I'm not fond of hearing "America, we have a problem" without "...so let's put on our thinking caps. Here's one tentative solution." I do want to hear what is more likely to work, actually. I'm the kind of person who goes to school board meetings with ideas written down and more hatching as I hear other people speak.

These wars have been expensive, and in all the wrong ways; I've heard horror stories about underequipped troops. Also, remember how run down Walter Reed got? Yeah. That's where we should've been spending. I don't know where the money went, which scares me a little. No. A lot.

I know that some expenditures were sort of inevitable (cleanup after disasters, natural and man-made) and that inflation happens, so we do have to get creative about reining in spending. We have to think where the money really will do the most good. Did my town need another roundabout when it could've put the money into its schools instead? Things like that.