1) Taxes

We generate $2 trillion/ year from income tax. I would change the tax system as follows:

a) 10% flat federal income tax rate
b) No deductions. Period. Not for kids, state taxes, property taxes, nothing.

Income tax was collected from 146,000,000 people in 2000. Assume an average salary of $27000/year.

That's $3.94 trillion.
Companies would be responsible for collecting these taxes, out of each paycheck.

So, no filing income tax returns. No W2, or W4 for that matter. thousands of pages of tax code eradicated, millions (if not billions) saved.

But what about all the lawyers, accountant and tax collectors that would be put out of work, I hear you ask?

I'm sure they'll find gainful employment as company lawyers, accountants and state tax collectors.

2) Education.

Education is the silver bullet. I would want public schools to become pillars of knowledge and learning. And that means better teachers, better supplies, better facilities.

$400 billion was spent on public schools in 2000. I will take $600 billion to increase their budget to $1 trillion.

Simply paying teachers properly and having modern text books would ease a lot of the problems, but I would also want this money to be used to reduce class size, and to build a better information technology system so that not only can the schools share resources, but the parents would have better and faster access to how their children are doing. No more relying on kids to bring home notes from teachers when they start to screw up.

College Education.
There were 15 million students in college in 2000. Smaller K-12 classrooms means more teachers.
There are currently around 3.6 million K-12 teachers. We need closer to 7 million.
So, anyone with a 3.0 grade average gets a conditional scholarship. They will get $6000/year (index linked to tax revenue increases) for college through Bachelors degree.
If they drop out, they have to pay it back, like a college loan.
When they graduate, they have to work as a teacher for half the time that it took them to graduate.
This program, and the additional teachers salaries comes to about $1.4 trillian.

So that's my extra $2 trillion used up.

I have other things I'd want to do to, but R. just told me its getting late and we need to go to bed. So perhaps another time.

Besides, a better educated population resulting from the above changes can come up with better solutions to the rest of the problems than I can...