Oh boy, does the USA need a major overhaul!!

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I recently found out that the Canadian Dollar has now surpassed the American Dollar. That's pretty much a good sign that recession is soon to hit. Though I will say this is definitely not the sole reason that America is heading down a doomed path.
Here's a lengthy list of what I think needs to be done...

- Withdraw from Iraq immediately, and afterwards, stop pointlessly attacking other nations and actually guard ours!
- Make much much better border control (maybe use some of the soldiers that were fighting in Iraq).
- Find as many of the illegal immigrants possible, and deport every one of them. Who should pay you ask? The people who employed them. Maybe the immigrants themselves should help foot the bill, too.
- End birthright citizenship for illegal immigrant children! No amnesty!
- Punish employers for hiring illegal immigrants! Fines, maybe jail time will give them the incentive to not think about trying that again.
- Fill these jobs with students and the unemployed. If more people are working, it will stimulate the economy. Not only that, but for unemployed people on welfare, that will save money for the average U.S taxpayer! We don't need to import labour when we already have plenty of potential labour within our borders already!
- More effort needs to be put into making sure the welfare system isn't being abused. People found to be lazy sponges should have their benefits threatened to be taken away. Even better, make them all do volunteer work at minimum. If they want money, at least make them contribute to society for it.
- Cut military spending a bit. The money would be better spent in healthcare or education
- We need to raise our education standards. They're quite pathetic compared to Europe, China, India and Japan. Also, we should help subsidize university students who are wanting to obtain useful degrees (Engineering, Economics, Computer Science, etc...)
- Socialized health insurance. It would save a lot of families a couple thousand dollars a year, since more people would be paying into it, and we wouldn't be paying the fat cat health insurance tycoons making millions off of denying people health coverage. (There would still be private practitioners, so it wouldn't be like the UK's NHS)
- Stop job outsourcing! Call center jobs and whatnot being sent to India can easily be done here. More jobs here = saving taxes on welfare money.
- Invest in a good electric rail system. America's train system is a joke. If the USA had fast, energy-efficient trains (like Europe and Japan), more people would use those to travel cross-country instead of driving and flying. This would make a shift to the left in demand for oil, making it cheaper!
- Also invest in some cheaper, cleaner alternate fuel, so we can release ourselves from the grappling hold of the OPEC cartel.
- No more tax cuts for the rich. Trickle-down Theory Economics was proven to be bunk back in the Hoover days of the 1930s. If there is room for tax cuts, give them to the working class.
- Abolish Affirmative Action at the Federal level. It's an outdated, discriminatory system that no longer serves its purpose. If some states really want it though, they can have it.
- Fix our "Democracy." Have the top 5 parties/candidates allowed in the debates with equal air time (like in France). Our 2 party system is corrupted and not serving the people. Most Americans want immigration and healthcare reform, and nothing is being done about it. The Dems and Repubs have joined together to quash every other political party to keep their greedy tyranny afloat.
- Abolish hate crime laws. The extra punishment is from the thought/motive, and is a blatant disregard of the most important amendment: Free speech.
- Americans are overworked. Make a certain amount of vacation time mandatory.
- Three words: Balanced Budget Amendment. Congress likes to spend more money than it receives in taxes. Therefore, we're accumulating more and more debt, which in the long term will be very very bad. We need to stop accumulating debt and start paying it off.
- Cut Congress' pay. They're already rich enough, so why do we need to give them MORE money? Put the money saved in rail, education, healthcare, or tax cuts for hardworking Americans!

Is that enough for you?

No, keep going.

Meh, I end up disagreeing with a lot of the stuff's importance; there are some ideas that could really have some good impact, but a lot of it ends up being things that I don't think will do much to America.

Actually, the U.S. dollar is currently worth about 2 cents more than the Canadian dollar.

That is about a 30% drop over a short period of time.

and after commission?

I love your ideas Cyanide: it's time for a second American Revolution!

The dollar was intended to drop in value. Its great for manufacturers. Now I don't agree with the path that led us here, or even where we're heading, but those are the facts. Any politico who bets high on some grand recession will be sorely disappointed. Recession? Sure. Engineered? Yep. But its not a death trap. Unless a Dem wins in 08 and does some of those expensive things you talked about, Cyanide.

The only thing that will kill our economy, in the present situation, is a complete reversal of all the drastic and very unfortunate changes that we, numskulls, have allowed to happen in the past eight years.

Incredibly, tho, I believe the antidote is Greg Palast. Plain and simple. So what if the country erupts in chaos, at least we'll understand how bad the situation really is. Of course, it is much worse than what even he can admit, but its a start nonetheless. I think there are worse things than a weird economy and a sick dollar.

By the way, how does using less oil make it cheaper? What happens to coal?
Why are you joining the anti-Mexican pop craze just because you hate NAFTA (as I hope you do, at least selectively)?
You can cut your figure of savings under socialized health care, because tax rates would go up.

Ok, I'm done, I just wanted to point out that you're overlooking a lot of crucial details. No offense meant, and I wish I could agree with you on more of these points, but politics and economics are infinitely more complicated than simple solutions.

Last edited by BrutalRhubarb on 15 Nov 2007, 2:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I will be accepting commissions privately.

