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.