If we want to get the economy going again we need to do the following:
1. Every government agency at the Federal, state and county level must be aggressively audited the following wasteful items:
a. Bureaucratic overlap--too many agencies are trying to do the same job when one agency should be doing it instead.
b. Agency bloat--too many agencies are just too big and need to be pruned back quite a bit.
c. Too many regulations--there are a lot of regulations that either are not worthy the expenditure to enforce the regulation or no longer needed due to changes since the law was first passed.
We need to use these audits to streamline government by as much as 30% immediately, with a goal of 50% or more in 4-5 years.
2. The current income tax system needs to be gutted right now because it has become an overly-complex mess that wastes resources (US$300 BILLION per year in compliance costs right now), drives millions of jobs, thousands of factories, hundreds of corporate headquarters, and maybe as much as US$14 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets out of the country for income tax avoidance reasons, and is being overly-used as a means of political coercion. The Steve Forbes flat-rate income tax plan should be at minimum what our income tax system should be like, and we should seriously consider ending the income tax in favor of a national consumption tax like FairTax (H.R. 25/S. 13).
3. Wall Street needs to be reigned in, since it was the financial shenanigans of Wall Street that caused the mess in the first place. We need to impose the following:
a. Require all hedge funds, derivatives, and other new-style investments to be backed with real liquid assets or be banned as financially too risky.
b. Increase the minimum margin requirements for futures trading to 20%, and if you're trading in a tangible commodity must require 40% delivery of the product you trade in.
c. Break up the "too big to fail" investment banks by re-imposing the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which will also protect conventional bank assets from the ups and downs of the stock market.
d. Re-do the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to make it easier to do corporate initial public offerings (IPO's).
Given the history of what happened before the 1929 and 2008 crashes, like it or not Wall Street when it runs amok it cause tremendous financial harm, especially when the housing bubble crashed and took down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG all within six months. If we had the controls I mentioned in place it's likely none of these financial disasters would have happened.
If she accepts this agenda for REAL reform, she would win in the biggest landslide victory since 1980. 