To Balance and Restore

What Congress should do to Balance the Budget and Restore Liberty and a Sound Economy


To balance the budget (in this order):
1.  Repeal Obamacare.  Short of that, refuse to fund it.
2.  Cut all government expenditures by 10%.  This includes everything:  The military, NASA, social security, medicare, medicade, pell grants, all welfare programs, everything allocated to various departments, congressional salaries, congressional staff salaries, all federal employee salaries -- everything.  Spare nothing.
3.  Eliminate unneeded (and unconstitutional) federal institutions such as the Department of Education and the National Endowment of the Arts, among others.  The government doesn't need to be involved in the arts, and education should be entirely at the state level or below -- the feds should have nothing to do with it.  All the D of E really does is create more costly overhead and restrict the freedom of the states to make their own educational decisions.
4.  Make a simple, initial reform to social security (which needs to eventually be phased out, but one thing at a time): for everyone 45 and under, shift all the SS regulations having to do with retirement age up by 5 years, and by 10 years for everyone 35 and under.
5.  All of the surplus revenue should be used to pay off the debt, with the priority being used to pay off the supposed Social Security "Trust Fund," which is full of trillions of dollars worth of IOUs.

To Restore Liberty and a Sound Economy

1.  Provide for the federal income tax to be gradually flattened down to a flat rate of 10% over the next ten years.  Knowing that tax rates will go down and remain stable will encourage business and investment, so that the entire tax bass will grow, which will off set revenue losses.

2.  Immediately eliminate the death tax.

3.  Phase out the capital gains tax.

4.  Pass real healthcare reform: tort reform, competition across state lines, deregulation.  Getting the government out of the way will encourage more people to go into the medical profession, increasing supply, and decreasing cost.

There's a lot of other things congress could do, but this makes a decent beginning.