Overall, I have truly enjoyed macroeconomics and am considering taking microeconomics as well. I feel that I may be able to take more ideas to use in my personal life from microeconomics; however, I was able to take several things away now. The largest change will be implementing our household strategy of savings and investments and maximizing our buying power during market fluctuations in our local economies.

Our current budgetary plans of running a deficit continue to drive the United States debt total deeper into the trillions. For one year, I would love to be in charge of cutting the budget deficit, which is set to be over $350 billion dollars for fiscal year 2018 and put the United States federal government budget back into balance.

In my one-year plan, I intend to immediately set a two-rate tax system for individuals above the median income level of 25% and a rate of 15% for those under the median income level. Corporations with over $1 million in revenue will be taxed at the 25% rate, while small businesses making less than $1 million in revenue will be taxed at the 15% rate. This plan will completely discard previous progressive tax brackets and simplify the tax code. There will be no tax credits given for the first tax year, and re-evaluations of whether to give tax credits will be decided each new tax year based on revenue from tax filings.

After the taxes are set at their fixed rate for everyone, I will take the estimated tax revenue and compare to the expenditures. If the expenditures were still causing a deficit, or not creating a large enough gap to gain positive revenue to contribute to the national debt, I would take aim at the largest expenditures.  

Arguably, one of the most disliked but not heavily debated national expenditures is our military budget. While I completely support our military and service members, I do feel that we could cut funding from the military budget by 25% to help reduce our national debt. This would promote a more streamlined military and reduction of unnecessary equipment purchases. Cutting military funding by 25% we would decrease the budget deficit to approximately $200 billion dollars.

While lowering the military budget only impacts our discretionary spending, I would also argue that the simplified tax plan would impact unemployment, as more small businesses can afford to hire laborers due to a lowered tax rate for their lower revenue business. A lower burden on our unemployment expenditures should also feed into a lower burden on food assistance programs, due to many unemployed workers to now have gainful employment, thus no longer needing food assistance.

I feel that if we can simplify the tax code, which simplifies our revenue stream, we can stimulate our economy naturally and decrease the burden on government assistance, thus decreasing federal expenditures and forcing the budget into balance. Our ultimate goal should be to create a surplus in our budget to pay back into our national debt and eliminate all need to borrow money and any need to pay interest on that borrowed money.  

Although my plan may not be perfect, and may not even work, I do believe we should give each idea to fix our rising debt levels and ever-increasing budget deficit a one year trial, to see which works best, and after a 4 year trial period, the public could vote on their favorite plan at the ballots during the presidential election.
