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How to save three trillion dollars a year. That $30,ooo per household, every year. Up to a trillion each from four categories of expenditures.
1. Public health. Remove the marketing incentive and the profit markup, and concentrate on the establishment of genuine health access to everyone according to what they need for good health (not what sales pitches tell them they think they need). Create basic-level clinics to maximize day-to-day health maintenance, depend on skilled doctors to make pre-test diagnoses, simplify wasteful forms and billing with single payer, and stop heroically keeping vegetative patients alive at all cost. Move health care into the low-rent district by cutting back on glitzy frills.
2. Child care. It costs $400K to raise a child. Abortions alone, 2.5 million of them every year, could save us a trillion dollars. Yet, many and possibly most births are unwanted or at least ambiguously received. Cut down births and save another trillion dollars. The unwanted babies are the ones most likely to grow up to be the unproductive adults, who will never pay for themselves, so make it easy and socially acceptable for parents to not have them.
This would include an immediate discontinuation of court-ordered child support for all future babies . If parents want to have babies, place the burden of raising the children squarely on those parents, and their extended families if necessary. For parents who choose the burden and then can't meet it, make adoption as quick and easy as buying a used car.
If our society is unwilling to pay the cost of babies, we have to learn to think of them as gobbling machines, not miracles from heaven --- they are crushing the life out of people who have them.
3. Education. Student loans are one of the largest debts carried by most Americans, many of whom have not benefited at all from their expensive education. Half of all students who get student loans and other grants and aid, dropl out and never earn their degree. Make higher education free to everyone who keeps up his grades and progresses, and pay for it with tax rates on the levels of income that higher education enables.
The three items above, health insurance, student loan, raising children and saving for their education, very typically extract $30K a year from professional earning families, throwing them into a lifetime of insurmountable debt. And I haven't even counted taxes yet:
4. Security, criminal justice, and foreign intrigue. Bring home all overseas military personnel, discharge most of them, and stop squandering money looking under beds for imaginary enemies. And stop financing petty dictators. With murderers and car crashes and medical errors killing 100,000 people a year, how is it cost effective to spend hundreds of billions trying to prevent a suicide bomber from killing a dozen? Send a million non-violent prisoners home with expunged records so they can get jobs, and save $100K a year each on cost of trying, convicting, and incarcerating them and supporting their bereft fatherless families on welfare. That's $100-billion right there. We can no longer afford to worship Revenge as the national religion.
So, what could you do with the extra $30K every year that I just saved you? Well, your wife could stay home and take care of housekeeping needs, and you could scale back to a part-time job (or vice versa). With technology and outsourcing, why do we need so many more people working now than we did 50 years ago when everything was done here at home, hands-on, no computers, no automation? To pay for items 1-4 above?
i like these thinking posts where people offer solutions to what is wrong in the country. we should have a solution site with just solutions where people can comment on them.
that was an interesting post and correct me if i am wrong (i have done no research in this area) but didn't the government take over the student loan business and aren't student loans non-dischargeable?
doesn't that now provide more money to the government (albeit at the expense of those students, particularly if they could not get a job because higher education is no guarantee of employment when you have an oversaturated workforce).
i think we do really need to address the illegal problem because that is draining huge amounts of money from our country in so many areas. for example, i picked this up from the FEMA website:
Citizenship:
What are FEMA's citizenship/immigration requirements?
•You must be a U.S. Citizen, Non-Citizen National, or a Qualified Alien in order to be eligible for FEMA cash assistance programs: Individuals and Households Program Assistance and Disaster Unemployment Assistance.
•A Qualified Alien includes anyone with legal permanent residence (green card).
•You will be asked to sign a Declaration and Release (FEMA Form 90-69 B) that you are a U.S. Citizen, Non-Citizen National, or a Qualified Alien.
•If you cannot sign the Declaration and Release, another adult household member who is eligible can sign it and no information regarding your status will be gathered.
•If you cannot sign the Declaration and Release but you have a minor child who is a U.S. Citizen or a Qualified Alien residing with you, you can apply for assistance on your child's behalf and no information regarding your status will be gathered. You will be asked to sign a declaration that your child is a U.S. Citizen, Non-Citizen National, or a Qualified Alien.
•You do not have to be a U.S. Citizen or a Qualified Alien for Crisis Counseling or Disaster Legal Services or for other short-term, non-cash emergency assistance.
If I am an undocumented immigrant, am I eligible for assistance for disaster-related needs?
•Yes, you may be eligible under many different programs run by state and local agencies and voluntary agencies for various types of cash assistance.
If I am an undocumented immigrant, am I eligible for any assistance from FEMA?
•You may be eligible for short-term, non-cash, emergency aid provided by FEMA.
there are too many loopholes for non citizens and their anchor children in this country and they need to be closed up!
i am all for bringing the troops home and keeping some of them on our own southern border for now, where we actually could use some help.
jbut didn't the government take over the student loan business and aren't student loans non-dischargeable?
doesn't that now provide more money to the government (albeit at the expense of those students, particularly if they could not get a job because higher education is no guarantee of employment when you have an oversaturated workforce).
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Outstanding student loans now total just under a half-trillion dollars. Currently, student assistance consists of 30% in grants, 14% in loans directly through the government, and 56% in loans through the private sector, repayable under the same terms as any other consumer loan, but guaranteed by the federal government. Which means that, of all loans that must be repaid, only 20% is payable to the government.
By the way, for ease of getting a handle on things, a trillion dollars works out to an average of about $10,000 per household, assuming roughly 100-million households.
