We have a debt based currency and the system is designed to create debt.
There is no budgeting process. Budgeting is to set priorities and spend for what is most necessary. Instead the system creates these enormous bills and adds on enough extras to bribe sufficient votes and the president can only pass or veto it in whole.
If they really wanted to budget, they could break these bills into their various “line items” and have every legislator assign a percentage value to each item. Then put the bill back in order of preference and have the president draw the line at what could be afforded. This would still divide responsibility, with the legislature prioritizing and the president having final authority over total spending.
There would be limited inclination to overspend, because the few items on the line would have less constituency than those asked to fund them.
This would blow up our current financial model though, but it is falling apart anyway.
The reason capitalism has mutated from a theory of efficient allocation of resources to a cancerous production of surplus capital for its own sake, is that we treat money as a commodity, when it is in fact a contract.
If someone hands you a piece of paper that says; This is redeemable for one ounce of gold, That piece of paper is not a commodity, but a contract.
Since capital is subject to the law of supply and demand, the banking system understands it can create enormous amounts of supply, if it can only create the demand for it, ie. lending.
Which is why they are so intent on lending money to anybody and everybody.
When the modern system of debt based monetary systems developed, three hundred years ago, there were no methods of determining how large a given economy was and thus how much money had to be created in order for the money supply to grow with the economy, so it made sense to base it on people’s willingness to borrow and ability to pay off these loans.
The problem is that economic growth is necessary to pay off the loans and more loans are always necessary to maintain economic growth. This has powered the various empires and the industrial revolution, but is now running up against the limits of growth.
There will be a reset and what does this entail? Politics used to be private enterprise. In the entrepreneurial stage it was warlords, which stabilized into feudalism and then gentrified into monarchy. So long as these systems did more to preserve the societies they governed, than predated on them, they survived and still do in some places of the world. Eventually though, they proved to be inefficient and politics evolved into a public system.
Today it is our financial circulatory system which has become more predatory than functional.
In order to function, a market needs a medium of exchange, if this economic circulation system is in private hands, then the rest of the market will be taxed by those entities.
How would a public banking system function? Monarchists used to say mob rule could never work, but democracy functions by pushing power down to the level it can be most efficient and responsive, thus we have various levels of local, state and federal government. A public banking system would have to be similarly diversified and fundamentally bottom up. Local community banks would lend out to the communities which deposited with them and use the proceeds to support those communities that generated this wealth in the first place. These local banks would then develop regional partnerships to support larger projects. Likely it would mean state banks as the centerpoint between local communities and a reduced federal presence.
As I pointed out earlier, we could develop a system where the federal government actually budgeted, but this would reduce spending on many local needs, from education and retirement to infrastructure, but if we have a locally based banking system which used profits to support these communities and not just send the profits off to New York, in order for it to be lent to Washington, so they could buy the votes of that community’s representative, there would be far less room for waste and corruption.
Just some ideas to think about, as we spiral into the abyss.