Be Prepared for the F-Bomb!

[nathanm]

Now, borrowing on your premise of real investment vs. speculation, if higher taxes created a better incentive for companies and wealthy executives to create more jobs to try and avoid as much tax as possible then taxes can (in a roundabout way) serve to create more jobs.

In that vein, I think taxes on investments held less than a year probably ought to be higher. One would hope we could funnel some of that money toward education and programs to ameliorate poverty. At the same time, you can't make the tax too high, because you don't want to reduce market liquidity too much.

Uh, h-man, hidden inflation is a figment of the Paulista/gold bug imagination. If you don't believe the government, believe the Billionton Price Index. Deficit spending at less than full employment (pretty much, there are corner cases) cannot cause inflation. Inflation is almost purely a demand side phenomenon, although it can sometimes be controlled from the supply side. (see: Volcker raising interest rates) Thing is, raising taxes has exactly the same effect. Cutting taxes in an inflationary environment as we kept doing after Nixon was the most proximate cause of Carter's inflation. MMT explains all this very well, but I disagree with many of the policy prescriptions that flow from its proponents because, like most other economists, they ignore the real world obstacles. In the case of using the taxing authority to control inflation, the disconnect is with the political reality. It would be great if they could convince everybody to run their economies based on MMT, but it's not going to happen any time soon. Look how long it took the holy trinity of conservatism to get their ideas in play. They started while JFK was still President and it took until Reagan to be taken very seriously.

The problem with the supply-siders is that they refuse to recognize the vast economic changes we've had since Reagan's time that, if not completely, largely invalidate their assumptions. Many Keynesians have the same problem. Hate him if you like, but Krugman at least changes his tune when he's shown to be wrong, unlike the supply-siders complaining of invisible bond vigilantes and the always-on-our-doorstep hyperinflation. Their theories just don't account for the liquidity trap. Keynesian economics does because that's precisely the situation Keynes was working in. It failed to work in the 70s and supply-siders are failing in Europe now because people treat economics like a damned religion and try to apply it long past where the theories break down.

It's like physicists trying to use quantum mechanics to describe the orbits of planets or trying to use general relativity to try to understand black holes. The theories apply only within a specific domain, just like economic theories.

[Conan71]

Heir,

I appreciate you taking a stab at it, however, it's nothing more than theory and really doesn't illustrate any sort of demand pattern which would create concrete demand for jobs.  Of course the rich and corporations will still spend money, but higher taxes equals less wealth they have to spread around at their discretion.  That's an immutable mathematical and economic fact.

If you couple that tax increase with reduced government spending, that still doesn't create a demand curve, even if it inspires more confidence in the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. government which stabilizes markets.

That still doesn't put more money in the hands of middle class consumers and taking more taxes from middle class people like you and I results in less net income left to spend while the government is spending less money as well.  You remove a whole lot of velocity from the economy with such a premise.

Really what would be an immediate jolt to the economy would be a comprehensive energy policy which would reduce motor fuels to the $2.00 to $2.50 a gallon.  That would instantly put more money in the hands of consumers while not reducing tax revenues on fuels.  That policy needs to be free of gimmicks and preferred treatment of certain types of energy which offer very low return while requiring a high rate of subsidies.

And finally, your second paragraph shows you have a very limited understanding of the mechanism of Reaganomics.

[Gaspar]

.

And finally, your second paragraph shows you have a very limited understanding of the mechanism of Reaganomics.

Yeah, but it's adorable.

[Red Arrow]

As is shown by the fact that the Reagan boom of the 80s, which is dragged out at intervals as the prime example of "good times" was a time when the incremental tax rate was 75% for 3/4 of his term. 

Wrong again.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213

[Conan71]

In that vein, I think taxes on investments held less than a year probably ought to be higher. One would hope we could funnel some of that money toward education and programs to ameliorate poverty. At the same time, you can't make the tax too high, because you don't want to reduce market liquidity too much.

I agree with that probability on short term gains, though I think I'd zero in on specific items like commodity trading as that can tend to kill the average consumer.  Let's be honest, speculation trading in the oil markets has literally robbed other segments of the economy for the last three to four years.  I don't begrudge anyone the right to make a living or a profit as they see fit, but when it negatively affects an entire consumer economy, there really needs to be some sort of mitigation to change that dynamic.  Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who has never liked the idea of behavior modification via taxes.

