The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

P. J. O’Rourke

that’s the problem we are currently having in washington, d.c. there isn’t a serious effort to reform the way the politicians handle our tax money, or to change the way the power structure works so that our representatives are more accountable. it’s more difficult than just blaming the party currently in power, because the system has been broken for many years, and neither side seems interested in changing the status quo. the conventional wisdom is that a congressman or senator campaigns on “reform” and “changing washington”, and then that person gets caught up in the game, and forgets all about that silly reform nonsense. the solution to this is not just to elect idealistic people who don’t have a fighting chance under this current system of getting any serious reforms passed, although we absolutely need to do that. we need to fix the system.

i wish i could take credit for the following suggestions, but i can’t. they are the proposals of former congressman and MSNBC host joe scarborough, from his book “rome wasn’t burnt in a day”. the main premise is accountability. what a novel concept. it could never work in washington d.c., unfortunately. (my comments in italics)

• ban congressmen, senators and white house officials from lobbying for five years.

i don’t know if this would be long enough, but that time frame would be a decent jumping-off point for further discussion.

• freeze the pay of congressmen, senators, and white house officials until the federal budget is balanced.

there is absolutely no way this would ever become policy…but i love the concept.

• force political candidates to immediately scan and post all campaign contributions on their campaign website. failure to do so would mean criminal penalties.

the key change here is immediately. being transparent in this area allows voters to decide for themselves whether this donation or that donation did in fact influence that person’s vote.

my addition to this: i don’t see any reason why any candidate should be able to accept contributions from people who aren’t citizens of this country or government officials from foreign countries. no one should influence our elections except people who live here.

• term limits (especially the house, because they handle the spending bills)

i’m sort of torn on this one. the strongest argument for term limits is that they limit the possibility of a politician getting fat and lazy (figuratively) and refusing to listen to what the people want. i’m very sympathetic to that argument. on the other hand, there are people who are doing an excellent job on issues that we care about, and it doesn’t make sense to throw out the non-bums along with the bums. maybe there’s not enough of the latter group to worry about their job security.

• independent, professional audits for both congress and for washington bureaucracies every four years

how much money is being wasted by our government? it’s about time that we knew the answer to this question.

• balanced-budget amendment – for every single budget year (exception being national emergencies)

didn’t we already have one of these? in any case, it’s a great idea.

• create a rainy-day fund that would set aside one-half of one percent of all tax receipts each year for national, state, and local emergencies.

i’m not enough of a policy wonk to determine whether this amount would be significant enough to completely finance emergency situations, but again…this would be a definite improvement over what we are doing currently.

• require congress to offset new spending programs and tax cuts with spending cuts from other programs

this is such a no-brainer to the rest of america. you spend money to buy something, and it’s no longer available to spend on something else. why shouldn’t our government operate on the same principles?

• congressional spending caps that would force congressmen or senators to live within their previous spending projections – exceptions only for national emergencies.

see above.

• change and simplify the tax code…and have a bipartisan panel of budget experts write it, not special interest groups.

how did special interest groups get that kind of power? we just can’t allow that to continue, or we will all get hosed.

these are suggestions that make sense. they are proposals that are simple enough for even the smallest minds to understand. these are things we can begin to do to fix what has been broken with the way our government works. we can do more. it’s up to us to demand the changes and not to give up until we get them.

tags: congress, spending, accountability