Outstanding student loans now total just under a half-trillion dollars. Currently, student assistance consists of 30% in grants, 14% in loans directly through the government, and 56% in loans through the private sector, repayable under the same terms as any other consumer loan, but guaranteed by the federal government. Which means that, of all loans that must be repaid, only 20% is payable to the government.
By the way, for ease of getting a handle on things, a trillion dollars works out to an average of about $10,000 per household, assuming roughly 100-million households.
Marryin' off the wimmenfolk at 14 ain't gonna change nothin'. People will still do what it takes to have babies, at whatever age they see fit, and whether or not the union is blessed by the good book or not can hardly have an effect on the economic collapse of the union.
The fact is,whether the mothers are married or not, the birth rate in the USA is the lowest in history, and the age of primagravida is the highest in history. Partly due to the ease of abortion.
Um, no need to go to extremes here. I didn't say or imply that getting married at 14 is the solution to the high out of wedlock birth rate.
I do believe we need a practical "abstinence plus" curriculum in the schools. That means birth control is taught but it also needs to be emphasized that birth control is not a cure all. And the emotional aspects of sex as well as the long term economic consequences need to be taught.
We, as a culture, also need to re-evaulate the role of romantic love in relationships. When cultures adopt romantic love as the main basis for marriage, the divorce rate starts to rise immediately. Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert found this out in her study of marriage in different cultures, which she wrote about in her book "Committed".
If you look at the history of marriage, anytime you see a conservative culture of arranged marriage being replaced by a more liberal culture of romantic marriage ... you will see divorce rates start to rise immediately. It turns out that love is a very fragile notion upon which to base a very important and complicated institution. I think most people throughout history would look at the way we choose our marriages today and just think, my God, these people took huge risks. They risk their future, financial stability, property and their heirs on something as fragile and delicate as romantic affection.
In short, I think romance needs to come down a few notches on our priority list of what's important...not to say it doesn't matter, but too many people act as if it's the only thing that matters.
Decline doesn't necessarily have to be "collapse". Look at Japan over the past few decades. There has been no collapse, but the economy is no longer as strong as it was, and Japan no loner occupies one of the top spots in global economic importance. They were just gradually squeezed by other economies that grew faster or dominated new sectors.
The same thing could happen to the USA, such that from one generation to the next, the expectations diminish, but it is all just taken in stride. Each American will slip back a little, one at a time, as they lose their job, or move to a smaller house, or give up on their hopes of college for their kids, or not replace their second car, or cut back on junk food. This has already happened to a majority of families, but the mythology continues that nearly all is well for nearly everybody, and you don't realize that it's not until it happens to you.
Japan could still very easily collapse. Their government debt is 200% of GDP. Even though they pay very low interest rates on their debt (less than 2%), the interest cost of their debt eats up 25% of the government budget. The recent earthquake will only add to the already large and growing debt burden.
Um, no need to go to extremes here. I didn't say or imply that getting married at 14 is the solution to the high out of wedlock birth rate.
No? Obviously "wedlock" is the solution to ALL "out of wedlock" predicaments. A century ago, most girls were mothers by the time they were 18, but they were all married, so "out of wedlock" births was not an issue at all, and certainly not an impediment to social respectability.
Girls 16 had babies then, which was fine because they were not out of wedlock. Today girls 16 have babies, but you think it's a national crisis because they're out of wedlock. Easily repaired. Marriage at 14. Presto.
Your attitude is "Physically matured human beings thinking sex is a pleasurable activity---tsk tsk tsk---That needs to beaten out of them somehow".
The only reason divorce rates rise is because they become possible. In the era of arranged marriages, it was virtually impossible to divorce and retain social respectability. In the era you described, plenty of people would have wanted to be out of their marriages, and most never wanted to be in them in the first place. Freedom to divorce goes hand in hand with the freedom to marry.
You are right, though, about the impact of this on the topical thread. Fluidity of domestic relationships is heavily destructive to the national economy. There is huge waste of money, labor and resources, trying to maintain the shuttle custody mandated by the courts. Our economy is being brought to its knees, in a large part because of our belief that babies are miracles from heaven, and both parents can hate each other but still be entitled to an obscene share of custody of the issue.
The solution is to make non-childbirth the default, by making it easy and socially desirable to NOT have children. And then make parents suffer the consequences of having a poorly planned family, instead of encouraging them to bludgeon each other to death economically, using their children as weapons.
8) highly important- cut the freaking foreign aid when we are in a financial crisis as a country.
American foreign aid appropriations have escalated from about $20 billion in 2000 to $50 billion today..
The foreign aid budget is so small it's a joke. $50 Billion for foreign aid when you're running a budget deficit of 1.5 TRILLIon is a joke. I'm surprised you even mentioned this. Based on your posts, I thought you were smarter than that.
Te answer is yes if we do not solve the governamntal cost increases in three entitlements;SS;medicare and medicad. Thsoe three at there growig cost will by 2040 estimates before the recession( shorted now) to consume 16% of the 18% average of GDP of revenues the federal government takes in from all sources. That leaves 2% for everything else. If we go to revenues increases by taxes to fund those numbers needed then you can look for those providers to move out of the country to compete in the emerging countires where the market sales are.hat is why we must solve the spendign problams of government doing so with 40 cents of every dollar borrowed o the future revenues. Governemnt is living on borrowed money the same as people doing so on credit that got us in this recession. The nation is facing the same thing as those people in the near future.Politicians promise and kick the cost with interest can down the road to get elected. Its like not paying your mortgage and thinking you can keep the house ;simply put.
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