We've beaten this issue to death multiple times on different topics, but we already throw a lot of money at education.  Perhaps that's the problem, we throw it around with out any real meaning or purpose.  Money spent on building new facilities really does not equate to a better education experience if the teaching experience and parental participation is nil.  Even increasing teacher pay doesn't arbitrarily increase outcomes or results.  Take a look at the D.C. school system: some of the highest spending per pupil in the United States, and at the bottom of the results/outcome pile.  By and large, I understand other than beltway jobs, D.C. is a poverty haven.  I suspect with the crime and drug problems which are rampant in the inner city that parental participation is very limited in the D.C. school system.  If you could figure out what it would take to increase parental participation, you'd probably become a very sought after consultant to the education industry!

So long as the increased education spending isn't targeted soley used as quid pro quo toward construction, transportation (which of course, does create jobs), and improved benefit packages for education unions, we might get somewhere.

As far as programs which aim to directly ameliorate poverty, the unfortunate reality is most of them have turned into nothing but entitlement programs which are used to shore up votes and power, while enslaving an entire class of people on the government tit.  Obviously job skills programs are worthwhile if they result in job placement and learning marketable skills.  Hell, even the military has given a lot of people a great start in life.  Look at Guido and his wife as examples.

I love the back-story on the president of one of the companies I do business with.  He was a grunt in the trenches in Viet Nam as a Marine.  After the war, he returned to the states and earned a degree in computer science, naturally paid for by the government.  From there he went to Texas Instruments and eventually went on to design CNC machining equipment and built up his own company.  He's now purchased one of his customers as well and has completely overhauled that business.  I love to tell Jim's story because he's an amazing success story that illustrates that there is such a thing as a "good" investment on the part of government. 

By the same token, the government spends money to send people to college who might actually have been better served with technical or vocational training and vice versa.  There are also a lot of independent job skills schools which depend heavily on government student loans for their revenue.  Many do not offer any sort of placement services nor do they care if a student gets a job.  The school made it's money and that's all that matters to many of them.

Our biggest problem is there are 537 elected officials in Washington with access to the largest check book and credit lines in the world.  They seldom do what is really best for society as a whole because they are more motivated to spread all that money around to their own favored interests which keep them in power and very flush.

[swake]

Increase the minimum wage to a living wage

Require that all employers pay into some sort of minimum retirement plan for workers, even for part time workers. Make current retirement plans more portable and less accessible by the employees. End things like "401k Loans".

Make corporate boards and execs more accountable to non-instutional shareholders. Change the culture that a CEO is worth hundreds of times more than other workers. The CEO (in most cases) is not the owner and pay that disparate is a disservice to both employee and shareholder

Create a single payer national health care system, get out of the employer insurance system. Pay for this by closing loop holes in the corporate tax system. The net to companies should be overall should be zero since they won't be paying employees health care costs any longers. Companies with lots of US workers should actually save money. Companies with lots of foreign workers or companies that don't cover employees will pay more, this will encourage more US based employees and make sure that all Americans are covered. Additionally, like what most of the world does we should lower healthcare costs by mandating healthcare costs and tying payments more to outcomes than counts of procedures. Stop bankrupting people for healthcare costs.

Toughen rules regulating layoffs, employers laying people off need to take more responsibility for impacted employees. Encourage employers to repurpose employees rather than highing in one place while laying off in another.

Rework the corporate tax code providing penalties for moving jobs overseas instead of incentives

Simplify the corporate tax code, maybe institute a VAT at least partially in its place in order to lessen the tax cost on small businesses and make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes.

Remove "goodwill" writeoffs, make any writeoffs be more tangible.

Require that goods produced overseas and imported to the US meet US standards for safety and quality, for workers too. No sweatshop goods allowed.

We spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense spending. This is insane. Cut defense spending in half and devote that money into more research and education

Increase teacher pay and teacher quality. Develop a multi track national education system instead of trying to pigeon hole all students into a pre college system
Teach higher level math at younger ages, teach more science

Make education more socially important nationally, stop promoting politics and religion over science

Make sex education real and make it really required. Make contraceptives easily obtained and create a culture where we are more adult about sex and its consequences.

Make housing more affordable nationally. Stop creating inner city public housing ghettos and move public housing to peripheral areas of cities and link those developments to inner city jobs and services via dedicated mass transit. This will encourage more inner city growth, less inner city crime and over time lessen sprawl. This in turn will make cities cheaper to run.

