America is dying. At least, the America I know is dying. Floundering in debt while our elected “leaders” sit around and bicker over the tiniest of changes. No one, outside of Ron Paul, is actually proposing real change…and those that do are instantly labeled as wackos, nutjobs, and immediately dismissed. This is unsustainable. Has anyone watched what is happening in Greece? Has anyone been paying attention to the shenanigans our banks right here at home are pulling? You’ll find some very severe parallels.
However, not all hope is lost. America can find its way again. But it will take a severe overhaul to our system, and some real growing pains, to get us back on track. If I was running the country, I think I’d push for something like the following…
1. Immediately cut defense spending by 40% - By all accounts, defense spending for 2011 was somewhere around $740 billion dollars. This is absurd. It shouldn’t take that much money to keep us safe and take care of our veterans. It’s expanding at 9-12% a year. When the recent defense spending “cuts” came in from Obama’s administration, it was a cut in how much the budget was going to expand! They were still slated to spend more money than ever! The U.S. spends $4.5 billion dollars a year on buying weapons for other countries. It spends $45 billion on “homeland security.” It spends north of $200 billion just on interest on our existing debt! Overseas wars cost us unspecified billions. We have over 130 military bases overseas. Nearly half of all the money spent world-wide for military purposes is spent by the U.S., and much of the remainder is spent by our allies and strategic partners – not our enemies. With our ridiculous national debt and a floundering economy, we neither can nor should be picking up half the world’s defense tab.
If you were to cut defense spending by 40%, it would be easily attainable by just changing the way we decide to view our military. Right now, the military is designed to be able to carry out two full overseas wars! That’s completely unnecessary. If the military was just used to keep our borders safe and our overseas interests (trade routes, etc) safe, we could spend a fraction of what we are right now. If we take a real look at what kind of military force we truly need based on the real threats we face here at home and abroad, we can reduce our active Marine Corps and Army troop force by as much as 1/3, and still maintain the strength we need to win conventional conflicts and participate in reasonable multi-lateral missions with our allies and strategic partners. Combined with the accompanying savings in procurement, civilian contractors, and infrastructure, these reductions in forces will save at least $30-40 billion per year.
Likewise, over the next 10 years, we can cut defense costs by $40 billion by reducing the number of aircraft carrier battle groups we currently maintain, and an additional $30 billion by simply maintaining our current level of other warships, rather than procuring additional ones as currently programmed. Again, doing so will still leave us with more than ample naval firepower and flexibility to deal with real threats. Additional major cost savings can be achieved by reducing our nuclear arsenal, with no loss of security. We can cut our nuclear weapons by half, and still maintain the capability to reach every corner of the earth with nuclear warheads. It is ridiulous to imagine that any aggressor, whether it be Iran, North Korea or whatever, will somehow be more tempted to attack us because we only have 500 or so nuclear warheads deployed at any given time. Such a re-sizing of our nuclear capability can save as much as $6-8 billion per year.
Finally, we’re still slated to spend $100 billion a year on foreign conflicts in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This is absurd. We should not be in the business of nation building. If our goal is to flush out groups like Al Qeada, this is an even worse idea. Groups like Al Qaeda simply move. They are not nation-based armies with defined loyalties or boundaries. We can ‘conquer’ Iraq or Afghanistan or topple Qaddafi at costs of billions per day, but does that defeat Al Qaeda? Obviously not.
These changes, as well as cutting homeland security (and letting private entities compete for airport security contracts), and streamlining our procurement and military construction, can lead to an immediate $300 billion dollar a year reduction in our current budget…with no change in our ability to truly defend ourselves.
2. Reform Social Security and Entitlements – This is a big one. Last year, Social Security paid out $686 billion versus bringing in $807 billion, a $121 billion annual surplus. Not bad. This surplus is supposed to go into the Social Security Trust Fund, and be held in reserve to pay out down the line when expenditures pass income. However, the government has sticky fingers…and can’t just leave a pot of money lying around. So it gets pilfered. On top of that, Social Security spending will increase sharply over the next decades, largely due to the retirement of the baby boom generation. The number of program recipients is expected to increase from 44 million in 2010 to 73 million in 2030. So, we’re going to have a big pool of people expecting the benefits they’ve been paying for their entire working lives.
