Jing Pan

Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 8:11 AM7 min read

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The U.S. government has been running budget deficits for years — consistently spending more than it collects. And while neither party has managed to rein in the red ink, legendary investor Warren Buffett once offered a surprisingly simple fix.

"I could end the deficit in five minutes,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in a 2011 interview. “You just pass a law that says that any time there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

Now, that old clip is going viral again — and it's gaining fresh support in high places.

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Utah Senator Mike Lee reposted the video on X, asking the public, “Would you support this amendment?”

The question sparked a wave of responses, including one from Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, who replied: “100%. This is the way.”

But Lee isn’t just crowdsourcing opinions — he’s trying to turn the idea into a reality.

“I’m drafting a constitutional amendment to oust every member of Congress whenever inflation exceeds 3%. It’s better to disqualify politicians than for an entire nation to suffer under the yoke of inflation,” he wrote on X.

While Lee referenced both inflation and deficits, the logic echoes Buffett’s frustration: tying lawmakers’ job security to the nation’s fiscal health.

Economists have long noted a connection between excessive government spending and inflation. The late Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman once famously said, “What produces [inflation] is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else,” adding, “Only Washington can create money.”

But enshrining that accountability into law — especially one that threatens every member of Congress with job loss — is a heavy lift.

Buffett’s threshold was a deficit of more than 3% of GDP. In fiscal 2024, the U.S. economy generated $28.83 trillion in GDP, while the federal government spent $6.75 trillion and collected $4.92 trillion in revenue. That left a $1.83 trillion deficit — or 6.3% of GDP.