Lower crime rates and decrease prison populations with shorter and more reasonable prison terms. Dedicate the saving to better police protection, especially in high crime areas. Crimes are less likely to be committed when potential perpetrators know they are likely to be caught

Legalize and tax marijuana and other low level drugs, do a better job keeping it out of the hands of kids. My high school student says that drugs are far easier to get than beer.

[nathanm]

Really what would be an immediate jolt to the economy would be a comprehensive energy policy which would reduce motor fuels to the $2.00 to $2.50 a gallon.  That would instantly put more money in the hands of consumers while not reducing tax revenues on fuels.  That policy needs to be free of gimmicks and preferred treatment of certain types of energy which offer very low return while requiring a high rate of subsidies.

Feel free to debate, but in my view, energy policy won't do a damn bit of good for years at the least. Why? It's the demand, stupid. (thanks to Bill for the original) The only way to get the price of gas down is to dramatically increase supply or dramatically reduce demand. Being complete assholes in our economic policy could do the trick by putting Europe further in the crapper and forcing petroleum demand down in the BRIC countries. Short of that, we have to rejigger our economic engine to use less petroleum-based fuel.

IMO, one of the important first steps is getting long distance truck hauling gone like yesterday. Not only because it uses far more fuel to transport a ton of goods a mile in a truck than it does on a train, but because it has the follow-on effect of significantly reducing damage to our roads, and therefore our maintenance expenses, not to mention the fuel used in that maintenance. One fully loaded truck uses as much pavement life as somewhere around a hundred passenger cars.

How would you use energy policy to get fuel prices down in the relatively short term? A Keynesian might suggest subsidizing the price of fuel for individuals, so as to free up consumers to engage in more discretionary spending, but I think all that will do is delay the necessary transition away from oil to a less scarce resource, which is the only non-band-aid solution. Remember that drilling more doesn't increase supply very quickly these days, since we've tapped out most of the fields that produce quickly without help and forcing production generally ends up leaving more oil in the ground unrecoverable at the end. (as I understand it, anyway)

On education, I agree that it's important to spend the money wisely. However, I disagree that we're wasting as much as you think. Why? Deferred maintenance. As I'm sure you're aware, waiting to perform maintenance until a building and/or its equipment has already failed is far more expensive than keeping it up in the first place. From the 70s to about the 90s, schools have been constantly squeezed as their costs increase in excess of inflation. Public schools are particularly hamstrung relative to private schools by the 1977 federal edict requiring that special needs kids be educated by public schools. Prior to that they could tell the troublemakers to F off. I'm not saying that the requirement is a bad thing, mind you, but it accounts for a surprisingly large amount of spending by school districts. Money that could have gone to maintaining and/or refreshing existing PP&E.

Studies consistently show that kids learn more when they're in a nicer environment. You're probably right that much money is spent on construction just because the contractor is the superintendent's brother or something, but we can't throw the baby out with the bath water. If we actually maintain what we have, the older buildings can still be nice, and with retrofits, even be nearly as energy efficient as a new building.

Another thing that is rarely talked about is the effect of women being more accepted in the broader work force. Again, this is a great thing that has devastated our education system. At one time, the best and the brightest of the fairer sex had four choices: Be a stay at home mom, work at the phone company, work as a secretary in an office, or be a school teacher. This meant that schools didn't have to pay all that well to attract the best talent. Now that they, like us, can go out and land a six figure job, that's what they do when they can. The talent pool has been diluted significantly and it has become impossibly expensive to have a school full of good teachers. Instead, we have to settle for a few good ones who are both good at it and willing to do it because they love the job and hope the rest are at worst mediocre.

The last thing I'd like to touch on is No Child Left Behind. While I commend the effort to bring more accountability to the education process, talking to teachers has given me the impression that it's actually seriously harming the quality of education in schools populated by lower income kids. Because the school will get its funding cut off if not enough kids pass the test, they end up overreacting and teaching almost exclusively the material that will be on the test. It's also a terrible measure of a person's overall level of education, but I'm not really sure what would be better other than tracking people all the way through their lives and seeing what the outcomes are. That's just plain creepy (not to mention smacking of some -ism or another), so I don't think it's a good alternative.

As far as entitlement programs enslaving people in poverty, I don't think that is so much true. What enslaves people in poverty is living in poverty and being surrounded by poverty. The 60s-70s ideal of concentrating poverty-stricken families in small areas of our cities also concentrated crime and its attendant hopelessness. It doesn't help that historically the lower-income neighborhoods have been neglected from the standpoint of city services. In Chicago, it was pretty much unheard of for the poorer neighborhoods to get regular trash pickup and street cleanings until the elder Daley finally died. I don't know about you, but if I walked out of my front door every day and saw first hand the scorn that the rest of society heaped upon me, I'd be pretty discouraged also.

