How can we straighten out the US Economy?

We have a debt problem.

However, treasury bond rates are so low that the market will essentially pay us to borrow money from it.

If the government were a business, it would take the free money and invest it. We should borrow money and put people to work improving our infrastructure. Do whatever it takes to get unemployment back down to 5%.

Then, when the economy improves, raise taxes—mostly on the rich—to pay down the debt.

I don’t know about the economy, but I work with a lot of metal.

It takes a lot of loud pounding to straighten out anything that is inherently crooked.

@Qingu
That makes sense to me.
@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
True. Can we insist all Politicians resign immediately? 99% have No clue what to do about our Economy. The few that try are ignored by the Majority.
The CEO of Starbucks has some good ideas. I am sure there are other people who have great ideas. Too bad they are not running for President. The ones who are seem to Represent themselves and the Lobbyist. I don’t believe anything they say.

I hate it when people say things like “all politicians should resign.”

It’s the laziest possible position to take. Politicians are not monolithic. Some politicians support policies you support, have in fact fought very hard for those policies. Kicking them all out would punish your allies and reward your enemies for their intransigence.

It would help tremendously if the government would stop “trying to fix” the economy. It would help a great deal if people would learn simple economics and stop voting into office cheats, charlatans and liars who promise that we can have all we want by taking it from others, whether “the rich” or our children and their future.

“The economy” is all of us making our way in the world: we work at agreed-upon jobs for agreed-upon wages and spend money in voluntary transactions with others. And the government, attempting to “fix” things, takes larger and larger percentages of our incomes and redistributes it as it sees – and some of you think “better than we do”. But it ain’t necessarily so.

If the government take was smaller, then we could be freer to make more and more individual choices and willing transactions. But too many seem not to want that. Too many want someone (or some group or groups) to take more from us involuntarily and place their own bets.

I’m not in that camp.

I think the real problem is income inequality. Shit, the CEO of Viacom just took a 50 million pay raise. The person that cleans his office most likely gets food stamps.

Ah yes, if only people would learn the Austrian school of economics, where people are modeled to be perfectly rational actors and the invisible hand of the market is assumed to spontaneously correct externalities and monopolistic tendencies.

It’s like having faith in religion, except you get to sound slightly smarter!

@johnpowell, while I do think inequality is a problem, it’s not clear to me that it is the source of our unemployment problem. Paul Krugman said that you could theoretically have full employment in an economic system where 99% of the work force are underpaid wage slaves manufacturing luxury goods for 1% elite.

Rather, I think inequality is something we need to keep in mind when we decide how to pay down our deficit.

@Qingu :: I am pretty drunk right now so I let you be right again. I’m going to finish my beer and eat a cheeseburger and crawl into my “vagina bed” that is made from a few electric blankets.

It is seriously fantastic.

Clearly, @Qingu, your ‘completely novel’ solutions have been so much more effective.

Nobody has tried my solution. Don’t let facts stop you from posting though.

You have to kickstart consumer spending, until that’s moving nothing else will budge. Start with long term government spending on national infrastructure, incentivize debt restructuring for the bottom 90%, incentivize corporate infrastructure investment. That’s what I’d try, after that (or hand-in-hand if it can be managed) start raising taxes and closing loopholes from the top down, incentivizing education, reigning in federal and state expenditures, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah.

@wonderingwhy
I like your ideas.
I have not got time to list mine now.

Dissolve unions.

Arrest the people on Wall Street that need to be arrested and recovery their money and deposit it into the U. S. General Fund.

Immediately, call home all our troops stationed on foreign soil that are truly not needed there.

Cut gas prices by 50%, no matter where you live.

Cancel all imported products from China to the U.S.

@john65pennington
Unions were started to protect hard working people from the wealthy exploiters who felt they were not entitled to a living wage.
The Elitist are the real problem, corrupt Unions, and corrupt immoral Politicians.
Most of the top ten percent wealthiest in this country are greedy and immoral. I am related to some by marriage.
They inherit wealth, the best education and more.They are not the brightest or hard working.
They make me sick and I have No respect for them. They earn little in life and steal all they can.

I’m starting my own currency. Yep, just gonna print off notes and give them any value that I want. Not counterfeit… No. I mean really a new currency note.

Sometimes I’ll have to exchange them for dollars. But the difference between my Reals, and your dollars, is that mine actually represent a percentage value of my hard assets. Yours dollars only represent some mysterious and arbitrary sense of value determined by people you’ve never met, and couldn’t give a damn if their peice of paper represents anything of real value or not. They just want you to think it does.

In short words: Stop being the world’s policeman, crack down on people taking advantage of programs that were meant to help those in need, do not allow illegal immigrants any perks for well, being here illegally and focus on job creation first, then focus on the deficit secondly. Tax incentives for companies that avoid outsourcing along with eliminating giving companies that suffer profit loses due to outsourcing with taxpayer monies would not hurt either. President Obama has at least one of these down.

Partisan bickering doesn’t help either because let’s face it, if a decision is never made because of perpetual disagreement how can anything positive get done? There is the banking and currency issue as well here but I don’t feel like getting into that on this thread. However, the money issue is perhaps the most important one we face relating to the economy.

@Paradox25
Well written and you have common sense. Too bad your not a candidate.