Education & Career
3 mo

Are these radical steps enough to finally balance the US federal budget?

1) Pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. This should have been done to begin with. There should be no exceptions except for Federal Disaster Spending, and even that should be used sparingly and require a 3/4ths majority in the Senate to authorize.

2) THIS IS THE BIG ONE

Cut entitlements which are not paid for by the beneficiary. This means leave Social Security alone, but remove "Refundable Tax Credits" including Refundable Child Tax Credit, WIC, and especially remove Earned Income Credit. Everything that is "Free" is actually paid for by someone who works. This change alone will save nearly one trillion dollars in Federal spending per year. The government should not be paying people to have children, least of all illegitimate children.

3) Raise a 5% Federal Sales Tax on EVERYTHING until the debt is paid in full. This will provide about 1.5 Trillion dollars per year in funds. There would be a Constitutional Amendment requiring the tax to phase out once the Federal Debt is paid in full. This would be phased in by half a percent per year, starting at 2.5% in the first year, so the economy isn't shocked too strongly at first.

4) DOWNSIZE the Military by HALF. We'd still be 4 or 5 times bigger than anyone else's military. Reduce to 2 Aircraft carriers in the Pacific and 2 Aircraft carriers in the Atlantic, and maybe one in the MIddle East or Indian Ocean, and LEAVE EVERYONE ELSE ALONE. This would save about a half-trillion dollars in spending every year and return over 1 million people to the work force. Disarm all nuclear weapons even if we kept 20-something nuclear powered submarines for military operations. Generally we should phase out 1 Aircraft carrier and 2 submarines per year for the next 5 years after adopting this policy.

If we did all that, we could pay off the Federal Government Debt in one lifetime, and the purchasing power of the Dollar would go up again every year, instead of going down every year.

Are these radical steps enough to finally balance the US federal budget?
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