End Baseline budgetting

[Avatar4321]

We need to end this baseline budgeting BS and start budgeting from how much we took in the previous year. Then we can fix our budget problems.

 

[Trajan]

We need to end this baseline budgeting BS and start budgeting from how much we took in the previous year. Then we can fix our budget problems.

agreed.


baselining...have a gander....

snip-

The new Members who are intent on fiscal responsibility should visit with Congressional historians to discover a root cause of this modern spending catastrophe—the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, the most laughable title ever placed on a federal law.

Passed amid Richard Nixon's struggles over spending with Congress, the law eviscerated the President's ability to impound Congressional spending. The law itself was an act of rage against Nixon's impoundments. "Control" over spending tipped into the hands of Congress, as is clear from the upward path of federal spending post-1974. This was the start of the infamous "baseline" budgeting rules, which automatically ratchet up spending from one year to the next.

Rather than trying to scale the impossibly high cliff of a Constitutional amendment, younger Members should revisit that bad law and fix it. Tom DeLay never wanted to fix it, but Paul Ryan does. The goal of an achievable reform act would be to put spending on a downward slope. That would include getting rid of baseline budgeting, restoring the Presidential impoundment power (if liberal Congresses hated it, it must have been good), and requiring the two-thirds majority for tax increases.

The BBA's supporters are right that the U.S. is riding a runaway entitlement train. That train, however, is the product of politics, and politics is the way it will have to be stopped. The main political impact of the BBA, however, will be to give "moderate" Senate Democrats up for re-election next year a chance to enhance their prospects by voting "for" spending control they don't believe in.



Review & Outlook: GOP Balancing Act - WSJ.com

 

[ScreamingEagle]

Baseline budgeting is why Boener's and Reid's plans are just so much smoke and mirrors....

When you have an automatic annual increase of 7%....meaning each department gets 7% more money each year based on what they spent the former year (their baseline) which creates a bigger baseline for automatic increases the following year....the "spending cuts" are only cutting the baseline increases down to size a bit...but the overall spending continues to expand...we need to end all automatic baseline increases...

check out Mack's penny plan...