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[alway]

0. Above all else, attempt to honestly inform the public about where we are and where we are going; both as a society and technologically. Bring about real discussion about the future, what will happen, and what can be done about it, in order to figure out how best to avoid terrible mistakes.
1. Copyright reform
2. Prioritize digital infrastructure and regulate the way companies with monopolies or near-monopolies over regions of internet users are gouging them
3. Lower defense budget, particularly our oversized doomsday arsenal (blowing up the world once over is plenty, no need to pay the maintenance to keep the ability to do it 3 times over), and cutting our collection of outdated big-budget toys. Moving the military from its current status of industrial behemoth towards a 'more with less' philosophy emphasizing technological solutions over brute force. Essentially turn it into an agile R&D centric organization.
4. Increase the budget of NASA. Very good investment historically; provides large numbers of high-skill, high-paying jobs, good R&D which benefits everyone, and most importantly, encourages children to go into STEM fields. Which brings me to:
5. Increase funding for primary & secondary education. The current cuts are entirely unproductive in an era when, in some states, jobs requiring technical expertise are expected to outnumber qualified job seekers 2:1 in coming decades.
6. Allocate funding for expansion of post-secondary education. People talk about how college costs are rising at silly rates, the need for post-secondary degrees is rising at similarly high rates; these factors are probably not unrelated. Demand is growing at a rate at which current increases in post-secondary capacity can simply not supply. Fix that issue of supply, and I suspect costs won't be doing what they are now.
7. Universal health care in some form or another. As it currently stands our system is the worst of both worlds; no one has the leverage to lower costs.
8. Ensure laws are based on humanism, not dictated by any particular religious creed.
9. Rein in the current rapidly expanding corporate power. Democracies can not coexist alongside behemoth, rigidly hierarchical entities whose sole aim is profit and which have total or near total control over entire industries, including the distribution of information.

Well, there's probably more, but that's the gist of it.

[Mrhappyface]

I just hope that by downsizing our military overseas won't have our allies having to increase their ones to make up for it.

[Aklyon]

Shut up Hollywood/MPAA/RIAA/Others who have less than a snowflake's chance in hell of knowing what their talking about related to the Internet because they just repeat themselves (or heavily limit their ability to lobby the fuck out of absolutely useless "anti-piracy" bills), and fix the copyright/patent wreckage. Also get the ISPs who get money to expand broadband/fiber optic coverage to stop doing whatever the're doing and actually do what they're given that money for. If Google can give one town Epic Internet, and Sonic.net can do a less news-making but still great job as far as I can tell over yonder in California while not being a nationwide corp, they should be able to at the least cover the country with something that isn't modem-based and has bandwidth measurable in kilobytes.
That is what needs to be cleaned up, I'd say as an IT-related guy.

In general though, alway's list is a good list.

I just hope that by downsizing our military overseas won't have our allies having to increase their ones to make up for it.

Unless people become more peaceful, us doing that will just remind me of what someone said before: "America, because we spend a ridiculous amount compared to others on military, has ended up making us explain away the excess by trying to be everyone's defender if we like them enough."

[Mrhappyface]

Well I guess having extra lemons doesn't matter that much unless you use them.

[G-Flex]

In this case, we're sending extra lemons off to the military by the truckload when plenty of people at home don't have enough lemons to eat, or to go to the doctor. Don't ask me why going to the doctor requires lemons in this analogy.

[GlyphGryph]

And the military doesn't even WANT half the fucking lemons!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'd say that there are plenty of military who love having all the money that they could ever need, even if it means other sections of the government end up critically underfunded. 

[G-Flex]

A lot of military money is spent very wastefully (probably because they have so much, and there are probably issues with contracting deals), and I've heard the Pentagon themselves have stated they don't need that kind of money... but don't quote me on that.

[kaijyuu]

I just hope we quit printing so much money eventually. (Also, thanks for not being the Escapist forums. They think all conservatives are controlled by Skeletor!)

No, not all conservatives are Skeletor. Some are. Others are Skeletor but think they're Jesus. Others want to shove Jesus down everyone else's throat. Others are jerks that only care about themselves and would love to see others suffer (or at least don't care if they do).