To some degree, I don't consider it to be at all about the parents. They're probably screwed no matter what we do. Some of them might be able to use the help we provide to dig themselves out, but most of them won't. The kids, on the other hand, are being punished by the talk of welfare queens and the disdain we hold for "welfare." They're the ones being condemned to the same life their parents had because we can't bother to figure out how to give them safe streets and safe schools. We can't figure out how to provide necessary medication, glasses, tutoring, and whatever other tools the kids need to learn effectively. We can't let our disapproval of the parents make us give up on the kids. Fix the problems facing the kids and they'll be mostly out of poverty in a couple of generations.

I wish I had solutions, but I've mostly just got problems.

Edited to add: Holy wall of text, Batman! Sorry about that. (or maybe it just looks big on my TV..can I still complain about my laptop or is it just devolving into whining at this point?)

[heironymouspasparagus]

And finally, your second paragraph shows you have a very limited understanding of the mechanism of Reaganomics.

And yet, regardless of mine or your understanding of Reaganomics, the fact still remains that the taxes during that wonderful time of massive growth were twice what they are today.  (Irony, satire alert.)

One thing that was a big difference from today was the use of the incentive stock option - it was spooling up, but had not reached the epic proportions of today, and the last few years. 

[heironymouspasparagus]

Really what would be an immediate jolt to the economy would be a comprehensive energy policy which would reduce motor fuels to the $2.00 to $2.50 a gallon.  That would instantly put more money in the hands of consumers while not reducing tax revenues on fuels.  That policy needs to be free of gimmicks and preferred treatment of certain types of energy which offer very low return while requiring a high rate of subsidies.

And yet, oil and gas are exactly the industries that do get the highest rate of subsidy. 

And which energy policy would that be?  The one that gives the industry a set of leases and permits on known reserves and the industry actually utilizes about 25% of that?  That is today's policy.

I am gonna make a guess here that you may be talking about increased deep water drilling, fracking, and drilling ANWR.  Is that close?  So they can do all that while turning their back on the resources already available and waiting for action.

You already know, and hopefully others will realize that there is no reason that there isn't twice as much being produced here today as there is.  And 4 times as much with just a little extra effort.  But that would mean a glut, which would do exactly what you seem to be proposing - bring the price down - and that is absolutely contrary to the financial interests of the industry. 

Notice all the advertisement about how NOW we are bringing all this gas and oil production online?  Well, the oil price seems to have stabilized above $75 per barrel, and will stay there, or higher.  Yeah, let's get some of that out....  But that means an average $3.00 per gallon or so.  Rule of thumb; $1.00 price of gas for each $20 to 25 price per barrel of oil.  Sort of.

Side note; notice how gas is cheap right now.  Lulls the masses.  Diesel on the other hand is still stupid expensive - making everything you buy just that much more due to transportation costs.  But most people don't even notice that.  Large, unjustified gouging opportunity being taken by the industry.

[Conan71]

Increase the minimum wage to a living wage

That certainly would increase the average wage and help close the "disparity gap".  Now, which model do you want to use to consider the minimum wage a living wage?  Single, single with a child, two parents with one child, two adults two kids?  Do you put a sliding scale on it to adjust for how many kids a family has?  Here's a living wage calculator for Tulsa, Ok.  If that simply means taking the current minimum wage of $7.25 and raising it to $8.41 in a place like Tulsa the impact is pretty much imperceptible.  Taking minimum wage in LA of $8.00 and raising it to $11.20 for a single adult means a much greater impact.

http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/counties/40143

Let's say for argument's sake that to make minimum wage a living wage for single parents with two kids, we had to double the current minimum wage nationwide.  How is that paid for?  What would the affect of the sudden inflationary pressure do to our economy and how many jobs would be cut as a result as employers would figure out ways to get the same amount of productivity out of a smaller work force in order to stay competitive with foreign compeition.

Require that all employers pay into some sort of minimum retirement plan for workers, even for part time workers. Make current retirement plans more portable and less accessible by the employees. End things like "401k Loans".

They already do pay into a retirement and disability plan which is fully portable and inaccessible to workers.  They even pay for long term medical care after retirement: it's called Social Security and Medicare.

