Let's see if we can figure this out today.

make the biggest 10 corporations pay taxes, i mean at least as much as the avg worker in the US.

i'm not against it but how would you stop them from passing that cost on to consumers?

It's simple, everybody should pay their fair share (which means more) and we should do like everyone and spend what we can afford to spend. If they don't want to buy it, they don't have to have it.

WWIII is still on the horizon, which is as far as it's always been, so we can snip a little off that a lot.
Hitler is still dead, the Marshall Plan was a success, it's time for the rest of Planet Welfare to stop pretending they can't afford to defend themselves. And it they truly can't, then let somone who can do it for them instead, just like the old days.
Same with allowance they keep recieving from us. If, after tens of thousands of years they can't stand on their quivering legs, then, again, allow someone else to take over for them.

That goes for our own too. Oil, farming, industry, etc.
My complaint about gas prices is that it's half of what it actually is.
Same with food. Sucks that we can't all be obese, but in the long run, we'll actually have more food on our shelves as we stop throwing it out.

Education should be approached like any other business - fire the inept dolts that have brought it down to their inept level and replace them with those more capable.
Oh, and tell the stupid kids to shut up and do their homework because growing up to be stupid ain't cute, they can just ask their stupid useless parents if they have any doubts on that front.

We're all a bunch of maggots. The problem with maggots (other than being unsightly to our eyes) is that once the carcass runs out, the maggots starve to death.
I'd rather avert that for the time being because I'm selfish like that and would rather do more selfish things than ending up on the pile in the boneyard.

Biden did that and my Disney+ subscription cost went up as a result.

Got a better idea? You can't tax a corporation without immediately taxing every consumer as a result.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubilee-is-only-way-avoid-depression/

let me rack up some more debt first

Cutting spending needs to be the first step.

Tax policy revisions would be nice, I'd like a serious overhaul (but no major increases) to simplify them, if possible.

everyone agrees on that until it's time to decide the specific areas for cuts.

I'd point out that our education spending is exorbitant, yet the results are laughably bad...seems like that could do with a new approach other than, "This must work like the military! Throw more money at it!"

Granted, a few billion dollars isn't going to actually make a huge difference, but fat-trimming cuts like that could certainly happen in a lot of places.

there's a lot of activity in education that i don't agree with. our education system has lacked qualified leadership for a long time. it seems like a good strategy will need to address that problem first, which should be easy to do, and yet it hasn't been done.

Exactly. We need good people to lay out good programs and strategies, then allocate as much money as is necessary to achieve those goals. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume we could save a LOT of money and get a LOT better results if we had a competent hand at the helm.

I don't see how spending a lot less on our educational system is a brilliant idea (although there's a lot of fat in government loans that go into for-profit colleges).

The real pork is in defense.

Here's the only reason I bring it up and defend defense spending as-is;

We spend the most money in the world on our military, but it is world-class and arguably the strongest on earth. We spend the most money on education as well, but it is NOT world class and NOT the best set of programs on earth.

I'd rather have the best military AND the best education system on earth, but only the military achieves that goal through raw cash infusions (pay, R&D, upkeep). (There are absolutely ways the military needs to save money, don't get me wrong. The F-35 and LCS programs, for example, were huge black holes for money and should not have been anything of the sort.)

Education needs good programs run by good people in order to get great results, and right now I'm not certain our current strategy of dumping more money into all schooling systems is the right way to go....Actually, I'm certain it's the wrong way to go. I'm no policy maker, mind you, and don't have a better idea as of right now, but we need to figure out what will actually get good results in our schools, especially our public systems. Once we find that out then we need to make as much money as is necessary available.

Idealistic, yes, but a better course than the one we've charted.

Good point, sir. But when you dig a little deeper, it looks like a few states in the Northeast are responsible for most of that sticker price. Maybe we need to copy what Colorado is doing. They're in the top ten and only spend about 10k per.

But you know where we could REALLY save money -- if we incarcerated fewer people. Apparently we spend more than 40 billion a year locking people up.