curious why you're being downvoted. If your message is "many presidents for the last few decades have tried and failed to balance the budget", I think you're co

curious why you're being downvoted. If your message is "many presidents for the last few decades have tried and failed to balance the budget", I think you're correct. Looking at the bigger picture, it seems like the two-party system is incentivized to NOT solve this problem. If you're a member of Tweedle-Dee in congress, and the president is a registered Tweedle-Dum, you can't help her solve the budget issue because then she'll have that jewel in her crown to win re-election. This being a tech forum, I offer a tech solution (maybe this already exists, who knows): we need some kind of impartial data structure about every piece of legislation in congress. Some example attributes would be {tax: up/dn/na, introduced by: Rep/Dem/3p, services: add/sub/na, lobbyst dollars: $(mln), ... } but there would be many more. The idea being that the meta data could be easily broken down to show the manipulation and dirty deeds the lawmakers do pass and block these bills. The most glaring one is when they piggyback unrelated changes into the same bill (I forget the term for this, but it's dirty). So that Senator WhatsHisName can't be blamed for voting against the ThinkOfTheChildren Act. He could point to the metadata and say "this bill would increase taxes by $1b, double our nuclear arsenal, and only give $9m to the children through one school lunch company in one district in the nation". The metadata would clearly show that some idiot put a school-lunch bill in with a nuclear weapons bill. Then the media (likely bloggers, because the major networks seldom talk about the composition of bills) can name and shame the idiot who bundled those together and make them answer for it. Just the threat of bringing these things to light should be enough to discourage it. Another goal of the metadata, would be to shame lawmakers who vote against something for partisan-only reasons even though it clearly benefits the people. So if the president tries to balanace the budget, has congress draft even a minor change in that direction, the metadata would need to expose anyone who got in the way. Find some way to corner them and make them say "no, we don't need a balanced budget" OR, "balanced budget would be great, but I can't vote for something that Tweedle-Dum is behind". Just bring this dirty behavior to light in the most objective way possible: with unbiased metadata. I know this data already exist in the bills themselves, but the American public don't read these bills, they need a very concise (and impartial) summary that they can cite and that they trust to not be biased. Some sort of standardization.