A Friend Asks for Opinions on Range of Issues

He asks:

Could any of you tell me about four CONCRETE changes that are desired. If the changes are something like:

NO TAXES

NO SOCIAL SECURITY

NO UNEMPLOYMENT PAYMENTS

NO MEDICARE

NO REGULATION OF SECURITIES TRANSACTIONS

NO FOREIGN WARS

NO EXCESSIVE MILITARY EXPENSES

You will have to include a few words regarding how to compensate for any unwanted consequences of the change.

Respectfully - Gomor

It is difficult once these programs are started and people have become depend on them so:

SOCIAL SECURITY
I would lower the SS tax and payout the minimum payments to all SS recipients and raise the retirement age to 70.

MEDICARE
Seniors would not like this but I would start using evidence based medicine in Medicare.  I would also put a high deductible on Medicare.  $5,000/year to start.


Means tested programs make some sense (robbing Peter to pay Paul)  but programs like SS and Medicare make no sense.  They amount to robbing Peter to pay Peter. 


TAXES
I would replace the income tax with a national sales tax and excise taxes (maybe even a carbon tax).  At some point I would eliminate the SS and Medicare taxes. 

UNEMPLOYMENT PAYMENTS
Similar to SS lower the payout to some minimum level.  Interestingly you could replace unemployment payments and SS payments with a fixed amount of money given to every citizen but that is too radical and creates some bad incentives. 

REGULATION OF SECURITIES TRANSACTIONS
We have gobs of regulations and we still have periodic financial collapses (and BTW they have been worse since the civil war (civil war laws pretty much ended an level of free banking) and worse yet since the creation on the federal reserve and FDIC) and lest you think that this is because conservatives had power for a few years (congress and the white house) Sweden had a finical collapse in the early 1990s.  So the regulations seem not to work.  We might as well allow free banking but the  transition could be brutal so we must go slow. 

FOREIGN WARS
I am against foreign wars unless we are attacked. Defense only. We won everything that there is to win in Iraq and Afghanistan time to end the police work in those countries and bring the soldiers home.  We got Sadaam and we toppled the Taliban. 

EXCESSIVE MILITARY EXPENSES
We spend almost as much on military as the rest of the world combined, and the other strongest countries are our allies (France and UK).  I think that we can afford to cut military in half at least.