Baby steps toward a brighter future
Okay, here’s the standard disclaimer for everything we talk about: These ideas are not complete, they are certainly not set in stone, but they are hopefully a good starting place for a healthy discussion or debate. Some of the ideas I’ll suggest are not, in my opinion, the best long-term policies, but I believe they will help steer us in a better direction than where we are currently headed. Some of the ideas aren’t even actual suggestions for laws or regulations, but instead ideas on how to improve the system so better laws and regulations can be made. This is a discussion, I’m open to other ideas and I hope you will be too, so please chime in with your thoughts.
One-page bills in congress
Some of the worst legislation of our generation has been buried deep inside enormous bills that print out to hundreds, or even thousands of pages. Part of this stems from the apparent desire for back-room deals in order to gather sufficient votes to pass a bill. If I had my way, any bill longer than one page would be vetoed and sent back to be split up into smaller, more understandable ones. If you can’t get a supermajority, or even a simple majority, to agree on something, then maybe it’s not a good idea as written, or the law is too complex and involved to work well. Simplicity, transparency, and clarity are our best friends in a free society. I’m still OK with including additional pages, maybe even lots of them, with descriptions of what I’ll call “legislative intent,” with descriptions of how the bill is intended to apply to specific situations. That provides the guidance that the judicial branch can use when interpreting the laws. Instead of enormous “omnibus” bills for the annual budget, individual bills passed for each government department enable healthy debate on where and how the money is spent. Keep them short and to the point, and let’s have a mobile app, website, and other ways that allow every citizen to track each vote of their Senators and Representatives so they can see immediately what is being passed and by whom.
Inflation
The single most massive theft in the history of our country takes place every day right under our noses. Inflation is everyone’s enemy. The Federal Reserve policy of non-zero inflation takes money right out of the pockets of every one of us, every day, making our retirement savings worth less and less, increasing the cost of living, and making it harder to provide for ourselves. Some of the more wealthy in the country are insulated from this because one, their living expenses are such a tiny fraction of their income that a few percent per year isn’t even a blip on their radar, and two, their investments are made more valuable by inflation, cancelling it out. More money chasing the same stock shares results in higher share prices. Many goods should be decreasing in cost each year because of the benefits of automation, yet they aren’t, or are being imported from places where people aren’t paid enough to support themselves either. Look at the cost of housing and food in much of the country. A lot of people thought that leaving the Gold Standard was a mistake, and while I wish we had never left it, it would probably be too severe a shock to try to move back to it. We can, however, move to a zero inflation policy so prices are more stable and our wages stop falling behind every year. Inflation-adjusting the minimum wage every year is a band-aid to fix a tiny piece of the problem, but stopping inflation overall is a permanent fix for everyone.
Balanced Budget
People seem to think that the kind of economic collapse that has occurred in other countries could never happen here. After all, this is America, somehow we think that as a country we are too powerful and somehow, the laws of economics don’t apply to us. I have no idea when it will, but I’m pretty sure if we stay on the never-ending path of an ever-increasing national debt that eventually, we will be crushed by it. We are seeing some of those effects already, with higher-than-average inflation, but it certainly can get worse if we don’t make some changes. I’m not sure it’s possible to make it happen, but we should ratify a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. Hold on for a moment, I’m not about to propose slashing the federal budget, and I’m not about to propose massively higher taxes, but at least some decreased spending and some higher federal revenues are necessary. Watch the clip on the National Debt for more about this.
National Debt
You’ve probably heard it said that we have mortgaged our future with our national debt, and that’s true. When you hear about raising the debt ceiling to prevent us from defaulting, that’s basically saying that our house could be foreclosed so we better keep making our mortgage payments. It’s actually time to start treating it like a mortgage and begin paying it down instead of taking out more and more debt every year. This would not have been practical in the height of the pandemic, perhaps, but it’s time now. It may be a 20, 30, or even 40 year process, but it’s time to stop spending like a kid who borrowed a parent’s credit card, because we’re on an unsustainable path that leads to far worse financial results not that far in the future.