What Kind of Government Do I Want?

I want all the Government we can afford to have.   Given that my starting point is Expenditures must be less than or equal to outgo, I want our Government to do the best job they can do.  My budget would include paying off 10% of the debt each year.  here are some other thing I think would be good for the Government to do:

Just what are the top four or five things the Government is working on to fix?  Wouldn't knowing that list make life easier for us all.  Make the leadership of both parties attend a consensus workshop and hash it out.  failing to do that, we will be faced with the same thing that is happening right now.  They built a model to start us down the path a balanced budget and it was so full of pork that you could smell a hog farm.  In my world, writing good intentioned legislation and stuffing it with pork would be illegal and throw you out of office and ban you from ever seeking office again. Balance the budget or go home.  Delineate each dollar they are spending and acknowledge it in writing to everyone.
 
A Hand up is better than a hand out.  Help young mothers have a day care for their children while they attend classes is a good idea.  If this works for the GI Bill people, why is it not a good idea for poor people?   I would give this a couple of years to work and then make the recipients stand on their own.  I am not saying I would eliminate welfare for those unable to work, but they all would work as much as they were able.

 Helping people with housing is a good idea but not if you put it all in one place.  Take all the Government owned repossessed housing, refurbish it with the people mentioned above while teaching them skills, and then let them live there.  Put their children in the schools across the city not all in one or two schools and then wonder why they do poorly. Now more large Government housing in the poor section of town. 
 
I personally want the Government to for the most part leave me the hell alone.  Had they not confiscated over 7% of my income over my working life, I could have saved enough to live pretty darned well.  Now that in spite of their withholding for Civil service, Social Security and Federal taxes, I have saved a nest egg.  They tell me that at 69 1/2 I will have to start withdrawing that money.  The bad news is that I will also have to pay taxes on it and it will probably put me in the 39% (or higher) bracket.  

 The biggest problem is not that we have a lot of good ideas coming from our government, it is that we lack the will power to not try to fund everything.  Enough is just enough.  More is wrong and borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend is a darned good way to start living with someone like China telling us what to do.

MUD