Gormogon follower Ted writes in with the following (in response to this one):

I loved your post on proposals to balance the budget.  My own humble offering to increase the speed at which this is done is to cap Congressional pay at $50,000 a year.  I’d leave untouched the current statute that allows retiring Congressmen to keep what’s left in their campaign war chest.  An incentive to make like Cincinnatus and return to their ploughs isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Take 538 in Congress times around $100k a year, and you only have $53M a year, or a half Billion over a decade.  However, it’s likely the most important half Billion we’ll save.

I can get behind this.  Anyone who has read historical accounts of the early politicians in American politics will note that they were generally reluctant participants and desired almost nothing more than to return to their families, farms and places of business.  Politician was not an acceptable answer to, “what is your career?”

Having said this, I still believe that we need to tackle the entitlement programs: for example, up the Social Security payout age by 5 years.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.