Drew Cummins
12/8/2013
You Decide

If I was to advise the president I would make sure that there are two main focuses. First is that we need to get people back to work, second we need to do something to change the trend of falling prices. When I look at the recommendation of the other people on the panel I see Kathy Lee’s sticking out. The fastest way to get a large number of people back on the job would be some sort of public works program. Cutting government spending and raising taxes would make that pretty much impossible. If you were to look more at Alison’s scenario of increasing government spending and lowering taxes, you could get everyone back to work rebuilding infrastructure, but in the long term you would have a hard time sustaining the expense. I would try to raise taxes in certain sectors, I do not subscribe to trickle-down economics and believe that if you were to keep the tax levels relatively low on the poor/lower brackets and increase the rate on the rich/higher brackets it would be a better solution that across the board cuts.
If our prices are falling then this needs to be addressed for two different reasons. First America is not typically considered to be the cheap option when comparing goods on a worldwide wide scale. They make cars in India for less than $1000 but we would never let them be imported due to safety issues, we are not set up to compete this way on the world stage. The second reason is that stability is one of the greatest assets of the US dollar. Other countries peg their currencies to ours because of that strength and stability.
My recommendation is to use this scenario as a pivot point. I would increase government spending, paid for by increase in some taxes, and shift our workforce into a new area. We could have a giant, coordinated push into a new sector that would give us stability for years to come. Lower