The rest are pretty okay, I think.

[Bauglir]

I've got a bit of a sneaky path to economic improvement, but it's got a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting endorsed. And that's assuming anybody important ever reads it, which is even less likely. But the idea would be to cut most agricultural subsidies, and instead directly purchase any food crops that were not sold for a value very slightly less than market price, then process those crops in publicly-operated facilities into food that would then be provided at no cost to poor citizens (along with a redefinition of the poverty level to a point that would eliminate any of those wonky gaps where you can need government assistance and yet be making too much money to qualify, possibly by subtracting debt payments from income before determining eligibility since I don't think that's currently done).

The really important part, though, is to pay for the whole thing with an exclusively corporate tax with very steep brackets, to provide an incentive to larger corporations to pay their employees a living wage (an incentive that doesn't really exist right now since the only real one, "If they don't have money, they can't buy our products" is currently being staved off through a combination of credit and expecting other corporations to suck up the cost). The steep brackets mean that the largest corporations will save money by paying larger wages, because they command a larger portion of the workforce (and can therefore have an impact) and pay a disproportionate amount of the tax (so that each dollar they pay in wages saves them more than a dollar in taxes that are designed to make up for too-small wages). The way I see it, that incentive's absence is a major problem that's leading to economic stagnation lately. I actually have no idea how much of the first paragraph is already in place, but it's this second one that is actually key and therefore the least likely to be considered acceptable. You could probably do something similar with health care, housing, and other basic services, but those are even more wildly improbable.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

A lot of military money is spent very wastefully (probably because they have so much, and there are probably issues with contracting deals), and I've heard the Pentagon themselves have stated they don't need that kind of money.

The Pentagon? Sure. But I've never heard an R&D lab say that they've had enough of the money. They're making things that are literally decades ahead of the mainstream.

[GlyphGryph]

The Pentagon has requested a great many cuts. Congress pretty much refuses every one of them.

And of course the particular PEOPLE getting the money will disagree, but the people running the military, maybe even the military as a whole, certainly want to be rid of them. And even the R&D people will probably be all to happy to cut other departments even if they only get a slight uptick in their own funding. (or even if they don't)

[alway]

I just hope we quit printing so much money eventually.

Why? Does it scare you to think about your money being fundamentally a system based on magic? Because it is regardless of whether it is printed or not.
I HIGHLY recommend listening to this particular This American Life podcast episode: The Invention of Money.

What it boils down to is this:
1. inflation/deflation represents and increase/decrease in the amount of money in active circulation (or in other words, being spent rather than sitting in a vault)
2. this amount decreases naturally during economic downturns, resulting in low inflation, or worse, deflation
3. re-normalizing the money supply will boost the economy, whether it is lowering overly high inflation or increasing it when inflation gets too low (or becomes deflation)
4. re-normalizing the money supply is done by the government through a variety of means, with 'printing money' (not that they actually print anything; it's all a numbers game on computers) by loaning previously non-existent money to banks being one method of increasing the money supply. Lowering it has it's own methods and such; but it's all just basic monetary policy stuff which is standard economics.

Why would the US's allies need to make up for it? The things I outlined were essentially the equivalent of cutting out the expensive dick-waving the US currently does with its military. Our military has all sorts of redundancies which serve no other purpose than to say 'hey, lol, we can kill everyone with our nukes 3 times over!' You can still destroy the world once over with 1/3 of the cost. Similarly, there are expensive military redundancies in which one project attempts to solve a problem which either doesn't exist or was already solved by a more cost effective solution. Aside from that, future wars among large powers won't be fought with the F-35 (costing an estimated $700 million per plane over their lifetime; $1.5 trillion estimated cost in total for the lot of them), but by subroutines implanted in power stations. It's bringing a knife to a sniper fight; or it would be if the knife cost $1.5 trillion.

[Mrhappyface]

Nah. American healthcare is a strange beast. It's not free, but top-tier if you can afford it. America also produces much of the world's med tech, yet many of its citizens will never benefit from it. It's a business, not a right and has all the pros and cons of a relatively free industry.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's not free, but top-tier if you can afford it.

The secret is that you can't afford it.