U.S. Government shuts down.

[kandrathe]

I'd be more for figuring out how to flatten that line out to cap spending under 4 trillion.

What, 4 trillion forever? Always nominal, no inflation adjustment? Not population adjusted, not GDP adjusted? No adjustment for demographics? Perpetually shrinking government sector as a % of the economy?

-Jester

Inflation, yes. Demographics, not much. Most of the fed should be scalable. For example, EPA, or National Parks... The environment needing protection is a constant, and we're not adding hectares of national park land. The number of farms/farmers is shrinking. Scale to GDP? Whatever for? It's more likely contrary to GDP. The better the people are doing "wealth" wise, the less need for government means tested programs. Governments *real* objective should be to make itself smaller, by crafting systems whereby people are more self sufficient and less reliant on federal programs. To really do this, we'd need to change the status quo whereby taxes were assessed against the wealthy (high net worth, not just high wage earners), and lowered for those with below average net worth.