The Answers to Most of America’s Problems are Simple, But Not Easy
Ronald Reagan gets falsely portrayed by the Left as a dumb man, but he was actually one of the most quotable figures in American history (Note to self: Do a list of Reagan’s 50 best quotes on the anniversary of his death in June).
For example, consider this quote:
How many of America’s problems are simple to solve, but seem nearly impossible because of politics? A surprising number of them actually.
That was brought to mind by this article about attempts to clean up the dirty, dangerous subways in NYC.
Local lawmakers and the mayor’s office need to “assess and address” a surge in people being arrested and taken to court for lying down or spreading out in New York City’s public transit system, the leader of the City Council committee that oversees homeless services said in response to a Gothamist data analysis this week.
“It feels problematic to me to know there’s a significant spike in people who are being charged for lying down or sleeping on the train,” said Councilmember Crystal Hudson, chair of the Committee on General Welfare. “I would say that if they had a safe, stable bed to sleep in, then they wouldn’t be sleeping on the train.”
Rather than criminally charge people, she said, “I think we need to be thinking about what types of resources we can actually offer.”
The number of court cases in which the most serious charge someone faced was for lying down or taking up more than one seat in public transit climbed more than 3,000% — from 19 to 591 — between 2024 and 2025, Gothamist found. Cases for the first three months of this year outpaced the number during the same period last year, according to a review of state court data. In nearly all of these cases, the person was taken into custody rather than given a ticket.
...But Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, a former public defender, said the city “absolutely” needs to change the way it addresses homelessness in the public transit system. Cabán has proposed legislation that would require government employees who do homeless outreach to receive training in how to interact with vulnerable people. It would also prohibit police or sanitation officials from participating in this work.
“Why is somebody finding themselves exhausted on a train, or precariously housed, or unhoused, sleeping on a train?” she said. “Rather than focusing on the failed systems that need to be changed to fix that big problem, we focus on individuals as people to be managed or corrected or disappeared or cast aside or disciplined for conditions that really are put upon them.”
Cabán, a Mamdani supporter, has urged him to hold his police commissioner accountable and ensure she abandons policies that target homeless people.
Within the last three years on the NYC subways, deranged lunatic Jordan Neely died in a conflict with Daniel Penny and other passengers in a nationally controversial incident. A random woman was burned alive. The police shot a guy slashing random people with a machete, and multiple people were pushed onto the tracks:
In a real sense, this dramatically undersells how bad it is because the subway cars there are disgusting, and it’s not unusual to have homeless people acting like lunatics or making threats. Even if that’s as far as it goes, why should people just trying to get home from work have to deal with that?
Yet, what do we see? Left-wingers trying to keep the insanity going by blocking a small, common-sense fix that would be likely to help improve it.
Remember when Joe Biden was president and he said he needed Congress to pass a new immigration bill to give him the power to shut down the river of illegals he was allowing in (It also would have codified much of the disastrous mess Biden allowed into law)?
Well, guess what? That horrible bill never became law, but when Donald Trump got into office, he was able to shut down the border much more tightly than Biden was even promising to do, without any new legislation:
Everyone seems to think, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do. We’re just stuck.” As this chart shows you, that’s not even remotely true. There are obvious solutions to many of the worst problems Americans face, if we’re willing to do them.
For example, what problem seems more hopeless and intractable than the deficit? Democrats started a terror campaign against TESLA because Elon Musk was trying to get rid of fraud and waste in the US government, and even Republicans in Congress could at best be described as lukewarm about what he was doing.
But, do you know what it would take to balance the budget? Freezing spending at the current level for 6 or 7 years would probably be enough to get it done. Granted, that means if let’s say the interest on the debt or payments on Social Security went up, we’d have to make cuts elsewhere to do it, AND wiping out the deficit isn’t the same thing as getting rid of debt, but is it not just doable, but SIMPLE? Yes, it is.
Could America DRAMATICALLY reduce our crime rate by simply permanently jailing anyone with say 3 felonies or 10 arrests? Since a large amount of crime can be traced back to a tiny number of career criminals, we absolutely can.
How do you stop shoplifting? When you catch shoplifters, you arrest and punish them. If someone gets caught doing it multiple times, they get significant jail time. It’s not a heavy lift.
Want to dramatically improve the quality of immigrants coming to America? Put a merit-based system in place. If you’re not marrying an American, you only get here if you obey our laws, add to the tax base, and adopt our culture. We could literally make immigrants ineligible for welfare and denaturalize them if they commit a serious offense. You want to take immigration from a never ending source of controversy to something that undeniably benefits America? This is how you do it.
How many illegal aliens do you think we’d have here if we wrote into law that anyone caught here illegally could never come here legally again, could never be a citizen, and would have to spend 5 years doing FREE manual labor with the checks they earned going to the American taxpayers? It would be pretty close to zero, right?
Want better, more honest representation in Congress? Okay, how about we raise the pay to $500,000 per year to discourage bribery and insider trading, term limit everyone in the House to three terms, everyone in the Senate to two terms, and make it illegal for members of Congress or their family members to work as lobbyists in the future? Do you think that would dramatically improve the quality of people we have in office while dramatically reducing the amount of corruption? Of course, it would.
