My one and only advice to all of these major economies is this:
- Pay your debts (you cou could afford it by cutting down on government expenditure)
- Encourage education on a broad level (every smart child that enters a gang instead of a university is a major loss to humanity). In Scandinavia, we are presently lowering taxes while providing more youngsters opportunities.
This guy was born in Ethiopia and thanks to Sweden and America he is today one of the most succesfull chefs on Earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Samuelsson
Good societies and good old fashioned work ethics still pays off.
Unfortunately in the United States, in the United States context and factual situation, education reform actually will require NOT ONE ADDITIONAL CENT (we already spend more than we need to).
It will require:
(1) total restructuring of who is and how they come to be in charge of it - in the first 12 grades;
(2) complete alteration of its priorities in both its curriculum and methodology, in K-12;
(3) those two priorities set with greater demands from elected bodies and less acquiescence in the demands of self-appointed education professionals (in as much as they now represent the "education industrial complex" and its interests and not intrinsically "education";
(4) and with de-politicization as a corollary priority within both of those priorities;
and all of it joined by
(5) an end to tenure and
(6) parental choice of where they want their child's portion of state support to go.
Other kinds of education "reform" have no hope of an existence, in the U.S. context, without those core structural changes.
What is most important is a national "social" commitment - a social and cultural element - to all children being educated and all adults having higher education opportunities available to them and within their reach.
However, it is total myth, often dominant in "western culture" that centralized government MUST take charge of it all and dictate everything about it and to the extent that the centralized government is not forever extending its breadth and depth into the workings of education that "the nation" is no sufficiently committed.
The myth in that substitutes "the state" as THE force and not "the society", acting not only through the state, or not even dominantly through the state, but through the private associations of the people, as individuals and as groups as well, making what they see as THEIR best choices within their LIBERTY to do so.
The only purely essential role of the state, in helping society fulfill that social and cultural commitment is to assist those of lessor means in participating fully in the education opportunities that "the society" has produced. It is not a given that any particular of those opportunities themselves (the education institutions) MUST be created or controlled by the state, in order for "the society" to have a high commitment to their broadest affect and reach.