The leaky U..S. economy needs many patches and reforms if the long slow drain is to stop and reversed. There are several issues needed to seal up the national hull-not just bilge pumping with deficit spending hoping to pump prime and stay afloat. Neither party seems interested in using the tough reality choice required to pay down federal debt, fully employ American citizens, secure national defense at a reasonable cost and halt the environmental decay.
The Obama administration in the first term seemed just to ignore fixing the problems and instead deficit spend and provide relief to the poor and unemployed through welfare programs that deny hope for employment. The prosperity of employed middle class voters is good enough and problems of the future are too far distant to be concerned about now.
The middle class should want to be responsible and pay higher taxes while demanding more political control over the Washington D.C. politicians. They should be a moral majority and not seek to be rely on the rich paying taxes for them. Just because they are lucky enough to be well off middle class voters they cannot abandon responsibility politically or solid taxation either-that sort of political posture results in eventual rule by dictatorship, royalty, commune elite central committee or Emperor.
U.S. jobs continue to hemorrhage and there is no real plan to fix that, secure the U.S. border against dumped cheap immigrant labor, pay off the federal debt and stop paying 3/4 a trillion annually on interest, save the environment against mass extinction and global warming etc. The major political parties represent constituents incapable of objectively comprehending the real world or perhaps they don't care about it.
Government must help to adjust social value theory and point out that real values can differ from present social values-it can be worth more to eliminate atmospheric greenhouse gasses and possible mass disaster than to own an SUV for instance. Well, the problems of the commons with wrong value theory ideas is for another essay.
There are fundamentally five bills that could be legislated and signed into law that would immediately begin to restore the slippery slope of national decline.
One-let the Bush era tax cuts expire and in the future cut taxes from the bottom up reducing poverty directly. Every welfare recipient that can be employed cuts out reliance on social security, medicare, food stamps and so forth savings 10 to 20 thousand dollars per individual-and they would even pay taxes.
Two-create incentives for employers to hire the longest unemployed first and incentives to really go green and national with least entropy causality for most quantitative production. Make manufacturing more like human intelligence that develops ideas that make use of mass & energy models a priori efficient structures.
The human brain in a dream state can produce an almost live high-resolution color video with sound and tactile senses thrown in-imagine what kind of computer program would be required to make a comparable spontaneous creation-and the human brain does that without even thinking about it! Human thought should be better utilized at the social and political levels to move America in the right direction.
Three- Halt all illegal alien immigration that trashes the labor wage values market. Build a mile wide border control zone with Mexico using berms, ditches, salt water for desalinization evaporation canals (condensing the fresh water) and so forth that would serve as a wildlife refuge as well. Create jobs, fresh water and wildlife habitat while securing the border against all illegal entry off-the-road.
Four- Restore the Glass Steagle act's purpose and defend U.S. home mortgages against global takeover. AS it is, the reason so many homes mortgages are being purchased is that deep pocket investor groups are buying up the distressed housing.
Five-cut defense spending and other federal spending where possible. The Chinese military threat is more of a future than a present danger, and spending much on equipment today that will be obsolete then isn't a first-rate concept.
Afghanistan policy should change so that the Northern Alliance forces are given a homeland there with U.S. support. Outside that area there would be a voluntary association region that would receive some U.S. assistance if they wanted to be confederated with the Northern Alliance led Afghan state. The Northern Alliance would work with those Sunni tribal elements of dubious loyalty to Barrack Obama and the gay-friendly U.S. military, and U.S. military forces would not. The U.S. would help defend the Northern Alliance Afghanistan when it wanted help.
It seems unreasonable to believe that Afghanistan would become a strong independent state without an extremist jihadi presence-especially without direct U.S. military and civil support in 2015. Proflligate military spending on unsustainable objectives is not good economic sense.