So, how do we make sure this program is viable in the future? Well, first, we need to make sure the Social Security Trust Fund off limits to the government for other things. Second, we should probably raise the retirement age to 70 for anyone under the age of 50. Everyone over the age of 50 is well into their final planning stages, and I wouldn’t want to disrupt that. Raising the retirement age to 70 would, conservatively, reduce the 75 year shortfall by 30%. A good start. I also think anyone under the age of 35 should be allowed to opt out of social security, and instead either just keep their money, or have it put into a private retirement account of their own. Why the hell is the government planning our retirements for us? Privatization reduces the role of government in determining retirement ages and incomes, and improves government accounting of revenues and spending obligations. If the government isn’t in charge of any retirement obligations for people, it would be hard for them to run a deficit for them too. Eventually, the goal would be to end government involvement in retirement completely…but without bailing on those who have been dutifully paying into the system their whole lives.
Elsewhere in entitlements, I’m for block grants to the states for Medicaid and other welfare programs to allow the States the flexibility and ingenuity they need to solve their own unique problems without harming those currently relying on the programs. Ideally, these “Mandatory Spending” expenditures would be fully funded for those who needed them, but would slowly disappear over time as the government got out of the business of managing people’s money and retirements.
3. Immediately cut Discretionary Spending – Discretionary Spending is the funding for various cabinet positions and agencies. Basically, it’s funding of the bloated government bureaucracy. What would I cut? Well, I’d take a page out of Ron Paul’s book here. I’d completely defund the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior, and Education. Most of these programs can be handled just fine by the states. The States can run the State Parks, they can run their own school systems. Some of these departments are completely unnecessary, while the parts that are important can be picked up by other agencies. The budgets of other agencies could be rolled back to 2006 levels (which, if you could believe it, would cut spending by 50% in those areas in some cases). Overall, the bureaucracy of this country is way, way out of control. Slash it, and get us back into an operable size again. This could cut as much as $1 trillion from the federal budget. Just by eliminating bureaucratic waste! Seems so simple, and yet no one wants to tackle it.
4. End the Federal Reserve – This is a big one as well…opposition to a Central Bank. Opposition to the Fed is supported by the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, which holds that instead of containing inflation, by which it means monetary inflation rather than price inflation, the Federal Reserve, is responsible for causing monetary inflation, which in turn usually causes price inflation. In addition to eroding the value of individual savings, this creation of monetary inflation leads to booms and busts in the economy. Thus government, via a central bank (the Fed), is the primary cause of economic recessions and depressions.
We should probably look at the historical context into which our money system has evolved, and the steps that were taken that have gotten us into this mess. I believe David Iben has a pretty good rundown in his latest Commentary release:
Historically, barter of goods and services gave way to the far superior method of exchange - using money as a medium of exchange. Many different objects have served this purpose over the millennia. Metals generally evolved to the forefront. They are durable, divisible, somewhat scarce, portable, familiar, and difficult to counterfeit. Precious metals, being scarce, proved to be the most desired monetary metals (attractiveness didn’t hurt either). Eventually, banks and governments issued receipts for precious metals held on deposit. These receipts (currency) were far easier to carry around than the metal itself and soon became the most common form of money. To this point, developments in the field of money had been a positive evolution.
Unfortunately, people, banks, and governments succumbed to the urge to cheat, issuing receipts for more gold than they held on deposit. If/when everyone tried to redeem their receipts, a serious problem was inevitable. When the U.S. was effectively called out for its cheating in 1971, Richard Nixon effectively said, “yeah, so what?” He announced that forthwith the gold receipts (dollars) would no longer be redeemable for gold. The U.S. dollar would henceforth be redeemable into nothing at all. Shockingly, the rest of the world not only accepted this outright theft of their wealth, they embraced it!! Currently, all countries use irredeemable currency, intrinsically possessing no value other than by fiat (accepted only because the government mandates that we accept it).
This is ridiculous. A currency backed by nothing, which can be printed out of thin air, and spent at will by the government is unsustainable. And we’re seeing the effects now! A dollar today is worth 4 cents compared to a dollar in 1913, which is when the Federal Reserve got involved.
What we need is to rely more on the free market system! Economic volatility is decreased when the free market determines interest rates and money supply. Most of Congress is unwilling to abolish the central bank because it funds many government activities by printing money for them. To compensate for eliminating the "hidden tax" of monetary inflation, Congress and the president would instead have to raise taxes or cut government services, either of which could be politically damaging to their reputations. The “hidden tax” of inflation is basically the devaluation of the dollar due to large scale Fed printing of new money. Every time the Fed prints money out of thin air (money that is not backed by anything of value, since we left the gold standard), the money in our pockets loses purchasing power. This is a tax borne out of excessive government waste and spending, and allowed by the Fed as it prints money to fund this waste! The government and the Fed can only get away with this for now because the U.S. Dollar is the reserve currency of the World. However, the more they devalue the dollar, the more other countries and businesses will look elsewhere for their reserve currency. Once oil starts being sold in gold, or in Pounds, or something other than US Dollars, we’re in big, big trouble. Inflation will run away, and we’ll be up shits creek.