I agree that we need an overhaul in our medical system but I think these are the two areas of most vital importance:

1). Frivolous lawsuits, we have a lot of idiots who'll sue for anything and what we really need is better inforcement against frivolous lawsuits; bring down the price of malpractice insurance for doctors, draw much more strict caps on what can be taken in terms of punitive damages (of course by situation, not a broad-based cap), and while attorney's will hate that so what.

2). All these drug companies who are doing research into cures for cancer and all that, while its great that they're getting this end of things done I do get furious about the problem we have with big pharma ruling out generic drugs just by releasing new analogs of the same chemical. Our tax dollars go to fund these companies to a degree, meaning they NEED to knock this crap off.

As for other suggestions:

REALLY bad idea. While it really sucks that we're there, while Saddam tricked us into thinking he had WMD's just out of his fear of Iran attacking him if we didn't and we found out that he was bluffing the world - we can't let our hands off of this mess until Malaki's government can self-sustain. For one we funded a big part of this war with war bonds, China bought a lot of them so if we pulled out it would be more than just the left hanging the right out to dry politically. Also, for all the guys my age who are stuck living in hell over there, getting hit by IED's, and picking up pieces of their friends, the biggest injustice you could do them is to make all that be in vain.

I know people try to say that sunk costs are sunk costs but from what Malaki's saying it sounds like the insurgents themselves are even taking the side of the new Iraq and helping to fight Al Qaeda. Yeah, they aren't the most honorable help - really just mercenaries, but what it does show is that if there's anyone licking their finger, holding it up to the wind, and deciding which side to pick based on best odds its them. While Bush's team may have really blundered a lot of the handling of this war from a lot of angles it does need to be won. People keep talking about it being a huge bloody civil war and that we can't do anything about it, that's one of the very elements thats actually calming down to a degree - so we really just have to ignore the hype, keep doing what we can to train the new militia, and send more troops home as the government actually gains more solidity and self-sufficiency. If we did just throw our hands up, walk out, and let it crumble it would really be suicide for our country; in the world political arena, world opinion, and of course China probably being able to blackmail us into completely overlooking any trade or intellectual property infractions from here until our country just falls apart from foreign divestment.



Extremely important, I agree. I don't know how they're going to handle the fact that we already have over 12 million here, that they could probably debate for years on principal alone, but if we did have a good wall built at the border we could probably get away with working toward naturalizing some of the illegals here without the pressing question of giving amnesty as this huge green flag to just keep doing what they already are - that to a large extent would be stopped.




I'd love to see that but you know what the left and the ACLU will end up doing. Its not going to happen, if we have a good sized wall and border perimeter built we could at least make sure that all the criminals and sex offenders who are deported back to Mexico stay there but we'd have to be extremely picky how we handled sending the majority of the illegals back without it being arguably a 'discrimination' issue; if that case can be made things get gridlocked and in the end nothing will get done.



Again, it would be great but in the end its wholly impractical.




Agreed. Then again to a point I do worry about all these employers moving overseas, we really f'd ourselves with GAT and NAFTA but what can you do - its really a 50/50 and I agree that national security comes first, we can make economic security happen in other ways.

I know you have a lot more there but I think a lot of it is reiterating much of what you said - I think we're in agreement on most thing but unfortunately with Iraq though, I think we're stuck right now and pulling out would be stretching ourselves over a barrel far more than people even realize.

A)For oil becoming cheaper : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... demand.svg . Say that Demand is currently at "D2." If suddenly, less people want to use oil, the Demand will shift to "D1." The graph tells us that there will be a lower quantity being sold (Q1), and at a lower price (P1).

B) Yes, I do hate NAFTA, but that isn't the reason. The reason is that importing people to do jobs doesn't really help much at all. It's not helping our unemployment rate at all, while giving those jobs to Americans would help unemployment. Plus, it's anti illegal immigration, not anti-Mexican.

C) How?

i'm not anti-mexican but i'm most definitely anti-mexican culture. it's an abusive, destructive culture on the whole. their focus on breeding often and early is quite disturbing to me and their complete disrespect for women as a whole is sickening.

"The supply and demand model is used to explain the behavior of perfectly competitive markets"

I'm now out of depth, so congratulations. But I propose that, because this is an energy market, something crazy happens.

Importing people to do jobs really doesn't hurt at all. If anything it helps by reducing the prices for certain kinds of labor. Our unemployment rate is not bad and I don't really see how an increase of the labor supply will really help the economy.


I disagree with the importance of both, what needs to be done with our medical system is a reduction in unnecessary regulation and promotion of less insulation from health care costs which might be promoted by removing the tax exemption from employer provided insurance. The reason I say that is because one of the major costs in our health care system from my perspective is that we have unnecessary regulations(I am not saying at this point that health care must be unregulated so don't even attempt to make that attack), and another is that people are too insulated from their costs. Many of the gains from any government improvement of the health care system would be in cost control, but really, our health care system does really do better in outcomes in some ways. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/11/ ... -sick.html

It wouldn't be increasing the labor supply. It would be replacing the current illegal immigrant labor supply with American labor. The labor supply would be about the same.