If I were running for President, here would be my financial proposal

 

• Get rid of, or drastically reduce, the minimum wage, and get rid of the idea that anyone with a full-time job should be able to support a small family with it.
• There are too many double income families, or single income individuals that either share a home with other income earners, or at least don’t have a family to also support.  These people will have way more spending cash than the single income families.  Even if we raised the minimum wage so that single income families can support themselves, the dual-income families would have enough extra cash that they would cause prices to go up, and single income families still wouldn’t be able to afford all they need.
• Also, by getting rid of the minimum wage, we reduce the entrance barrier to getting into the job market.  People who have jobs won’t be making as much money, but more people will have jobs, and employers will be more likely to take a chance on someone just entering the job market because the cost will be less.
• Adjust tax rates based on a mathematical formula based on an ideal slope between rich and poor, and that taxes the rich more based on the steepness of this slope.
• Instead of trying to raise taxes on the wealthy to make them pay their fare share, or lowering taxes on the wealthy to spur investment and encourage them to keep their wealth within the country, this method would mathematically determine how our tax rates would scale based on income.
• We would decide what ideal difference is between the incomes of the rich and the poor (the slope of a line who's y-axis is income and who's x-axis is # of people at or below that income level).  The steeper the slope, i.e. the greater the divide between rich and poor, the more we tax the rich, and the shallower the slope, the less we tax the rich.  Or, to put it another way, the greater the divide between rich and poor, the more we tax the rich to compensate for that difference.
• People will still argue over what the ideal slope should be.  It should be steep enough to give people incentive to work hard and reward innovation, but shallow enough to enable most people to live comfortably, and to buy enough stuff to keep the economy going.
• People will also argue about how reactive tax rate changes should be based on how the division between rich and poor changes.  For example, should a small change in the division between rich and poor trigger a small change in the tax rate, or a bigger change.  I think the change in tax rate should be big enough that it encourages people and corporations to stay close to the ideal line, but not so big that it can throw our society out of control.  It's probably best to start small, and then gradually experiment with different tax change rates.
• I'm actually seeing one problem with this proposal as I write it, in that the tax rate depends on large scale economics, but that people behave individually.  In other words, there's really no more incentive for an individual wealthy person or company to suddenly start paying their workers more money, because they'll reduce their own income without really affecting the rest of society much, so they'll still end up paying a lot in taxes.  Anyone have a solution to this?
• Provide basic necessities for free for everyone, regardless of income.
• There are several problems with welfare today:
• Once you get a job, you lose your welfare, so unless you’re able to get a really great paying job, it really makes more sense to stay on welfare.  With this system, everyone is welcome, so you’re still able to take advantages of the services even if you do get a job.
• There is a lot of overhead in determining who is eligible for welfare.  A lot of people who shouldn’t be on welfare successfully cheat the system by submitting a false claim, and a lot of people who really do deserve welfare are denied it because someone doesn’t believe their claim.  If the services are free to everyone, then there is no opportunity to cheat the system, and there’s no denial of services for those who really need it.
• The level of services provided need to be spare enough that people would rather get a job and move beyond those services.
• We could just write everyone a check.  Taxes would have to go up to pay for this, but for a person of average income, the amount of the check they receive would be designed to be equal to the amount of extra taxes they pay.
• However, if we want to keep costs down more, and thus reduce the tax increase required to pay for it, we could just provide homeless shelters, soup kitchens, donated clothing, etc..  Anyone could take advantage of it, but if you can afford better, you would, and you would no longer use the free services.
• If we wanted to control costs even more, we could limit the amount of resources available for free so that the more people tried to take advantage of the free services, the less would be available for each individual person, thus encouraging more people to find other sources of income.
• Provide post-high-school education for free, but limit number of recipients based on national and/or corporate need, and award based on merit, with perhaps some scaling based on race or some other nationally recognized disparity.  Also, scale amount of education and subject matter based on national and/or corporate need.
• The goal here is to make our nation stronger by educating the best and brightest among us in the most cost-effective way possible.  We don’t need everyone to have a PhD, or even a bachelor’s.  There are plenty of jobs available for people with no college.  There are also a lot of jobs that require education in a specific area, but don’t require a more general education.  And then we also need people, the top decision makers, to have a broad education that allows them to see beyond their immediate field.
• We could have government control the number of people we educate at each level, and what subjects we should educate them in, but I think it would be preferable to allow industry to decide.  If IBM needs a lot of hardware engineers, it should specify how many people it needs educated, at what levels, and in what subjects.
• Companies can also be incentivised to help pay for the educational system by giving them more access to the top students based on how much they paid into the system.  We might even allow for a kind of indentured servitude if good enough controls can be enforced to make sure that people are treated fairly.
• People can also pay for college themselves if they are unable to qualify through the merit-based system.
• One reason people feel a need to go to college is that incomes are so much better for college graduates.  This causes people to take out loans and do whatever they can to afford college, which causes college tuition to skyrocket.  Critical to getting this to work is to lower the division between rich and poor so that the incentive to go to college matches our societies need for college graduates.