My approach to taxation and budgeting would center on these pillars:
- Comprehensive Tax Reform (flat structure, no deductions)
- Elimination of Social Welfare programs that contribute to the poverty trap and replace them with a Negative Income Tax
- Line-Item Veto
- Bismarck Health Plan
What it would require to get there is that you would need a president who is not encumbered by one political party or the other. You would have to leverage enough votes for Tax Reform by providing benefits on the lower-income side like a Negative Income Tax while removing stacked social welfare programs. Likewise, balance universal health coverage aspects provided by the kind of Health Care Plan proposed by Owl 69/70/75 paired with a line-item veto in order to get enough votes for both to pass. I would like to see a president parlay a repeal of the War Powers Act to get a line-item veto (shift one overreach of presidential power for another), helping to reduce the defense department share of the budget deficit in the process.
The approach that I think it would require politically is to combine enough votes from politicians with enough genuine interest in those programs to be willing to trade votes on aspects of the program that they wouldn't normally agree with, and pols who are pressured into agreeing to vote on one or more of the above pillars due to public pressure.
One basic problem is that we are essentially 12-13 years into a toxic political environment whose roots really run at least 25 years or so in the form of binding "no new taxes" pledges, congressional scorecards, and terms like "RINO".
Long gone are politicians like Tip O'Neil willing to genuinely work across party lines... I'd venture that votes along strict party lines are far more common today than they were 30 years ago or more... gone with the Blue-Dog Democrats and the Golden Fleece Award.
Whatever passes for cross-party voting is probably limited to niche spending programs that only serve to benefit local campaign contributors. Without the line-item veto, I think bringing the budget under control is a futile task. There are those that disagree, but the question is how to return to a long-gone Congressional ethic?
The Line-Item Veto Won't Work - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world
Quote:In our view, the malady stems from a change in the implicit “Constitutional ethic” describing the relationship between private economic actions and the government. For the first century or so of our nation’s existence, there was a commonly held view which placed most private economic activity outside the domain of government policy. The implication of this ethic is profound. If no one believes that the government is (or should be) the guarantor of income security, government transfer payments do not inflate the budget. If government intervention in private markets is not considered appropriate, agricultural price support programs do not drain the treasury.
The basic pillars I've outlined essentially attempt to contain wealth transfers that the above authors (Cott and Bohannon) find to be the root of the problem. Social welfare would be focused in direct transfers (negative income tax) and health care (which is a growing portion of the economy. I think that the public appeal of targeted subsidies - agricultural or otherwise - would be less appealing when you've also eliminated the myriad of targeted social welfare programs.
ibid
Quote:Our nation now finds itself in a situation where government wealth transfers have extended themselves into every nook and cranny of our economic life. Moreover, all social and economic ills, real or imagined, are viewed as a legitimate domain for a new government program. This is the new ethic.
The line-item veto does not arrest this process, let alone enable us to regain what we have lost. Regardless of protestations to the contrary, Presidents are political animals, indeed the most successful of the species. All members of the species find serving special-interest constituencies irresistible. This insures their survival.
The rigid application of the two-party system has bred the kind of political animals that we have, and I think it would take someone not invested in that system to really change how Congress functions. I'd like to think that is the promise that most Trump voters saw in Trump, but instead he has basically asked politicians to trade adherence to the party platform for personal loyalty to Donald Trump. What we have is the political inverse of Barack Obama, and what we will see after the next election or the one that follows is the same kind of reactionary response - while Trump is doing everything he can in his role as anti-Obama to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, the anti-Trump will do everything he or she or xhe can do to erase the legacy of Donald Trump... probably involving implementation of every nonsensical regulation they can conceive of, coupled with immediately doubling the corporate income tax. I think it's unlikely that there will be much of anything else of substance to Trump's legacy.