How to fix the economy and get our nation out of debt?

Cancel NAFTA

End free imports for China +25% like the D. Trump plan.

Keep all the oil in Iraq we won..just some basic stuff.

 

Sure we could use a 'scalpel' to trim the budget, but still have the tumor or we could just cut certain things while leaving others untouched. But how about we hit ourselves where it really hurts - cut nearly everything in the form of budget cuts ensuring that the real victim of our cuts is bureaucracy. Our government is bloated with bureaucracy and I'm sure that if we eliminated many programs, consolidated others and just cut spending on others, agencies would have no choice but to ACT.

Families who thought about the potential of losing their income surely thought "there is no way we could live off of less" but when their income took a hit, they often found a way. It's much easier to give than to take. Agencies could easily make do with less money and still not sacrifice quality at all - they just need the drive.

For example, a local organization lost a chunk of revenue and they thought before that there would be no way to cut back. But when that revenue loss hit, they looked closely and found a way to save an extra $500/month just by sourcing their own dairy products.

Where there's a will there's a way. Cut the president/white house/Congress/staff/etc compensation, reduce budgets, etc and we could easily save many millions, which done around the country could save hundreds of billions.

 

THIS.

Well, maybe not everything but it's a start.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that we can't fight a war on two fronts....let alone a war(s) that seem like there is no end in sight of pulling out.
We should have never landed our troops on the ground there in Irag, however I don't see a problem with bombing the heck out of it.
It's even more hard to fight a war when we are out of money.

I hate saying this, but we need to cut down on our military spending a lot! As well as many other things.

We need to free up the private sector and hold government spending more accountable. And less spending (spreading the wealth around) on other countries. Our country is hurting badly, let's stop giving our money away that usually end up in private bank accounts anyways. Except money and programs for food.

Also, this is the fault of us. We keep voting in people that don't have any kind of experience. I kept telling everyone not to vote for Arnold here in CA, but no one would listen. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot here in CA.
I understand that sometimes it's slim on good people that run. But they show up, vote for them!
I don't care if they have a D or an R, or I next to their name, if they have experience and will get the job done, vote em' in.

I could keep going....but I need to leave. lol
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HA!

he's the one who started the significant deficit spending!... its his fault we are in this mess... he set the precedence of spending without a plan to pay it back

 

I thought you guys were there to liberate Iraq not conquer it .

 

Eh, plans change...

 

or not.

 

the best answer in the thread.....you win sir

 

touche sir! I would love to know the true motivation behind what our elected officials get the country into.

 

Start making products in the USA, and buy them.

 

Everyone wants to play the blame game pointing fingers at someone else. Instead of trying to find someone to blame we need to figure out a way to recoup our negative balance at at the very least make it zero out some.

If you look at how much money is being spent on various things in this country it will make your skin crawl. Value of 1 trillion dollars is immesuarable. If you spent 1 million dollars per day every single day of your life... you would come short of (assuming average life span is 80 years) 3% of what it takes to spend 1 trillion dollars. Heck if you spent 25 million dollars per day for 80 years you would still be short by 25%. In other words there is no point trying to cut on programs because unless we can cut on 13 trillion dollars + compound interest on outstanding loans.. there is no way in hell we could repay this thing any time soon.

Lets say hypothetically that for the next 20 years we completely shut down our military that draws upwards of a trillion dollars per year. Only then we have any kind of chance of getting our balance sheet on track. But ofc ourse that could never happen so we need to seek other alternatives. Alternatives like cutting back on 50% of military's budget for next 40 years and maybe we can crawl out of debt when I will be in my late 70's. Alternatives like trading our debt for... and I am going to go off on a tangent here... something like land. Overpopulated countries could start shipping their people to islands in the middle of nowhere that we owned during cold war for strategic purposes. Here is another one... whenever our president travels there is a 500 person army that travels with him. Assuming they get paid at least "medium wages of $45000".... that is 22.5 million green ones right there if not more.

Problem with 14 trillion dollar debt is that it ammounts to almost 4 times the national budget of world's "greatest" economy which is usa. In the grand scheme of things it is working out as intended. Countries that loan us money get showered with money we owe them. We keep postponing the inevitable by increasing our national debt by couple trillion dollars per year. They profit, we lose.

What we should keep in mind that throughout the past 2000 years empires rose and fall. Some broke up because they exhausted their resources, some were killed off by diseases, some conquered and dissolved into ever growing upcoming new kid on the block. New kid in time ran out of ways to fund itself and collapsed, new countries were formed. Some prospered (even being super tiny) while others have ran on the verge of impending doom for hundreds of years barely sustaining themselves. More recently it were empires we are all familiar with. The romans, the mongols, the spanish and english among many others. Commonality was almost always the same. Depletion of economy and natural resources.

But never fear lads. The world is coming to an end in 2012 so we only have about year and a half left of this crazy mad house.

 

because we don't already have the largest manufacturing sector in the world...

 

I agree and I have no interest in contractors picking up guns and fighting wars. But when it comes to areas like maintenenace and support contractors are well worth their paycheck considering 1 contractor can effectively do the same thing several "maintenance soldier" can like you mentoined without the burden of pension healtcare housing GI bill etc.

The soldiers I work with work 8 hours a day 6 days a week while us contractors work over 12 hours a day 7 days a week. Its nothing against the people they are great dedicated people its just how the Army works their scheduling and its ineffective.

And in contractors defense you have to go through a quite intrusive security clearance going above and beyond a top secret clearance. I Respect all men and women of the armed forces and what they do for the country. Just a suggestion about the saving of money becuase i know contractors work much more efficiently in my line of work.

 

cumulative debt is not really the problem when you have a surplus year to year... however, since we are running an annual deficit the debt becomes more of a problem. The first step is fixing the deficit... the debt will go away with that

 

I may have a distorted idea of what national deficit is... but I do not see it being that much difficult from having 100 dollars in your banking account and writing out checks left and right for bazillion dollars hoping it will slide before anyone notices.

Bank of America for example rewards deficit of funds by slapping 35 dollar fee on every single transaction or upping your credit card APR by 23% if you dare miss a payment with no turning back or willing to budge afterward.

We do not have money because we tend (and by we I mean the government) to first "add it to our tap" and only then we come to senses that we have an unplayable outstanding balance.

 

it is pretty simple actually

as winston Churchill once said "a nation trying to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handles"

 

So , you are suggesting having no taxes ?

 

I think he's refering to over taxing