January 28, 2009
America has one advantage, the perception of freedom and opportunity. Any economic recovery plan that doesn’t play to this core strength in my opinion will be in vain. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
Do
- End the empire, bring home the troops.
- End restrictive security measures at the border and encourage tourism.
- Open door policy for skilled immigrants and entrepreneurs. This is counter intuitive when unemployment is rising, but absolutely necessary.
- Tax-incentives to move south where real estate is still affordable.
- Lower property tax rate for foreigners who spend less than 6 months a year in their American property and have no children enrolled in school.
- Raise interest rates. Let strong banks eat the weak. Find some fraud and send a few executives to prison then make a big deal about cleaning up Wall Street.
- Eliminate the capital gains tax to encourage investment. Very few people have any gains anyway.
- Sell “Re-building America bonds” to the public. A slightly higher yield than regular treasuries, only available to people with US addresses. Use the money to create cheap-energy free-trade manufacturing zones in Detroit and somewhere out west to encourage the return of factories. Also build high-speed rail along the coasts, should be a more cost effective way to move people than airplanes.
- Break up the big media conglomerates.
- When the economy recovers make it illegal for the Federal government to deficit spend and increase capital reserve requirements for the banks considerably. Never stop reminding everyone how stupid bankers are, so we discourage intelligent mathematicians from wasting their abilities engineering financial instruments.
- Government public relations campaign (propaganda) to encourage modest city living and discourage worthless college degrees for the sake of experiencing college. End the “live for today” consumption oriented culture and convince people to roll up their sleeves and get back to work, dammit.
- Stop worshipping athletes and actors, tax the hell out of everything entertainment (movies and music) to reduce their pay if needed. Declare war on pop culture, encourage the return of public intellectuals.
Don’t do:
- Borrow more money from foreigners.
- Bailout bankrupt companies.
- “Stimulate” the economy with inflation.
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I agree that those would be only beneficial changes in the long term, but I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a radical change in the short term.
The only way that I see the mass population changing their views and NOT causing some type of counter-productive revolution, is with the education system.
I think that we should completely revamp the education system nation wide, and stop engineering students to fit into the system, but rather to have their own personal influence on which direction our society inclines towards….
Though I still don’t have any concrete idea on how to make that happen, I think that it is a more realistic start to start changing our troubled society.
Your ideas seem to be a mix of legislation and attitudinal change. I’m not sure how they fit together, but I do like some of them.
I find the last entry particularly interesting. For many years I have boycotted things like the academy awards, people magazine and american idol. I love movies but I am sickened by the adoration heaped upon these people who have the ability to play make believe well and are lucky enough to be good looking.
I have thought about how this could change in our society. Surely the monetary incentive gives us better entertainment and innovations in film cost a lot. The idea of taxing the hell out of these folks sounds creepily socialistic. But not subsidizing them in the way of new publicly built stadiums sounds reasonable.
Besides, who are these public intellectuals? and where did they go off to??
Ya there really is no direction in the post, I was just brainstorming ideas. You’re probably right about taxing entertainment, they would probably just go underground or move abroad. What about repealing the millennium copyright act so they die of natural causes instead?
“taxing the hell out of these folks sounds creepily socialistic”
I keep wishing I had said creepily Marxist….
“from each according to his ability…”
There seems to be something quite human about “wanting to get those rich bastards!”
Maybe that’s why pure capitalism will never be. We’re all just big babies.
Oh no you misunderstood me completely, I don’t want to take their money because they’re rich, I want to eliminate the incentive for people to become actors and pop stars. I want people to do something more productive.
The applause is all the incentive they need. Can’t eliminate that!
Besides maybe they aren’t capable of doing anything more productive (whatever that is) and we’d end up supporting them.
Best to let them pay their own bills and adopt African babies.
haha, maybe.