PAYGO

Doubling the Peace Corps to 16,000, and extending Americorps to 250,000 seem like ideas with a lot of potential - but what would they actually do? Is there a way to use PAYGO to get concrete services out of them, such that the Peace Corps’ salary, health and life insurance, and three-tiered retirement plan would be fair compensation? And pooled resources that provide food, simple clothing (jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts), shelter (barracks in renovated and reopened military bases), and recreational facilities? Certainly recovering from hurricanes, earthquakes, and forest fires is worth paying for. Federal tutors bearing down on substandard districts might be effective. Manning clinics for flu shots could be a low-key rehearsal for biowarfare. Adequate pay would dignify the services performed.

Because education has a lower priority in this country than sports, employers are used to training new hires. Use them, and use the excellent training facilities that the military already has, to train noncombatants in Americorps and the Peace Corps to do useful work for the nation.

Relax restrictions on entrepreneurs. We can get out there and do lots of things, but the paperwork is too much hassle! I would guess that there are 25 million jobs, let alone 2.5 million, that people could invent for themselves, if government just got out of the way! Especially if their income were not taxed. The amounts, at least at first, would not pay the cost of collecting them anyway. John Stossel did a "special", showing how easy it was to start a business in Singapore versus how difficult it was in India. How about letting anyone with a car earn some money using it as a taxi, with no warranties expressed or implied?

Using the PAYGO principle on the extension of unemployment insurance, how about basing those payments on actual work done? If folks will volunteer at soup kitchens for no benefits, more will volunteer for similar duties when benefits are offered. I can remember “policing up” the grounds on military bases. Make it part of the Americorps program: no job too small. Even slackers, panhandlers, and functional retardates could be picking up litter, and might be happy to if it were made hassle-free and properly rewarded. You can’t bail out everyone, and there’d be a lot less resentment from the rest of us if cities got visibly cleaner in exchange for money being spent.

I’d also like to see a combination of your whistleblower protection with the line-item oversight of federal programs, and a finder’s fee for individuals or groups who save government money. Say a 10% finder’s fee for up to a million dollars’ worth of savings, down to a 1% fee for saving a billion (ten million dollars is probably adequate encouragement).

Above all, please, do it with all deliberate speed, but Don’t Panic. Don’t overdrive your headlights. Do no harm. One of the reasons for the Wall Street meltdown was that CEOs couldn’t understand the algorithms their mathematicians were using.

As for those of us on Main Street, if we’d saved a little money along the way, we wouldn’t be worried about paying next month’s bills with next month’s paycheck. But we can solve our own problems. We may be consumptive (pun intended), but we’re neither clueless nor helpless.