Make corporate boards and execs more accountable to non-instutional shareholders. Change the culture that a CEO is worth hundreds of times more than other workers. The CEO (in most cases) is not the owner and pay that disparate is a disservice to both employee and shareholder

Why is high executive pay necessarily a disservice to the employees?  Don't you want the best CEO money can buy to lead the company through smooth and tricky economies?  Don't you want someone who is an innovator and extremely creative?  Considering the culture that Steve Jobs fostered at Apple, the thousands of jobs his ideas created, as well as his overall contribution to modern technology do you think he should have had his pay capped?

Now, how do you change that culture without nationalizing businesses?  If I don't like the way a particular company is run or think the CEO and other execs are over-paid at my expense as a shareholder, I don't buy that stock.  If anything, they need to be more accountable to institutional share-holders as those are generally pension plans or folks with 401K investments who really don't have any investment savvy so they are invested in a lot of mutual funds and have no idea what companies they are actually part owners of.

Create a single payer national health care system, get out of the employer insurance system. Pay for this by closing loop holes in the corporate tax system. The net to companies should be overall should be zero since they won't be paying employees health care costs any longers. Companies with lots of US workers should actually save money. Companies with lots of foreign workers or companies that don't cover employees will pay more, this will encourage more US based employees and make sure that all Americans are covered. Additionally, like what most of the world does we should lower healthcare costs by mandating healthcare costs and tying payments more to outcomes than counts of procedures. Stop bankrupting people for healthcare costs.

How exactly does that close the wage gap?  As we've learned over the last three years, corporate America says "mandates" stifle employment.  A lot of countries where they have comprehensive health coverage also have a lot of people living on the government dole.  I simply don't see where single payer creates jobs.  If anything it might eliminate a lot of insurance service industry jobs.

Toughen rules regulating layoffs, employers laying people off need to take more responsibility for impacted employees. Encourage employers to repurpose employees rather than highing in one place while laying off in another.

Employers pay unemployment insurance.  They way I see it is either they can lay off workers when demand is slack or they no longer need them due to better automation, or cut their pay.  Neither is a great solution but it's a reality when American companies have to fight foreign competition because everyone is too afraid to apply tariffs anymore.  As a business owner, would you want the government telling you that you could not lay off more than X employees at a given time or that you have to pay someone 90 days severance?  What about accountability to share-holders when things like that could really tank profits and value to the shareholder?

Rework the corporate tax code providing penalties for moving jobs overseas instead of incentives

In principal, I agree.  But, what's to keep a corporation from changing their corporate HQ and governance to a foreign nation?  In reality the incentive corporations have for moving jobs overseas right now is the penalty of paying higher taxes on their U.S. operations than they pay over seas.  One example would be Cisco's Ireland operation.  Tax credits and cuts on everything from federal returns to free property taxes and sales tax exemptions seem to be what has stimulated hiring and expansion the most in the states, but that goes back to corporations not paying their "fair share" in taxes.  I really have no good ideas on how you change that dynamic.

Simplify the corporate tax code, maybe institute a VAT at least partially in its place in order to lessen the tax cost on small businesses and make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes.

That's somewhat what the Fair Tax purports to do.  Again, see my comments on tax avoidance above.

Remove "goodwill" writeoffs, make any writeoffs be more tangible.

Agreed.  Not sure what that does to the wage gap, but there are a lot of gratuitous write-off's in the corporate tax world.

Require that goods produced overseas and imported to the US meet US standards for safety and quality, for workers too. No sweatshop goods allowed.

How do you feel about tariffs? I'm a fan of them.  That's one thing we could do to help protect American jobs.

We spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense spending. This is insane. Cut defense spending in half and devote that money into more research and education

We do spend far too much being the world's top police force!  Defense spending has created many high-paying jobs and created many practical products which have improved all our lives though.  I'm sure there are plenty of areas the government could spend half that money and still have a meaningful impact on the economy.  In addition, I think we also need to quit offering up billions in the face of every international disaster and allow others to contribute more.

Increase teacher pay and teacher quality. Develop a multi track national education system instead of trying to pigeon hole all students into a pre college system.  Teach higher level math at younger ages, teach more science

As you know, I'm not for increasing teacher pay just for the sake of increasing it.  Develop an accountability and reward system which offers merit-based pay increases.  I also agree that the pre-college model we use now doesn't serve all students well.

Make education more socially important nationally, stop promoting politics and religion over science

Make sex education real and make it really required. Make contraceptives easily obtained and create a culture where we are more adult about sex and its consequences.

