May I help?
1. Revise the tax code, cutting all tax rates toa minimum of 10% and a maximum of 25% and doing away with earned tax credit.
2. Eliminate all deductions except for dependants and mortgage interest on mortgages of over $300K.
3. Reinstiture Glass-Steagall and get the investment bankers out of the commercial banking business.
4. Balance the budget with a 20% across the board cut in expenses excepting the military.
5. Do away with/defund completely HUD, Dept.of Education, NEA, NEH, and other useless alphabet agencies. Sell off National Public Radio and National Public Television to the private sector.
That's a start
Your heart is in the right place, but you’re not taking the problem of unemployment on directly with your solutions.
First we have to get rid of the “cheap labor” policy in the US. That means eliminating H1B visas and illegal aliens from the workforce, which will open up jobs for US citizens.
Next, we simply must get the financial sector working properly again. Your point #2 is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to reduce the allowable leverage used by banks, and we need to re-institute real accounting for all banks and financial companies; ie, no more “mark to model.” We need to re-regulate the bond market and come down like a ton of bricks on the ratings agencies as well. Until people and businesses trust the financial sector again, they will be very slow to expand and banks will be slow to lend.
To add to your budget balancing, I’d suggest we withdraw our troops from the EU, UK, Japan, and Korea. These defense emplacements are nothing but a subsidy to other nations’ budgets. While we’re at it, we should tell the UN that we’re no longer paying 25% of the dues for the organization; we’ll pay only what other nations pay, no more.
With all of that, you won’t balance the budget without attacking entitlements, which are about to consume the entire US budget. The only way out of the entitlement swamp now is to means-test benefits.
Those sound like excellent solutions. I’m in favor of the Fair Tax, although I doubt that it has much chance of ever happening, if only because the IRS will lose so much of the power that makes it handy to the government as a whole for enforcing policy.
I think radically cutting the agencies would also be excellent, although sadly, I think we’re going to move in exactly the opposite direction (unless Obama gets carried off by space aliens very soon). Once unemployment reaches riot-level numbers, government employment plans will be created that will mean that most Americans actually end up working for one of those agencies, in one form or another.
It’s heartening to see some solutions though.