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

[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.