I guess I've never thought of education as not being socially important.  I disagree on the sex ed issue.  That's simply encouraging parents to abdicate one of the most important roles of parenting to the government and schools.  It also does nothing to close the wage gap which is what this discussion was supposed to be about.  If anything we need to increase emphasis on the family being the primary care giver of children, not the school system.  I simply don't see that happening without spiritual principles being given the proper priority instead of being looked upon with scorn.

Make housing more affordable nationally. Stop creating inner city public housing ghettos and move public housing to peripheral areas of cities and link those developments to inner city jobs and services via dedicated mass transit. This will encourage more inner city growth, less inner city crime and over time lessen sprawl. This in turn will make cities cheaper to run.

The idea of making housing cheaper nationally is how we ended up with ghettos in the first place.  I disagree on spreading low income housing around.  See what it's done to areas like 61st & Peoria and 31st & Mingo in a matter of 25 years? It's resulted in lower property values for the long time home-owners and they've become crime pockets.

Lower crime rates and decrease prison populations with shorter and more reasonable prison terms. Dedicate the saving to better police protection, especially in high crime areas. Crimes are less likely to be committed when potential perpetrators know they are likely to be caught

I don't think you can lower the crime rate in a meaningful manner when you empty out the prisons.  That said, I agree we are warehousing a lot of drug users who could successfully be treated outside prison walls so long as those aren't cases where the drug use ended up in severe child neglect or abuse or the death of someone else.  For the most part, I view the war on drugs as a failure, at least to where users have been given longer sentences than dealers.  Still doesn't do a lot to close the wage gap though.

Legalize and tax marijuana and other low level drugs, do a better job keeping it out of the hands of kids. My high school student says that drugs are far easier to get than beer.

The best way to keep drugs and alcohol away from kids is stronger parenting.

This reads more like the liberal playbook, but there are certainly some ideas in there which, in theory, would create jobs and increase wages which is what I asked someone to put up instead of being mired in the problem that there is a wage and wealth gap.  In my opinion, every time societies have tried to flatten the curve between the have and have nots, it's resulted in higher rates of poverty for everyone.  Cuba would be a perfect example of that.

[AquaMan]

The American and French Revolutions would be opposite examples. They pretty effectively flattened out income distribution from "The royalty and their cronies have it all" back to the underclasses.

[Red Arrow]

The American and French Revolutions would be opposite examples. They pretty effectively flattened out income distribution from "The royalty and their cronies have it all" back to the underclasses.

Are you proposing that we give the French Revolution treatment to our CEOs and top elected officials?

[Conan71]

Feel free to debate, but in my view, energy policy won't do a damn bit of good for years at the least. Why? It's the demand, stupid. (thanks to Bill for the original) The only way to get the price of gas down is to dramatically increase supply or dramatically reduce demand. Being complete assholes in our economic policy could do the trick by putting Europe further in the crapper and forcing petroleum demand down in the BRIC countries. Short of that, we have to rejigger our economic engine to use less petroleum-based fuel.

It's the attitude that it would take too long to enact that is the reason we have no real energy policy.  Do you realize that if Bush II had enacted some sort of cohesive energy policy during his first term, we'd be reaping the benefits well before now?  I interface quite a bit with the petroleum and syn-fuels industries with what I do for a living.  For a fact, there was more of a push for bio-fuels during the Bush administration than there is now with a president who was supposed to be green-friendly.  I'm disappointed in Obama's record on this and the irony that we had more investment in bio-fuels while we had a couple of "oily's" running the White House is palpable.  I have no clue why that is, especially with motor fuels in the $3.00 to $3.50 range.  A lot of the incentives Congress was giving that industry have vaporized and not been re-upped.

In reality, there's no shortage of oil or reserves which is keeping prices high.  Traders are using the excuses of debt crises and world events as to why oil is still so high.  From a supply and demand aspect, it shouldn't be more than $70 to $75 a bbl right now.  Trading practices that falsely inflate the cost need to be reined in and that wouldn't take years to implement.

IMO, one of the important first steps is getting long distance truck hauling gone like yesterday. Not only because it uses far more fuel to transport a ton of goods a mile in a truck than it does on a train, but because it has the follow-on effect of significantly reducing damage to our roads, and therefore our maintenance expenses, not to mention the fuel used in that maintenance. One fully loaded truck uses as much pavement life as somewhere around a hundred passenger cars.

