How To Decrease The Nations Debt

          
               Its no mystery that this nation is in some serious debt. The question is what are we going to do about this problem? Now we have all heard the angles of who's fault this problem is. "It's Bush's fault, no it's Obama's fault, it's the Republicans fault, no it's the Democrats fault." If you ask me, it is everyone's fault. This country has many bad policies in place. The American people are as much to blame for this as are our elected officials. The reason being we elect bad politicians who have no business running for public office in the first place. Some of us buy our politicians, some of us don't vote, most of us don't hold our politicians accountable when they are being corrupted by big business, big religious groups, or by any group that reap the benefits for themselves and not for the improvement of our great county.
               Now lets look at some things we can do as a county to start paying off the national debt. We could get a team of the top respected financial advisers in the country to come up with a budget for all national elections. We will use the presidential election as an example, since that is the election most of us (including me) are most familiar with. We are going to get this financial advisor to go through the last 5 elections and see how much each election cost for each candidate and average the total cost. This is not how much money each candidate raised, but actually spent on their campaign. This way they can see how much it went up each election. Then they are going to look at how the candidates spent their money. If there is any wasteful spending subtract that from the cost of the average election. Then the advisor can implement a budget of what they think the up coming election should cost based on the previous elections. Each candidate running for president will only be allowed to raise that amount of money that the advisor set forth. If the candidates raise more money than the budget proposed then that money only goes towards the national deficit. They could also put  some money towards a national disaster fund for disasters like hurricane Katrina.
               The next thing our country can do is get rid of the filibuster. As a country we will get more done if this policy is removed  This policy has been abused by a certain party and the country ends up paying for it in the long run. Tough policies are always going to be a close vote that's why they are tough. The majority of the house and senate should be enough to get policies past, we shouldn't need a super majority. If congress  spends most of their time using stall tactics like using the filibuster, then all they are doing is waisting taxpayers money.
              One of the biggest budget cuts we can make is defence spending. Do we still need troops in Japan and Germany still? There are almost 90,000 troops in those 2 counties alone. Last I heard Hitler was dead and I don't think he is coming back. Did you know the U.S. spent  663,255,000,000 on military expenditure's in 2009? That is almost 7 times more than the next closest which was China at 98,800,000,000. There has to be some significant areas that we can cutback on and still have the best military in the world.
             Another area is prisons, 1 out of every 18 men are behind bars, or being monitored. That's over 5 percent of the U.S. population. The reason we have so many people behind bars is the 3 strike rule. This law was primarily made for protecting the public from violent offenders. Instead, the law ended up working against the nonviolent offenders. This is mostly do to the war on drugs, which saw drug offender arrests increase twelve fold since 1980. If we spent more on rehabilitating the drug offenders instead of locking them up with violent offenders we could save ourselves some grief and money. Many times these nonviolent offenders are put into prison where they get caught up in prison politics, and become violent offenders.
             The final way to help draw down the national debt is to legalize marijuana. Many states have already legalized medical marijuana, and California actually put it on their ballot to legalize it for everyone 21 and over. It did not pass though do to many people thinking that it would drive up crime. I think keeping marijuana illegal is fighting the inevitable. Many people believe it is a far better drug than alcohol. People don't get angry and stupid off of to much marijuana the way they do when they drink to much alcohol.  We could benefit from legalizing marijuana in several ways. It would help out the economy because marijuana tends to make people hungry so that would help out the restaurant businesses. Just think how much each state would make in taxes. I bet the upcoming governor of California wished marijuana would of passed due to how much debt California is in.
            In conclusion that is some of my ways to start drawing down the national debt. Now I am not naive enough to think that there will be any major change to anything that I have suggested. People are to stuck in their ways, or to scared to think outside the box. Many people and the government are already talking about these ideas. In fact some ideas have already been put in place by the government. Ending the war on Iraq  is one. The government is also trying to close down Gitmo, but it is turning out to be more complicated than they thought. They are also hoping to withdraw the troops out of Afghanistan by mid to the end of 2011. California tried to to pass the nonviolent rehabilitation act for prisons, but again it failed like the marijuana bill. This is why we need to keep special interests and big money out of politics. This is also why we need to get rid of the filibuster so we can actually pass legitimate bills that do not have to keep bouncing back and forth between the house and senate. When the bill should of already passed because it had the majority of the vote. Then by the time the bill does pass its so water down that all they did was waste time, a whole lot of paper, and the tax payers hard earned money.

The Task At Hand

             Online side jobs, that’s what I call them. This is where people pay you to complete a task for them out of there own pocket. These jobs are not hard to find either. All you have to do is type in your web browser, “make money online for doing tasks.” Then it will bring up a list of various websites where people offer tasks.

             This is a great idea for when a person is really busy to be able to pay someone else online to get the task at hand done for them. It is also a great idea for the individual who needs to make some extra loot to help out with their bills, or possibly get a gift for their kids. This is also a bad deal because some people try to take advantage of other people by paying them very little for a lot of work.

 Here is an example of one of the tasks that I saw. This person was willing to pay 3 dollars if you signed up to there website. Once you signed up, they wanted you to go to the Hits4you website and surf for 1000 credits for there site. Let’s take a look at this more closely. One ad takes 20 seconds to watch at the Hits4you website, and you get one credit, so that’s three credits for every minute. Ten minutes equals 30 credits, one hour equals 180 credits. So you are looking at about six hours just to make 3 dollars. Talk about slave labor. Does the internet need a minimum wage law so people won’t take advantage of other people? 

Here is another example of  more common task offers where people pay on average 2 to 5 cents for you to sign up to a website thus making you their referral.. Even that is low, you can go to paid to click sites like Clicksia (pays 10 to 15 cents), and Scarlet Clicks which pays 15 cents for you to sign up for their offers. Sometimes people will tell you to click 25 ads if you want to get credit for the task or something to that effect. One should want to sign up for the offer to get credit. If you do not like the offer you should not sign up just to get a little money because you will just be waiting time in the long run. It is not worth the little amount of money for the time you have to put in, if you are never going to go back to that site the offer was for once completed.

All the tasks were not bad; some paid 4 to 5 dollars for you to write a 250 to 500 word article. If you are a good writer you could probably finish this in ten to twenty minutes. The only thing is if they don’t like the article they don’t have to pay you. Most likely if you are a good writer you are not going to be wasting your time in sites like this unless you are bored or just want to help someone out. If you are an average writer you can go to sites like text broker.com and they will pay you accordingly to how well your article is written. That way you know you are going to get paid something for your work.  

 Overall the people putting out these tasks can do other options to help out with the lack of pay they are giving for completing there tasks. They could pay some cash and also let the person who completed the task put a link on their website. Lots of people give out free e-books; this could be included in the deal along with some cash. They could also offer their services as a referral as well. The bottom line is there are lots of ways people can pay other people it doesn’t always have to be money.

Every one who is looking for a task to do needs to be careful too. Look around the website, and see if they have a forum. Check to see if there are any complaints about people not paying. Obviously if you find a bunch of complaints I would not use this website to do tasks. With any website that pays always check the Terms of Service and the FAQ’S that way you know what you are getting yourself into. Mostly just use common sense and everything should work out.