If I Was In Charge.........................

This is how I would solve all of Washington's problems (and ours).

First, we have to end the recession and we do that by getting 30 Million Americans back to work.  Here is how we do it.  We take the $800 Billion in TARP funds which bailed out the Wall Street banks, plus GM, and we create two funds of equal size.  One fund we make available to the mayors of U.S. cities and the other fund is available to state highway departments to do infratructure repairs..  We fund any and all projects on a first come/first serve basis.  There would only be a couple of requirements, i.e., no new projects, projects must begin within six weeks of the award, the recipient must file short monthly reports on jobs created, progress on the project, and funds expended.

This would have five wins.
1) It takes people off unemployment payments
2) It brings tax revenue to the government.
3) We will have to pay for these repairs some day anyway
4) We will improve the efficiency of our manufacturing system.
5) The multiplier effect will create sales for other small businesses so they can resume hiring.

Obama tried something he called a stimulus bill, but it was a bunch of useless crap.  First, he tried to run the entire program from Washington.  But mayors and highway departments know exactly which projects are crucial and how to do the job and how to pay for it.  They actually have shovel ready jobs which Obama and his economic cronies simply do not understand.  In addition, it contained a bunch of sometime in the future, maybe, projects that didn't put anybody back to work.

Next, the 2012 Budget.  First, we remove the cap from Social Security.  That takes Social Security off the table forever.  Then we have to deal with medical care which is out of control.  We have dealt with that subject before and there are four specific activities that need to be addressed.
1) The huge amount of money spent on end of live heroic measures.
2) The huge amount of money spent on chronic diseases, especially diabetes.
3) Making medical information widely available by digitizing medical records.
4) Getting control of the expenses of administrating health care.  Currently, private insurers have operating margins around 24%.  Every other country's costs are around 2%.
Those four actions will change the direction of U.S. government expenditures.

Here is what we can do immediately to reduce expenses.
1) Reduce the number of military bases we operate around the world.(Read earlier posts)
2) Get out of Afghanistan.  It costs $1 Billion a MONTH for us to stay there with absolutely no logical  expectation of anything going forward except for thousand year old intra tribal warfare.
3) Burn the 7,000 pages of the IRS tax laws. Everyone of those pages has nothing but tax breaks of some kind for someone.  Did you know that between 1995 and 2010, 67% of all U.S. corporations paid ZERO income taxes?  Read an earlier post to find out how many households in the U.S. also paid ZERO income taxes.

See!  That wasn't so hard and I can assure you actually doing these few things will put the U.S. economy on a strong path into the future.