The hard part is getting my plan through Congress

[gridlore]

Another fix the deficit tool. I made my fixes through a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts. Mostly, I allow Bush tax cuts on the top brackets to expire, add a national sales tax and add a "millionaires tax" above the highest current bracket. I gut the defense budget.

Playing with this thing shows one clear fact: you simply cannot solve the deficit with spending cuts alone.

Comments

[kengr]

Playing with this thing shows one clear fact: you simply cannot solve the deficit with spending cuts alone.

This is news? The plain fact is that the money *has* to come from somewhere, and the politicians aren't willing to say that plainly, because that will hurt their re-election chances.

[seawasp]

Sure you can.

You'll just lose a lot. If you cut spending to zero, you have no deficit. You also have no government services, but omelettes, eggs, you know how that is.

[seawasp]

I fiddled around with it and many of our choices were the same. I pushed a couple other taxes and gave the military back some stuff -- as I work for an R&D firm that makes a large percentage of its R&D money from the military, I can't pretend to back any plan that's going to cut my own throat. But in the end I think I actually ended up more in the black than you. So ... getting it passed would probably be harder.

Me, I wanted more options. Like deleting all pay for politicians! Serving as a senator or whatever should be an honor, not a paid job!

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Have you ever heard the concept of drafting members of the House? Same way you get called up for jury duty, you find out that you're now a Congressional Representative.

[dalen-talas.livejournal.com]

My idea for this is to cut the legislative branch entirely. With the present technology levels, we can have a proper direct democracy. And I bet quantum cryptography boxes (esp. when guarded by big scary Marines with big scary guns) would be much more immune to lobbyists than your average Washingtonian chairwarmer.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Quantum crypto is not ready for prime time yet (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/47486/20100830/quantum-encryption-broken-by-hardware-hacking-attack.htm) and the marines would have to guard the zillion miles of fiber as well as the boxes.

What needs to happen is probably more along the lines of paper ballots going into boxes and being counted at polling places that are continuously watched over by opposing parties both in person and by video stream - anyone can watch the watchmen and no "missing" ballots will "suddenly" be found.

Some sort of ballot-shuffling mechanism will be needed to keep the ballot counts from being matched up with individual voters from the recorded video, with the ballot images and counts being made public ASAP to keep the tampering window as small as possible. Counting machines are fine for approximate counts, but certified results should always be based on opposed, personal inspection of paper ballots with visual records for verifiability.

[seawasp]

A direct democracy relies on the voters actually knowing something about what they're voting for, and giving a damn about it.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

It's a lot harder to get useful work out of draftees, slaves, or other unwilling workers.

[seawasp]

Anything that prevents politicians from acting should be a good thing though, right?

My other idea would be to simply make it illegal for any lawyer to be a member of the legislature. I don't want doctors making diseases, why do I want lawyers making laws?

[seawasp]

Yep. I think that's a fine idea.

Or simply instituting Thunderdome for the politicians any time some percentage of their userbase is unhappy.

[claidheamhmor]

OK, can you get the politicians to read that article and play with the tool too?

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

They have much more important things to do and anyway, the tool is clearly flawed and the author biased.
</sarcasm>