OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

This is usually derided as "pork." I'm not saying there's no rationale for making pork more egalitarian, but I'm not sure that your method works out to anything more than an invitation for congressmen to thank their biggest donors by handing contracts to them or their brother in law.

I understand the problem with pork. The real problem is that it uses "democracy" to get help from other people to pay for personal and local issues.

In other words, "Democracy" is two wolves and a sheep arguing what to eat for dinner. If its only a wolf, there won't be any pork, or mutton to be eaten.

The real issue here is that through negotiation and bargaining to support each representative's personal pet programs, they almost all get supported but require loans to handle it all. If each representative has to pay for their pet program out of their own allotment, they will focus on more efficient programs. For party wide programs, like defense contracts, people will join together to support them.

It wouldn't stop legislators from inserting their pork into other bills.

This is solely about the budget. It doesn't have anything to do with later spending bills.

It does automatically balance the budget. Each representative is only given so much money to work with.

It does make each representative individually accountable for the budget. If there is pork in the budget, we will be able to point to the individual representative responsible.

What this really does is force people to properly assess the opportunity cost of each program. With the current system, the program is compared to the amount of money it costs. This does not account for how much money they actually have. They just assume that the money comes out of some other program that they do not support.

With my system, they compare programs with each other. If they only have a certain amount of money and several programs need support, they have to choose which program they support and ditch the others.

OK But I think it would put too much power in the hands of one man for each district or state, rather than the voters or their town councils and legislatures.

You may be right. Unfortunately, this will require several cycles before the budget stabilizes. Many programs will be underbudgeted or overbudgeted based on miscommunication. Having them vote each cycle would be onerous.

I wouldn't mind an overall vote on the budget at the end, or having state legislature confirm the vote of their representatives.

Thank you for your comments.

That might actually work. Maybe I shouldn't have voted NO so fast.

I'll put up a new proposal incorporating suggestions in a little bit.

Right now, I'm thinking just have the House of Representatives produce the budget. They vote when to close budgetting and send it to the senate.

The senate votes on it normally, and the President still gets his veto power. The idea is to keep it as similar as possible to existing process.

As I understand it, that's the process described in the Constitution. I think they've been doing it backwards for years.

Sorry, I meant, have the HoR produce the budget using my new system. I doubt that the constitution mentioned my ideas of making each representative responsible for a portion of the money.