Quote:
Originally Posted by DuffMan
go on....
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Okay, take infrastructure. It's a problem all over the USA. Raise the gas tax to the same proportional % that it was the last time it was raised. Additionally, raise income taxes by 2% for two years with the entirety of that $ being flagged for infrastructure. That is a huge amount of $ to fix roads and bridges around the country. That will also create a humongous amount of jobs.
For crappy rundown airports, why not use the same model that has been used recently for building hockey rinks and the like. A ticket tax. The government loans the initial $ for the project, but over the next 10-15 years ticket sales pay it back with interest. That way the government is not really out anything (will make money on the deal actually), it is passed on to the users. With bigger airports like the ones in NY, a $5 surcharge would recoup the funds extremely quickly.
That's an easy fix. Build it and they will come. The economy exploded after the highways were built under Eisenhower. Similar such upgrades with high speed rail and the like would have similar effects.
Coal going out of business is a problem for those areas. Create training programs for those same people to be able to work at green energy jobs of some sort (there are tons of different jobs available in that field). With it being an emerging field that is going to take over things, training programs are going to be necessary regardless. Also boosts the economy. That's just a matter of allocating some $ towards it. A relatively small amount considering the expanding nature of that area anyway.
The middle class has been destroyed over the past 40-50 years. That's due in large part to stagnant wages. Now it requires two people to earn what one person used to back then. All that savings for the corporate bottom line has gone directly to the top 1%. So one way to fix that is to look at the minimum wage and what the actual "value" it was based on it's value, and adjust for inflation over the past 40 years and keep the minimum wage on a sliding scale to adjust for inflation over time. That would mean that the minimum wage will go up to around $23 USD. That sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but that is how much things have gotten screwed up over the last 40 years. That would have a multiple benefit as it would increase the wealth of the lower and low end middle class, but it would also benefit the economy as people will actually have money to spend on things that they didn't before. In certain fields, that will cause automation to become increasingly more common. Things like fast food/cashiers etc will get automated. However, there are a lot of jobs that are not possible, at least at this time to automate. The man power from those jobs could be shifted into other fields. There are always new things being innovated that create jobs. There would be adjustment periods for those people, but that's what training programs are for.
University can be paid for, for everyone in the USA, by a 1 cent per transaction charge for every trade on Wall Street. 1 cent is nothing, but it adds up with the volume of deals that are being made. It won't be "felt" by anyone involved, but it will help get rid of the ridiculous student debt problem.