How would you fix the United States' budget problem?

[Arkinesia]

1. End oil subsidies.
2. Start a campaign to educate people about nuclear power. It isn't dangerous as long as you don't employ horrible staff.
3. Invest in solar, wind, geothermal, biofuel, and nuclear.
4. Push companies like Better Place to start developing an electric car infrastructure. Invest in battery tech to increase range (the only real downside of electric cars).
5. Start a campaign to encourage electricity conservation.

These are good ideas but the ones that miss are complete whiffs.

1. Not until we have alternative energy infrastructure in place. Otherwise it will completely fucking murder the economy.
2. Okay, this is a good one.
3. This is also a good one.
4. No. Just no. Everything in this is bad bad bad. Firstly, electric cars lost out to internal combustion not due to politics but reliability. And it's still a problem today in spite of consistent research over the past 100 years and multiple consumer models. Aside from that, when your batteries go, it's a $25,000 replacement cost. I could buy a racing engine for $25,000. Or a whole new car. And considering these batteries last at best ten years…
5. Okay that's not bad.

[Wamitoria]

1. Not until we have alternative energy infrastructure in place. Otherwise it will completely fucking murder the economy.

Not really. Oil companies are more than profitable as of now.

4. No. Just no. Everything in this is bad bad bad. Firstly, electric cars lost out to internal combustion not due to politics but reliability. And it's still a problem today in spite of consistent research over the past 100 years and multiple consumer models. Aside from that, when your batteries go, it's a $25,000 replacement cost. I could buy a racing engine for $25,000. Or a whole new car. And considering these batteries last at best ten years…

Some government investment into the technology necessary to build electric cars (not the cars themselves, mind you) could lead to a scientific breakthrough.

[Divair]

1. End oil subsidies.
2. Start a campaign to educate people about nuclear power. It isn't dangerous as long as you don't employ horrible staff.
3. Invest in solar, wind, geothermal, biofuel, and nuclear.
4. Push companies like Better Place to start developing an electric car infrastructure. Invest in battery tech to increase range (the only real downside of electric cars).
5. Start a campaign to encourage electricity conservation.

These are good ideas but the ones that miss are complete whiffs.

1. Not until we have alternative energy infrastructure in place. Otherwise it will completely fucking murder the economy.
2. Okay, this is a good one.
3. This is also a good one.
4. No. Just no. Everything in this is bad bad bad. Firstly, electric cars lost out to internal combustion not due to politics but reliability. And it's still a problem today in spite of consistent research over the past 100 years and multiple consumer models. Aside from that, when your batteries go, it's a $25,000 replacement cost. I could buy a racing engine for $25,000. Or a whole new car. And considering these batteries last at best ten years…
5. Okay that's not bad.

1. Oil companies are doing perfectly fine. They don't need the subsidies.
4. I first of all recommend you look into Better Place's battery system. And if not electric cars, what else? There is no other option.

[Parpolitic Citizens]

These are good ideas but the ones that miss are complete whiffs.

1. Not until we have alternative energy infrastructure in place. Otherwise it will completely fucking murder the economy.
2. Okay, this is a good one.
3. This is also a good one.
4. No. Just no. Everything in this is bad bad bad. Firstly, electric cars lost out to internal combustion not due to politics but reliability. And it's still a problem today in spite of consistent research over the past 100 years and multiple consumer models. Aside from that, when your batteries go, it's a $25,000 replacement cost. I could buy a racing engine for $25,000. Or a whole new car. And considering these batteries last at best ten years…
5. Okay that's not bad.

1. Oil companies are doing perfectly fine. They don't need the subsidies.
4. I first of all recommend you look into Better Place's battery system. And if not electric cars, what else? There is no other option.

It depends on how you define the subsidy. I consider the both Iraq wars a subsidy for oil. I consider every time we send an air craft carrier to the straight of Hormuz a world wide subsidy for oil.

[Divair]

1. Oil companies are doing perfectly fine. They don't need the subsidies.
4. I first of all recommend you look into Better Place's battery system. And if not electric cars, what else? There is no other option.

It depends on how you define the subsidy. I consider the both Iraq wars a subsidy for oil. I consider every time we send an air craft carrier to the straight of Hormuz a world wide subsidy for oil.

Those need to end as well.

[New England and The Maritimes]

It depends on how you define the subsidy. I consider the both Iraq wars a subsidy for oil. I consider every time we send an air craft carrier to the straight of Hormuz a world wide subsidy for oil.

Those need to end as well.

Bullshit. Allowing local conflicts to escalate with a lack of US Presence, and allowing that escalation to destabilize the world energy market as a consequence, would do nothing but bring pain and misery, especially to the third world, where people live and die on small fluctuations.

[Wamitoria]

Those need to end as well.

Bullshit. Allowing local conflicts to escalate with a lack of US Presence, and allowing that escalation to destabilize the world energy market as a consequence, would do nothing but bring pain and misery, especially to the third world, where people live and die on small fluctuations.

