Let's fix America.

- Disallow corporate donations to politicians, pacs, and political parties. (Get corporate influence out of politics.)
- Legalize marijuana, regulate it, and tax it. (Saves billions on drug prosecutions and keeping people in jail, generates billions in tax revenue.)
- Pass a balanced budget amendment.
- Close all tax loop-holes and write-offs other than charitable donations. Tax all income at 8%, 16%, 24%, 32%. (Add at least one tax bracket.) And possibly 40%.
- Limit the number of federal laws to 2,000. (Reduced from over 200,000.) When a new law is passed, a previously existing law must be removed.
- Limit all laws to a maximum of 5 pages in length. They must be written in plain-English and provide great clarity regarding the legal intent of the law.
- Pass a constitutional amendment that limits military spending to, say, 25% of federal income. (It is currently 94%!, leaving 6% for the rest of the country. Fuck that.)
- Anyone on unemployment must spend 16 hours a week volunteering for a charitable cause or doing some form of government work -- repairing roads or fences, for instance, in addition to spending the required amount of time job-searching, thus "earning" some portion of their unemployment check.
- Limit the highest-paid employee (in terms of actual wage) of any company to 100 times the pay of the lowest paid employee of that company.
- Outlaw Wal-Mart and places like it.
- Outlaw amazon.com and places like it. (I know this sounds outlandish, but they kill jobs. You know it and I know it. And we need jobs.)
- Enforce existing monopoly laws and break up the various conglomerate giants which now exist to defy common sense, decency, and U.S. law.
- Begin a very serious national campaign (with, say, the fervor of the anti-drug/ "Just say No" campaigns) to "Buy American."
- Limit benefits like social security payouts to those with less than 3 million dollars, net worth. (This generates billions of additional funds for the elderly who actually need it.)
- End the "War on drugs."
- Legalize audio and video recording of public officials who are in public, conducting the public's business, everywhere in the country.
- Create new standards for new police officers entering the force, mostly focused on a battery of psychological and personality exams, to try to ensure that the kind of people who become police officers are those who genuinely want to help people, and to protect and serve, and weed out the bullies.
- Pass a law stating that any policeman convicted of a crime must be given the maximum sentence, hard time. No suspended sentences, no probation, no judiciary discretion.
- Ditto politicians.
- End the death penalty forever.
- Make prisoners grow their own food, and generate their own electricity -- say by riding stationary bikes.
- Make prisoners "work" and produce something to the benefit of society. Making license plates is a nice start. Let's get them manufacturing ipods and computer parts and Nikes, and reduce our dependency on third-world labor.
- Start a world-class national University, where tuition is free. Select 15% of the student body by lottery. (This would cost about 3 billion dollars a year.)
- Make it possible to recall by special elections, when warranted, members of Congress.
- Make English the national language.
- Put employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens in jail.
- Put landlords who knowingly rent to illegal aliens in jail.

I'm open-minded. Feel free to let me know where I've gone wrong, and if you're so inclined, how you would do it better.

The vast majority of students would be selected by academic merit.  Having a small number selected by lottery would provide a chance for some brilliant kids who may not have done well in school, for various reasons, a chance at a first-rate college education.  There are those people out there who are smarter than their teachers, smarter than the curriculum, bored to their fucking teeth by school, who get lost in America because of it.