August 11, 2025
Spending and regulating are simple to limit. Enough government people just need to support and protect the Constitution by limiting themselves and other government people to within constitutional boundaries.
Congressmen have the most power, so spending and regulating are simplest for congressmen to limit:
- First, a lower overall-total appropriation can be passed in both houses by simple majorities. Senate filibuster/cloture must never be respected. It unconstitutionally gives more weight to minority votes more than to majority votes, violating the explicit one person, one vote rule in the Constitution; and the Constitution overrides house rules. If the appropriation passes but the president vetoes, the veto can be overridden by two-thirds majorities.
- Second, the same majorities can mostly just pass commonsense repeals. Repeals can get changes underway in healthcare, pensions, defense, interest, and welfare. Repeals can end national-government control of education and transportation, and can end regulation.
The table shows how much spending and regulating can be limited from year one on, once congressmen start supporting constitutional boundaries.
Data: usgovernmentspending.com, Ten Thousand Commandments, 2025 Edition
Healthcare and pensions can initially have their spending unchanged, but have their rules changed so that customers and producers can start developing higher-quality, more cost-effective products, which will reduce spending in future years. Defense, interest, welfare, education, transportation, and regulation compliance can initially be reduced by already-substantial percentages that are practical starting points. Welfare and transportation can initially be added back into state-government budgets.
Even with only these changes, spending plus regulation compliance would be reduced in the first year by a sizable down payment of 41%.
These changes will create new political winners who will hold in place all of these improvements and more. Fast, extensive change always ends up best for freedom.
Constitution-defying Progressive government is complex. Majorities of congressmen and all presidents enact imposing statutory frameworks. All presidents enact an order of magnitude more laws, calling them regulations, and then enact still more laws, calling them guidance and other euphemisms. Majorities of judges opine in favor of essentially all of this.
In contrast, Constitution-supporting government is simple. Government people just need to be limited to better-securing people's life, liberty, and property. Producers and customers then freely experiment and rapidly work out voluntary arrangements that add value optimally.
Healthcare (0% change in year one)
Congressmen should regularize healthcare products by passing healthcare-product descriptions that are customer-friendly, and by requiring producers to list their pricing or be punished with stiff fines and lawsuits. This will let customers compare base products and also additional products they might need if they experience complications.
Beyond this, congressmen should simply repeal national statutes and outlaw state statutes that interfere with healthcare producers and customers.
Pensions (0%)
Congressmen should formally repeal requirements to pay more money into Social Security. They should leave in place the benefits that past congressmen have promised up to now. They should formally support selling government-held assets to help pay for grandfathering-out these unconstitutional entitlements.
They should let a person retire as young or as old as he chooses and receive lifetime payments that are projected to have the same present value-the same actuarial adjustment they make now when people retire a little younger or older.
Defense (-50%)
Congressmen should formally repeal all defense treaties and authorizations for use of military force. They should pass or vote down declarations of war. They should pass rules-of-engagement cards.
They should formally repeal legislative grabs of executive power over organizational structures, positions, basing, and line-item funding.
They should formally repeal all infringements of the right to keep and bear arms, and they should formally outlaw all state-government infringements.
Interest (-90%)
Congressmen are explicitly required to not pay any debt or obligation incurred in rebellion against the USA people and Constitution-and Progressive government is rebellion.
They should immediately opine that presidents should repay the national debt held by USA retirees, who have been ill-advised by financial professionals and who could no longer recover from undue deprivations of property. They should immediately opine that the president should repudiate the rest of the national debt by immediately freezing all the debt, a month later repudiating interest except for USA retirees, and a month after that repudiating principal except for USA retirees.
Welfare, Education, Transportation, and Regulation (-100%)
The existing statutes are unconstitutional takings of private property for public use without just compensation, exercises of unenumerated powers, or delegations of legislative power. Congressmen should formally repeal the existing statutes and appropriations.
The Constitution's rules are not only law but also best practice. What has worked best has been voluntary charity, government-free schooling, local ownership, and regulation by producers and customers. Limiting governments in these areas in the past freed the USA people to grow to lead the world.
A congressman's got to know his limitations.
Nowadays, congressmen change the subject away from their current actions by focusing attention on ten-year budgets.
These call to mind Communists' five-year plans, but these plans are worse. Congressmen project these plans out twice as far. Each year, they violate the previous plan and roll out a new plan. And shielded behind this ten-year wizards' curtain, each year congressmen logroll the budget numbers for the next year-the only numbers that count. Aided by this subterfuge, Progressive congressmen and presidents have lately been sticking the people with another great inflation that will turn into another great depression.
Congressmen need to instead only set an overall-total appropriation, and then do their main job: pass bills that consist solely of constitutional rules and sanctions.
If any congressmen genuinely represent the people, the optimal path was already set for them long ago in the Constitution. Congressmen can hold themselves and their colleagues to within their constitutional boundaries. Or every last one who won't, the people can replace with another who will.