That's correct, long-haul trucking is inefficient compared to ships and rail.  The downside is with a million or so rigs on the road, that's a lot of people who depend on those jobs from drivers to mechanics, to the people who build the trucks.  The greater majority of semi tractors on U.S. roads are built in the states.  Those are all good jobs.  If you moved all long-haul trucking loads to rail you would not have anywhere close to 1:1 ratio of job swaps.

How would you use energy policy to get fuel prices down in the relatively short term? A Keynesian might suggest subsidizing the price of fuel for individuals, so as to free up consumers to engage in more discretionary spending, but I think all that will do is delay the necessary transition away from oil to a less scarce resource, which is the only non-band-aid solution. Remember that drilling more doesn't increase supply very quickly these days, since we've tapped out most of the fields that produce quickly without help and forcing production generally ends up leaving more oil in the ground unrecoverable at the end. (as I understand it, anyway)

Again, there's no shortage of oil.  Just a shortage of common sense on how we allow it to be traded.

On education, I agree that it's important to spend the money wisely. However, I disagree that we're wasting as much as you think. Why? Deferred maintenance. As I'm sure you're aware, waiting to perform maintenance until a building and/or its equipment has already failed is far more expensive than keeping it up in the first place. From the 70s to about the 90s, schools have been constantly squeezed as their costs increase in excess of inflation. Public schools are particularly hamstrung relative to private schools by the 1977 federal edict requiring that special needs kids be educated by public schools. Prior to that they could tell the troublemakers to F off. I'm not saying that the requirement is a bad thing, mind you, but it accounts for a surprisingly large amount of spending by school districts. Money that could have gone to maintaining and/or refreshing existing PP&E.

School systems are currently spending millions upon millions on performing arts centers and indoor baseball practice facilities.  Look at all the new school buildings in the suburbs.  We also have far too many rural districts which eat a ton in administrative costs.  Problem is, how many $100,000 per year superintendents of 300 student districts want to see their job disappear?

Studies consistently show that kids learn more when they're in a nicer environment. You're probably right that much money is spent on construction just because the contractor is the superintendent's brother or something, but we can't throw the baby out with the bath water. If we actually maintain what we have, the older buildings can still be nice, and with retrofits, even be nearly as energy efficient as a new building.

Agreed on the point on nicer environment.  I'm not so concerned about cronyism, more along the lines of spending money on ancillary facilities that really are not a necessity to learning progress.  I also think the emphasis on lower student to teacher ratios on the high school level is a complete waste of money.  Considering that college-bound students will eventually face that dreaded auditorium class, they need to get weaned off the desired 15:1 to 20:1 ratio.  I really don't think 30:1 at the high school level is a problem.  On the elementary level, yes, that is a problem as at earlier ages, children need more interface in their learning.

[Gaspar]

Increase the minimum wage to a living wage
I like our receptionist, but I suppose we could go ahead and use the auto-attendent on our phone system. She will have to find another job.  She's great, perhaps she can go back to school and get her degree.

Require that all employers pay into some sort of minimum retirement plan for workers, even for part time workers. Make current retirement plans more portable and less accessible by the employees. End things like "401k Loans".
We will just start to require our employees to empty their own trash and vacuum their own offices once a week.  Can't afford to create a retirement plan for Keim our part-time housekeeper, and can't afford to pay him more than $12/hr.  He will have to find another job.

Make corporate boards and execs more accountable to non-instutional shareholders. Change the culture that a CEO is worth hundreds of times more than other workers. The CEO (in most cases) is not the owner and pay that disparate is a disservice to both employee and shareholder.
Since this is a free market, I suppose if you are going to dictate wages at the low end, and wages at the top end, you might as well just dictate all wages, because that will be necessary to be "fair" don't you think?

Create a single payer national health care system, get out of the employer insurance system. Pay for this by closing loop holes in the corporate tax system. The net to companies should be overall should be zero since they won't be paying employees health care costs any longers. Companies with lots of US workers should actually save money. Companies with lots of foreign workers or companies that don't cover employees will pay more, this will encourage more US based employees and make sure that all Americans are covered. Additionally, like what most of the world does we should lower healthcare costs by mandating healthcare costs and tying payments more to outcomes than counts of procedures. Stop bankrupting people for healthcare costs.
Hey, we've come far enough in medical care/research/technology. Like other countries, it will be necessary to regulate care, we can't have Nanna paying for an expensive new drug just because she can afford it.  Heck, there wouldn't be any expensive new drugs, why do the work when there is no reward?

