spending restraint is to enact a legal cap on the growth in the overall budget. Under a cap, Congress could not increase total annual outlays by more than the growth in some economic variable such as personal income, perhaps averaged over five years. If it did, the administration would be required at the end of the year to determine the amount of the excess and cut programs across the board to meet the cap. It’s true that Congress could rewrite or suspend such a statutory cap if it didn’t want to comply with it down the road. But a cap would be a high-profile symbol of budget restraint for taxpayers to rally around and defend. It would be easy for concerned citizens to understand a law that said that the government’s budget shouldn’t grow faster than the average family’s budget. Supporters of a task force argue correctly that we need new budgetary procedures to control exploding deficits. But rather than a one-time deal to raise taxes and provide probably temporary spending cuts, we need permanent changes to congressional rules and incentives. We should start by shaking up the pro-spending structure of committees and then cap the budget to force the trade-offs needed to avert the coming debt disaster.