Thursday, July 1, 2010

How to balance the Federal Budget in 4 easy steps.

No long introduction because none is needed. Everyone knows the situation.

Step 1 (in progress): The budget of every department in the government is published on a single website. Check. www.usaspending.gov has it all. But the second part is that you need to be able to go down the department's budget line by line on the internet. A link to website is at the top of every government webpage. This is the first step to cut wasteful spending. President Obama presented this.

Step 2 (close, but not good enough): Every law is easily read and is at the top of every government website where people would see it. This is at thomas.loc.gov.

Step 3 (not even close): Every bill focuses on a single change or program, like in the New Deal. They are posted on Thomas as soon as they are proposed. They must be precise and to the point, and use normal English.

Step 4 (just a thought, risky though): There is a government news-feed on a website that only tells of all the bills, resolutions, and amendments, money spent, and every other government action on an easy-to use feed.. It runs in parallel to private corporations to give the information out in a concise non-confusing way so people can understand. It would allow people to see what every department is doing in chronological order which will make it harder to be corrupt in government and seek out corruption. You could turn a department on and off to see each department's budget. There would be an option to see what your Senator/Representative is supporting. The only argument against this I can see is government-controlled media. But this will be alongside the commercial press giving everyone one site that has everything relating to the government.

Step 5 (sadly not on the horizon): The people of America believe in how Democracy works (which has been proved for thousands of years, Greece) and they use their power to be one big check and balance to the politicans on Capital Hill. We listen to multiple sources, use tools like Google News to get 5 sources per day at a minimum, and are not pessimistic about the government, because that is what I believe to be selling Capital Hill to the corrupt, which is somwhere between an unpatriotic attitude and Treason. Our country cannot survive without people participating.