We could still do without shit like the Iraq War, though.

[Laissez-Faire]

More spending, yay.

Yup. If people are unemployed too long, they stay unemployed. This, in the long run, is problematic, and we don't have a short-run budget issue. We have a long-term issue tied to a slump in the economy and a structurally induced increase in economic disparity that discourages sustainable growth.

And the thing is, it's efficient in the long term for the government. Unemployment is high, therefore labor is cheap. When labor is cheap, we can update and upgrade our infrastructure more cheaply now than we would by putting it off. So...

The players in the economy is not the government, the players are the private markets. Public projects won't fix those structural woes.

1.) We reduce short-term unemployment and thereby prevent structural unemployment from rising. In fact, if we're really good, we'll cause it to drop.
2.) We upgrade and improve our infrastructure at a discount, facilitating economic activity (as almost all economic activity is dependent on our publicly constructed transportation network).

By artificially manipulated means. Not sustainable nor good in a private market.

Unemployment is the major issue. We've seen what happens when you take the opposite approach and cut government jobs en masse and put infrastructure upgrades on hold for "austerity's sake." Ask Greece how well austerity helped their economy recover.

See how well, contrarily, Greece implimented true austerity programs.

Not enough revenues even if it would help anything.

Actually, there's quite a bit of revenue there. A few hundred billion dollars a year really adds up. A couple trillion dollars of today's debt are due to the Bush tax cuts.

Yet, there is no justification nor long-term benefit. Therefore, there is no long-term revenue benefit.

And the deficit just went out of the ballpark.

Nope.

See, the funny thing is, we already spend more per capita on health care, through the government than places with socialized medicine. We just spend it really inefficiently. No, seriously, the US government spends more per capita on health care than the Canadian government, and has for decades. Socializing medicine, slowly but surely, is the way to reduce government spending on health care.

We build a non-profit government-run plan for people to buy into. That's step one. It's pretty much revenue-neutral... and will be competitive with private insurance because it doesn't fuck people over maliciously. We allow Medicare, Medicaid, and the new program - which will slowly eat them and eventually subsume the both of them - to leverage the fuck out of their market share to negotiate the sort of price cuts that private insurers demand and get, and that will do a lot to cut costs as well.

Costs that are escalated by government intervention, not the absence of it. Sure, reform the system, and costs will go down per capita, but they won't even compare to government spending per capita if it's left to the private market, and neither will net costs to the consumer. Both will be quite low.

I need no other example than the benefits programs of the past to roughly estimate how well any new programs would work.

[New England and The Maritimes]

Bullshit. Allowing local conflicts to escalate with a lack of US Presence, and allowing that escalation to destabilize the world energy market as a consequence, would do nothing but bring pain and misery, especially to the third world, where people live and die on small fluctuations.

We could still do without shit like the Iraq War, though.

I'll say this; the Iraq war was not a bad idea. It was the worst-executed US Military initiative in decades, however, and should have been done by an administration far less up the petagon's ass.

[Pope Joan]

1954 tax code, adjusted for inflation.

[Neutraligon]

...Close loopholes in taxation.

[Cedarwood River]

Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren
Country'll grow.

[PapaJacky]

1. Severely slash the DoD budget
2. Make efficient the SSA and Medicare/Medicaid
3. Impose tyrannical taxes on the 'wealthy'
4. Impose tyrannical taxes on corporations

[Occupied Deutschland]

1954 tax code, adjusted for inflation.

Because it's not like the fifties were a time when America was the only surviving industrialized country in the world following a dramatic and highly destructive world war.
...
Oh wait...It was.
A 1950's tax code (which I assume means the really f'ing high tax on high-income earners) enacted today would simply chase capital out of the country towards friendlier countries (say, for example, Singapore).

As to the question?
Print trillions of dollars to pay it back and then change currencies. The peso or Canadian dollar could do nicely!

Edit: World war, not civil d'oh!

[Liriena]

Increase taxes (especially on those who make more than $120k a year).
Cut military spending by half, withdraw all troops on foreign lands (Ron Paul got it right on that one).
End corporate welfare.
Legalize drugs...and tax them.

[Greed and Death]

1954 tax code, adjusted for inflation.

Lowest Tax rate is 20%, standard deductions half out current deductions when adjusted for inflation, 24 different tax brackets.
Are you mad sir or are you just trying to ensure full employment for accountants and Tax lawyers ?

[Arkinesia]

1. Oil companies are doing perfectly fine. They don't need the subsidies.

As someone who has to commute 40 miles each way to work I would immediately vote out anyone who voted in favor of eliminating oil subsidies. Gas prices skyrocketed when ethanol subsidies were killed. How much worse will it be if oil subsidies go?

[PapaJacky]

1. Oil companies are doing perfectly fine. They don't need the subsidies.

As someone who has to commute 40 miles each way to work I would immediately vote out anyone who voted in favor of eliminating oil subsidies. Gas prices skyrocketed when ethanol subsidies were killed. How much worse will it be if oil subsidies go?

