Succinctly:
1 - Deficit spending by gruberment: Freeze and then reduce guvmint spending in every category asap to the level of tax receipts. (This year USA spends 180% of receipts).
2 - Let the market force banks and financial institutions to resolve, work out, or eat their bad investments. Bankruptcy courts can handle the failed banks that can not resolve their bad investments. Share holders may get wiped out, but deposits are insured.
3 - Stop the Fed/Govt printing of cash and giving it to banks that made bad bets. Ultimately it will cause hyperinflation if not stopped.
4 - Win the Afghan war by kicking Taliban’s ass and then get the hell out fast after installing a friendly iron handed ruler. War spending needs to be diverted to USA infrastructure and local jobs.
5 - Use tax tools (import duties, whatever) to eliminate the balance of trade deficit. Heavily tax imports that can be manufactured in the US - create the jobs here so people can go back to work.
6 - Open up offshore drilling and enable compressed natural gas to be substituted as a transportation fuel on grand scale in the USA, vastly reducing dependence on liquid hydrocarbons, gasoline and diesel, which are imported and contribute to trade deficit.
7 - Forget cap and trade (it is a tax, and also Goldman Sachs does not need another toy to screw us with) and all the tax increases planned by the Pelosi congress, nation cannot afford to kill more business in time of economic depression.
8 - Tax credits to individuals and businesses for capital investment leading to job creation.
9 - Let the housing bubble work its way through the market naturally, without bailing any more mortgage debts or banks, or mortgage backed securities out.
10 - let the market set the interest rates.
This is not so difficult to do. All the economic problems we are having stem from failed Keynesian interventionist tweaking, political power plays, national socialistic takeover strategies (banks, car companies, insurance, healthcare targets). People are scared and that caused the economy to implode, coupled wth the fact that govt encouraged them to take on more debt than they could, and set up oil policies to allow $5/gal gas prices to slaughter family monthly budgets. Govt set up the economy for failure by pushing policies for an economy that the people can not afford. People need and want to pay their own bills, but this Obama govt wants to pay their bills for them and have people then serve their political masters - just like any communists want. All the fixes are aimed at increasing tyrannical power, so will actually fix nothing. What we have here is a perfect set up for a very disruptive revolution unless corrective measures are taken, and they are easy ones to do.
OK well it is not so succinct but it is pretty simple really.
The Eagle Flies.
Every one of your points, FE, make sense, but I'm not too sure about the import duties and tariffs. On the surface it looks good, but how it compares to free trade and why one is better than the other ... don't know enough. Sounds too Pat Buchananish to me. Didn't Smoot-Hawley sink us the last GD? I aways understood it to be the final straw.
The other thing I don't understand is this whole fiat currency thing versus a precious metal standard. Seems like in a global market, you would want to have each country's currency float with the other.
Rick, thanks for the book tip. Central banking versus free banking is another thing I don't have a handle on. But why would one not want a strong, independent bank setting interest rates and determining when to increase or lower the money supply? Is it just because the constitution said it was congress's responsibility? Wouldn't having all of these other institutions making their own rates and drawing cash from their supply of deposits ... maybe I just answered my own question. Competition. Well, as long as monopolies and oligarchies didn't form and they had to have “x” amount of cash on hand.