Subject: Re: The Biden Economy
We'd have to look at the top level numbers to see where it's all coming from.
There is one simple thing to: stop with the baseline budgeting and move to more of a zero based budgeting scheme.

I disagree.

Again, there's no simple things to do here. There's no "one cool trick" to address the deficit. The problem (okay, one of the many problems) in our politics around the budget is that both parties keep falsely insisting that there's a simple, relatively painless way to "solve" the deficit. Only the iniquity of the opposing party keeps us from getting that strong fiscal health that we could achieve with a "simple" solution.

But that's just not true. The federal government has a huge budget. But that's because most of what it actually spends money on is very popular among most voters. Oh, sure - there's plenty of stupid things that government does, and tons of things that are unpopular.
But almost everything it actually spends money on is stuff that voters like (or at least know has to be paid for): Social Security, Medicare, Defense, interest payments, pensions and retiree benefits, etc.

That's why even Grover Norquist never got his dream of a government so small you could drown it in a bathtub, even at the height of GOP anti-spending fervor. It's not because the federal government should be using a different budgeting scheme. It's because about 90% of what the government spends money on is deeply popular in both parties. Voters want the popular stuff, without having to pay for it themselves, and without raising their own taxes or having deficits.

That's a problem, of course. What voters want is impossible. But you don't win elections by telling voters that they're wrong.
Both parties solve that problem by lying about the budget. The GOP pretends that you can have popular stuff, no deficits, and tax cuts...just by cutting unpopular or wasteful things. That's false because the unpopular wasteful things are a rounding error in the budget. The Democrats pretend you can have the popular stuff and no deficit just by taxing "the wealthy" - which is false, because you can't raise enough money from the 1% (or 3-4%, if you go down to 400K) to pay for everything.