Buy a Ford Fiesta Diesel and stop being so greedy. Your family is not the only care in the world.

[Milks Empire]

Some of these would require me to have dictatorial powers I don't particularly want.
1. Go back to 1940 tax code, adjusted for inflation.
2. Shut down all US military installations abroad, bring all US troops home, and repeal the Monroe and Bush Doctrines.
3. Push a constitutional amendment prohibiting any military action outside the United States without a duly declared state of war.
4. Decriminalize all drugs and treat drug abuse as a public health issue and not a criminal justice issue.
5. Pardon anyone convicted of drug possession.
6. Fix the infrastructure.
7. True socialized medicine à la Britain's NHS.
8. Massive expansion of mass public transit.
9. Resurrect the tariff. Use it on countries with low labor standards.
10. Eliminate all industrial subsidies. This means oil too.
11. Pour money into scientific research and education.

[Parpolitic Citizens]

1. Oil companies are doing perfectly fine. They don't need the subsidies.

As someone who has to commute 40 miles each way to work I would immediately vote out anyone who voted in favor of eliminating oil subsidies. Gas prices skyrocketed when ethanol subsidies were killed. How much worse will it be if oil subsidies go?

That sounds like a personal problem to me.

[Conserlan]

First, reform our tax code to make a flat rate so corporate companies and high end businesses have less of a tax burden and can expand and hire. Drill now and open additional refineries to encourage more self independence. Regulate TANF programs to help eliminate fraud. And reform the income tax to prevent fraud. Theres plenty more but lets start there

[Greed and Death]

As someone who has to commute 40 miles each way to work I would immediately vote out anyone who voted in favor of eliminating oil subsidies. Gas prices skyrocketed when ethanol subsidies were killed. How much worse will it be if oil subsidies go?

That sounds like a personal problem to me.

Well American Car Culture is tied to the idea that in order to live the American Dream you have to live in a House on at least a half acre lot.
This pretty much requires living in the burbs.

[Tahar Joblis]

The players in the economy is not the government, the players are the private markets. Public projects won't fix those structural woes.

You're missing the economic reality. (1) The government is a major player in the economy; (2) Unemployment creates structural unemployment when it persists, all on its own. Workers lose basic working skills, give up, decide they'd rather not be working anyway, et cetera. That is to say, unemployment is sticky. Understand?

It's like... if Joe gets laid of from the steel plant, and he's out of work for six months, and then gets a job building a new highway, he's used to working when, three years later, the steel plant is hiring again. Bang, he's back working for the steel plant. That's the power of countercyclical public works projects; the government keeps workers in working condition on projects while wages are depressed and unemployment, projects which provide public goods (and thus will return on their investment anyway in terms of long-term economic growth - e.g., see the federal highway system or Hoover dam, public works projects that have paid for themselves many times over).

Meanwhile, in the world of long-term unemployment, Joe waits for the business cycle to pick back up. In the mean time, Joe gets out of shape and out of sorts. Now, by the time that the steel plant is hiring, he's a raging alcoholic, fifty pounds overweight, living on spam and rice in his parents' basement, and sold his car to make ends meet long ago. Not that he would be able to stay sober enough to drive it, anyway.

By artificially manipulated means. Not sustainable nor good in a private market.

Doesn't have to be sustainable. When the business cycle picks up on its own, the public works projects will taper off.

See how well, contrarily, Greece implimented true austerity programs.

Do you have a reality comprehension problem?

Austerity fell flat on its face in the Eurozone. It worsens recessions. As economists have known for quite some time. Well, the ones that think that reality is worth paying attention to, anyway.

Yet, there is no justification nor long-term benefit. Therefore, there is no long-term revenue benefit.

The justification is in the revenues. The benefit is in what those revenues can provide. It's really simple.

Costs that are escalated by government intervention, not the absence of it.

You can't have it both ways - the government being unable to affect the economy and the government being able to double the price of health care.

Sure, reform the system, and costs will go down per capita, but they won't even compare to government spending per capita if it's left to the private market, and neither will net costs to the consumer. Both will be quite low.

Actually, coverage left to the "private market" is no cheaper than that provided directly by the government. Anyone claiming otherwise is making non-falsifiable assumptions about what would happen in some magical unattainable fantasy world.

I need no other example than the benefits programs of the past to roughly estimate how well any new programs would work.

Quite shockingly well. Medicare has lower administrative expenses - per patient or per dollar spent - than any private insurance company.

[Parpolitic Citizens]

That sounds like a personal problem to me.

Well American Car Culture is tied to the idea that in order to live the American Dream you have to live in a House on at least a half acre lot.
This pretty much requires living in the burbs.

The American dream you present is entirely environmentally unsustainable.

[Milks Empire]

*snip*

LF belongs to the Fundamentalist Church of the Free Market Fairy. The worshipers there are perfectly content to ignore reality.