Baseline budgeting is a fraud. It's time to end the false and misleading advertising in the budget. Congress should be required to use this year's actual spending total as the baseline for the next year's budget. It has been said that the closest thing to immortality on this earth is a government program. This is Rep. Bob Walker's idea that would allow taxpayers to dedicate up to 10 percent of their income tax payments to retirement of the national debt.
Politicians earmark spending all the time.
Taxpayers should have the same right. Those budget process reforms are vitally important to the balanced-budget exercise because the rules of the game matter. The rules dictate outcomes. For more than 20 years, forces that favor spending have consistently prevailed over forces that favor fiscal restraint. That pro-spending bias in Washington threatens to cripple our nation's economic future.