I agree that employers should be out of the insurance business.  We could do this easily by dropping the cost of medical insurance so that people could afford and shop it.  Just eliminate the rules that prevent you and I from buying our insurance from competing companies.

Toughen rules regulating layoffs, employers laying people off need to take more responsibility for impacted employees. Encourage employers to repurpose employees rather than highing in one place while laying off in another.
Yet another reason to be very cautious about hiring.  Under this law I would certainly want to minimize my workforce.  To avoid liability it would be wise for me to be more selective when interviewing people to make sure that they don't have previous lay-off situation on their resume.  Wouldn't want to hire any trouble-makers.

Rework the corporate tax code providing penalties for moving jobs overseas instead of incentives.
Perhaps just semantics, but why wouldn't you just want to provide incentives for keeping jobs here, and make it more expensive to move jobs elsewhere?  Oh, yeah, forgot about all of the above regulations.  Never mind.  Penalties would have to be pretty stiff to overcome the costs added above.  Perhaps just close the borders all together! That should do it.

Simplify the corporate tax code, maybe institute a VAT at least partially in its place in order to lessen the tax cost on small businesses and make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes.
What would the threshold be?  $2 million?  $10 million?  Less?  How would you simplify the code?

Remove "goodwill" writeoffs, make any writeoffs be more tangible.
Why not eliminate write-offs all together?

Require that goods produced overseas and imported to the US meet US standards for safety and quality, for workers too. No sweatshop goods allowed.
So, we police labor in other countries too?  Would they be required to meet the same labor standards we have here?  Certainly would yank a knot in Apple's tale!

We spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense spending. This is insane. Cut defense spending in half and devote that money into more research and education.
Not a bad idea.  Not sure about the #.  To just say "Cut in half" is irresponsible.  I would like to see some research to determine what is necessary to keep us ahead of every other country first.  Perhaps the cut could be 75% or 33%.

Increase teacher pay and teacher quality. Develop a multi track national education system instead of trying to pigeon hole all students into a pre college system
Teach higher level math at younger ages, teach more science.
Agreed!  Get rid of education programs where children are forced into failing school, and forced to learn curriculum that does not fit with their goals, skills, and potential.  Give them the freedom to choose what school, and what program best fits their needs.  Stop spending $8,800 a year to provide nothing more than daycare with metal-detectors.  Can't wait to get a statement that says "Mr. Gaspar the education voucher total for your daughter is $9,000 this year.  Please present this voucher to the school of your choice with your child's enrollment documents.

Make education more socially important nationally, stop promoting politics and religion over science.
Who the hell are you to decide what everyone has to learn?  Schools need to provide a balanced base curriculum, and nurture the talents of each student. If my son wants to sing and paint, and my daughter is thrilled by science and history, then I want their education to nurture those talents. Politics and Religion are a very important part of society.  I want my kids to learn about all religions and to have a complete understanding of all forms of government and the political philosophies behind each.  History is politics and religion and the mistakes and successes of both are unbelievably important in learning how not to repeat the ills of the past.  Sure, it's harder to push a Socialist agenda if the young have an understanding of history, but we are not a Socialist country.

Make sex education real and make it really required. Make contraceptives easily obtained and create a culture where we are more adult about sex and its consequences.
Hey, I'm good with that!

Make housing more affordable nationally. Stop creating inner city public housing ghettos and move public housing to peripheral areas of cities and link those developments to inner city jobs and services via dedicated mass transit. This will encourage more inner city growth, less inner city crime and over time lessen sprawl. This in turn will make cities cheaper to run.
Social engineering experiment, not worth addressing.  People should have the freedom to live where they want, and based on what they can afford. Bussing people around to satisfy some secret desire to get the riffraff out of downtown so that developers will build new shiny glass buildings is not smart.  Never has been.

Lower crime rates and decrease prison populations with shorter and more reasonable prison terms. Dedicate the saving to better police protection, especially in high crime areas. Crimes are less likely to be committed when potential perpetrators know they are likely to be caught.
Agree!

Legalize and tax marijuana and other low level drugs, do a better job keeping it out of the hands of kids. My high school student says that drugs are far easier to get than beer.
No argument there.  In fact, legalize all drugs. This would solve so many problems, and only take a couple of generation to do so.  

[AquaMan]

Are you proposing that we give the French Revolution treatment to our CEOs and top elected officials?

I wouldn't have typed such craziness, but since you mention it...