How do we fix this? Well, we need to get our currency backed by something again. A return to the gold standard would bring stability to the value of the dollar. Let the free market decide how much gold each dollar is worth. Barring that, at least open up the US economy to allow goods and services to be bought and sold for gold and silver…something of actual value other than treasury notes. Right now, you cannot use gold to pay for things at the store. You’d have to sell the gold for reserve notes, get taxed on that sale, then use the fiat money to buy your goods or services…and get taxed on that again! What a waste! Hard money, such as that backed by gold or silver, would prevent monetary inflation (and, thus, would inhibit price inflation). I wouldn't exactly go back on the gold standard but I would legalize the constitution where gold and silver should and could be legal tender. This would restrain monetary and price inflation, limit government spending, and eventually eliminate the ability of the Federal Reserve to "tax" Americans through monetary inflation (i.e., by reducing the purchasing power of the currency they are holding by printing more and more money).
Honestly, this is a huge, major issue…and things are coming to a head. If we don’t work to stabilize our currency, we could be in big trouble very soon.
5. Cut the Corporate Tax to 15%, cut Income Tax to 0%, cut Capital Gains Tax to 15% – This is simple enough. Cut the corporate tax to ensure businesses keep jobs here. More jobs means more workers means more people with money and more goods being produced in the country. These are all good things for our economy. The Income Tax is illegal, and was never, ever allowed by the Constitution. Turns out, we didn’t need it at the time…and it was implemented so that the government could keep increasing spending in a time when tariff revenues were going down. With all the decreases in government spending I’ve been outlining, the US could easily do away with the income tax, keeping more money in the pockets of the working class, which in turn gets spent and keeps the economy moving. Lastly, Cap Gains to 15% is good too, as it will promote investment in the economy. The tax burden on doing work in this country is ridiculous right now…and it’s a major reason why companies are taking jobs overseas. We need to make it easier for companies to do work here, and for workers to keep what they earn. These small, but significant steps, would accomplish both.
6. End the War on Drugs – The war on drugs is a massive failure, and was completely unnecessary and off point when it was begun. The federal government shouldn’t be spending valuable resources to go to war with drug lords and try to keep drugs off the streets. Why? Because it’s a losing battle. All it does is empower these drug lords, these criminals, by driving up the profits for their black market goods. It leads to violence, and it leads to people who are legitimately addicted to these drugs from seeking proper medical help…since if they admit to using these drugs, they are thrown in jail. This seems like the wrong way to promote a safer society. Listen, people are going to make their own choices. If someone wants to use cocaine, or heroin, or whatever, they are! If someone wants to smoke marijuana, they are going to! Trust me, getting your hands on drugs is not hard at all. So, the war on drugs isn’t keeping drugs out of peoples’ hands. All its doing is making it more dangerous along our borders, putting money in the pockets of criminals, and overcrowding our jails. It needs to end.
First, decriminalize all drugs. Yes, I said it. Would use go up? I have my doubts. I suspect it would spike at first…but in the end, you’d have about the same number of drug users as before. Some people would try it and not like it and never use again, some people who had been addicted and wanting to stop would seek treatment, since they no longer have to fear getting thrown in jail. However, the violence around the borders would stop, and overall it would promote a safer society. I’d also completely legalize marijuana and treat it like alcohol. Marijuana is not dangerous. At all. And it actually has some legitimate medical benefits. If it was legalized like alcohol, you could clear out half of our prison population, you’d have a safe, state-sponsored place to purchase it, and the state governments could tax it and generate revenues off of it to help pay for roads and schools and whatnot. Not to mention the money that would be saved by not having such an overcrowded prison population.
Overall, this seems like something we could do, rather easily, that would both make our streets safer and also save us some money (and even generate us some income). Not a bad deal, in my opinion.
