Our current federal budgeting system, in a word…stinks.
It lends itself to corruption. Every year, 535 men and women vote once to approve a multi-trillion dollar budget that manages millions of federal employees and literally thousands of programs. What’s worse, I can virtually guarantee you that very few of those 535 members of Congress read that budget bill. (They’ve admitted they didn’t read Obamacare or any of the other huge bills passed in the last decade.)
Of course, this is the perfect opportunity for every pork-loving senator to attach his personal project as an amendment to reward his campaign supporters with the right to construct bridges to nowhere in Alaska and the like. This is way business is done in Congress: Vote for my pork project and I’ll vote for yours.
It’s all bundled into one big bill so no one can point at them and say “Why did you vote for that?” They can respond, “I couldn’t help it. I was voting to fund the military but that pork was attached to it.”
Meanwhile, the government balloons and weighs us down like a massive weight on our shoulders that grows daily. And there seems no way to stop it. Every time somebody suggests cutting something, others moan and tear at their faces about how that will destroy the country.
Right now, you have to vote to defund something, not to fund it.
So, we need two permanent changes that should be considered inviolate, never to be changed for “convenience”:
1. No bill shall be proposed to Congress that is more than 10 normal-sized pages long.
2. Every program of every department of the federal government shall be funded by a separate bill from every other program.
Yes, this last one means that Congress would spend a significant amount of time discussing the funding of things. But do we really want them having spare time to pass new laws to govern us? What #2 would guarantee is that every department would constantly have to justify the existence of each program they claim is necessary. Wasteful programs could much more easily be identified and cancelled.
Our government would quickly return to a healthy size.
To provide an extra incentive to ensure Congress abides by #1, perhaps #3 is in order:
3. A member of Congress may not vote on a bill they have not read.
Zack's Desk 