As citizens pay their taxes, they can specify a distribution of how their tax dollars should be alloted among a listing of various categories, departments... some appropriate set of divisions. The government budget for each of those categories will then be limited to whatever it has collected for that category and never any more (deficits should be utterly disallowed--but that's a separate issue).
If the people are not willing to pay for it, then it shouldn't happen.
Comments (1)
Taxpayers who are legally registered voters (vast majority) should have line item veto of budget. Just add a few pages to tax return (online filing would be encouraged to save paper).
Scary concept for the Lawmakers who keep spending more than the taxes collected, and want to enact new taxes to fund their ever higher levels of spending.