7. End All Government Involvement with Social Issues – Abortion. Gay Marriage. Gun Rights. Contraception. Religion. Drug laws (mentioned above). All of this gets lumped here…and literally none of it is any business of the federal government. Why in the world are our politicians wasting time discussing who gets to love one another, and who is allowed to have their birth control covered and who doesn’t? Why is the government deciding if people can abort their pregnancies? The Federal Government’s job is simple…deal with other countries diplomatically, keep us safe, and monitor the states for egregious civil rights violations (you know, slavery kinds of violations). That should be about it. The States should have control over the rest of it. If California wants to allow gay marriages, and give them those rights in that state…let them! If you don’t like it, move to a state where their laws more line up with your desires! The federal government has no place in the bedroom, in the house, in our private lives. They should stop spending so much time trying to legislate morality and instead focus on fixing our economy.
Ultimately, I believe this all should fall under the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights. States' rights simply means the individual states should retain authority over all matters not expressly delegated to the federal government in Article I of the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given control over any of these issues. Therefore, they should be left to the states to deal with on their own, with their populations.
8. End the Career Politician – This one is not a change to how the federal government works on a nuts and bolts level, but moreso a change of the who and what is operating it. Politicians are in the habit of listening to special interests, being bought and paid for, and have only one goal…re-election. This is worst in congress, where the House is up for re-election every 2 years. However, Senators and the President fall into it as well. So, what do we do? Adjust term limits, of course.
First, the Presidency. This idea came to me from the brain of James Brill, and I like it. Limit the Presidency to one 6-year term. That’s it. Thus, once they are elected, the president has 6 years to try and do what (s)he feels is best for the country. They do not have to run for re-election, or even worry about pissing off their base electorate. They don’t have to feel the need to answer to special interests. They can just govern. And 6 years gives them enough time to actually try and accomplish something. I think this would help.
Moving on to Congress, I’d enact term limits. For the House, three 4-year terms; for the Senate, two 6-year terms. This gives a congressman who is worthy a full 12 years to get shit done, without having to get re-elected all the time. Same with the Senate. 12 years. Two Presidential terms, essentially. And then, they’re gone. 12 years might even be too long, but I believe it would be a good start. If there’s term limits, at the very least, we can hope the final term of a congressman’s or senator’s run would be used to actually do something worthwhile…rather than running for re-election. I’d also limit total time spent in Congress to 14 years. That would allow for a congressman to run for one Senate term at the end of their 2nd House term, but wouldn’t allow for someone to essentially become a career politician by doing 12 years in the House and then 12 years in the Senate.
I’d also fix the fundraising rules entirely. I’d actually outlaw it. No political campaign fundraising at all. No PACs. No Super PACs. All politicians would be given, for free, a certain amount of airtime to air their commercials, at certain times. Say, 1 ad every hour in the last two weeks before an election, 1 ad a day in primetime for the 2 months before that, and nothing else. No franking privileges, no using government funds for campaign events, no free flights around to go talk to people. If we could just get campaigning away from money making and make the candidates focus more on the message and making people pay attention to them that way (rather than the most well funded candidate buying up all the airtime), I think it would lead to a more interesting, and informed, campaign.
The founding fathers built a government, in President Lincoln’s words, “Of the People, by the People, and for the People.” Citizens would volunteer to serve their country in Congress. Then they returned to their real job or retired. Now we seem to have evolved into a government of the career politician, by the career politician, and for the career politician. Or even worse, for the special interest groups that increasingly own the career politicians. It needs to stop. The government has become so insulated from the American people, how can we expect them to speak for us?
Not sure if this would help get us back there, but it has to be a start!
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So there it is…an overview of my vision for getting America back on track. Is it perfect? No. Nowhere close. I still haven’t fleshed out all these ideas in my head yet. But it seems to be a basic framework for the direction I believe our country should take in getting us back on track…and it all comes down to more personal freedom and less government involvement. The federal government is huge these days. I mean, massive! They have their hands in literally everything having to do with our lives. If you go back and actually read the constitution, as well as the discussions and writings by those who were involved in creating the constitution, the goal in setting up America was to have a smaller, weaker central government, more autonomy to the states, and, above all, personal freedom for its citizens. We have strayed so far from there that its terrifying. Simplify, simplify, simplify! That should be our federal motto. Less is more. Get the federal government out of our lives, and let us live our lives. And, really, most things will take care of itself from there.
At least on the surface level, America has been a beacon of country for a long time now…a shining example of what other countries should strive to be…but it cannot continue to operate as it has and continue to be so. Drastic change is needed. And we have to have the stomach to see it through. Hard decisions will need to be made, or else we’ll continue to slip into the abyss…with no way to get ourselves back out.
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