These are two of tenants of my five-point economy recovery plan:
1) Drastically overhaul or even phase out the income tax. The current system costs Americans US$304 BILLION per year in compliance costs, drives jobs out of the country and may have driven circa US$16 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets into the underground economy or to offshore financial centers to keep these assets out of the reach of the IRS--sheer economic insanity. A major change like Steve Forbes' flat tax plan or even FairTax would encourage Americans to keep their savings and investments in the USA (e.g., bring back most of that US$16 TRILLION now out of the US financial system, essentially the world's largest "private bailout"), encourage Americans to just save and invest more in general, and favors cash financing over debt financing, all good for the US economy.
2) Aggressively reign in the excesses of Wall Street. We need to require real liquidity backing to trade in hedge funds, derivatives, credit default swaps and other "exotic" investments, increase the minimum margin requirements for futures and index trades to 15%, re-impose the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act to "firewall" bank assets from the ups and downs of the stock market, and revise the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. These changes will drastically slow down the speculator-caused violent price spikes up and down that can have serious inflationary or deflationary effects, help protect bank assets, and encourage Americans to invest in stocks and mutual funds that have a more steady return on investment.
3) Aggressively use the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts or replace these acts with a modern version and use them to break up some of the biggest companies in the USA. Too much concentration of power in a relatively small number of companies can have disastrous economic results, as we've seen from the failed monopolies during the 19th Century era of robber barons and the deadly effect of the failure of Lehman Brothers because another financial company with huge influence, Goldman Sachs, won't support them. I'm sure you know that Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the type of margin trades that caused the 1929 stock market crash and they used a series of complex credit default swaps to "clean up" the Greek economic balance books so Greece could join the Eurozone--with the usual disastrous results down the road. Indeed, Apple, Incorporated, the current darling of the tech industry, should be split into two parts (one based on the Macintosh desktop/laptop computing platform and one based on the iPhone/iPad mobile computing platform) to prevent the type of power concentration that Microsoft nearly pulled off in the late 1990's.
4) Aggressively audit EVERY Federal, state and local government agency. Use the audit results to look for bureaucratic overlap and agency bloat so we can cut the size of government at minimum 30% immediately and eventually cut it by as much as 60%. Government spending is running out of control and cutting government spending 30 to 60 percent would go a long way to towards freeing up funds for private business expansion, something real necessary for long-term economic growth.
5) Begin a decade-long phase out of the Federal Reserve Note fiat currency and replace it with a new US dollar backed by a combination of gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper and nickel--the most common metals used for bullion blocks and coins used in legal monetary transactions. As historical precedent has shown, money backed by "faith in government" instead of a real tangible asset like the metals I mentioned lose value and causes no end of inflationary problems that can wipe out economies over time.
for later