Want to cut government waste? Okay, how about putting every single government agency on the same kind of accounting software and making all of it searchable by the public (with a few exceptions for military and intelligence buys). Sunlight is the best disinfectant and allowing anyone and everyone to see exactly where their tax dollars are spent would do more to eliminate fraud than anything else we could do.
What about improving education? There are a lot of things we could do here, but how about just paying teachers based on performance? What percentage of your kids graduate? How do they perform on tests? How do they compare to kids in similar school systems across the country, so we’re not comparing Compton public schools to the “Thurston Howell III School for Gifted Geniuses” in Whitebread, Connecticut? Do you think that would dramatically improve the performance of kids across the country? It absolutely would.
How do you permanently fix chronic homelessness? Make it illegal and force people who are chronically homeless to get mental health treatment and/or get off drugs, then live in a halfway house and work until they can buy a home. If they don’t want to do that, then they go to jail. Guess what? That would literally end chronic homelessness for good.
Many of America’s problems are SIMPLE to solve if our country is willing to adopt the obvious fixes staring us in the face. We don’t need some radical shift in America; we just need to adopt the simple solutions everyone can see that aren’t politically easy to do.
Your solution for schools has been tried in some states and did not work. California had a merit pay system for a few years (around 2010 if I remember correctly). I actually was given a $10,000 bonus because my students performed in the top 25% on the state biology test. The state could not afford to pay the bonuses, they cost more than they expected, so it turned into an IOU payable in 5 years. Then they realized that they could never keep up the payments and so killed the program and made all the IOUs null and void. The few other states with those systems abandoned them.
First, we need to get rid of all unfunded government mandates. The Feds only cover about 19 cents for each dollar they mandate. When I was in a teacher training program, around 2003, I learned that there were two states that did not follow the federal mandated special education requirements. They simply refused to take the money because it did not cover much of the services they would be mandated to offer. They streamlined their special education system and a lot of students did not qualify because they did not have a learning disability, they just were not doing school and their parents pressured the schools to put their kid in special education because their kid had not done school for so long, they were far behind. I worked with some of those kids and got a few to actually pick up a pencil and start working. I have about 6 that completely transitioned out of special ed and go to college because they started doing school. After some success, they kept at it because they were getting positive reinforcement. Success breeds further success. I got them to see and experience the positive results of doing school.
The special education population continues to grow because court rulings and federal laws make it harder for schools to say no. Parents just file suit and it will cost the district more to defend against it than it would to place the kid in special education.
Most states give each school a fixed amount per student, no matter what the real costs are. A special education student cost 2 to 10 times more than the average student. So money is taken from the average students to pay for special education.
The entire system needs to be overhauled.
The major issue in education today is student behavior. Teachers do not have the authority to institute effective classroom management. We cannot suspend students who constantly disrupt the education of other students. These are the ones that do not want to be there, misbehave all the time, and make life miserable for everyone. The federal office of civil rights has been instrumental in getting some court rulings that students have an absolute right to an education and so must be in the classroom, even if they are disruptive. Schools have to provide extra support for these students so they can get their education.
I am at a school that works hard to get these students sent to alternative programs. Most schools do not because they will lose the funding that student provides. We still have to deal with these students for a year or two before we can make them move on.
COVID got some of the best teachers to leave education for good. Many were able to get jobs in the private sector and earning much more than their teacher salary. These companies could not find employees. A couple of privately owned employment agencies started recruiting teachers and discovered that most teachers work well alone or within.a team. They are very efficient with their time. When they are not being interrupted every few minutes, they can get an amazing amount of work done in a short time. I have more work to do than the average private sector employee. I have learned through the years how to get things done in the occasional minute or two breaks I get when my students are working and do not need my help. I can also get things done in those few seconds I have to wait on students when I am delivering instruction. I know what I am teaching and by the time I do it for the third or 4th time in a day, I go on auto pilot and deliver the instruction while getting many of the small tasks done.j. Give me 30 uninterrupted minutes and I can do more than I could in an hour when I first started teaching. The private sector loved the work ethic of the teachers they were recruiting. I had 4 coworkers take jobs with private companies and more than triple their salary, get 100% of their moving expenses covered, and given money to find a new place to live. I talked to them later and they loved their new jobs and would never go back to teaching.
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This drained many of the best and brightest. Then consider that over 70% of new teachers leave the profession for good within 5 years. Low salary is part of the problem. The biggest reason though is student and parent behaviors. I am assaulted by both students and parents a few times a year, and the district will not do a thing. They are afraid of lawsuits by parents. If I file a police report, I am called out by top level district administrators for taking action that they do not agree with. Some will even place pressure on the local police to not follow through on the reports. I have had to retain an attorney a couple of times to stop the harassment I received for filing police reports. The union is woke and will not back me. So after I prevail, my attorney has to go back and file a suit against the union for not providing an attorney to me as they claim my union dues covers. So I win a settlement from the union as well.
When I first went into teaching, the majority of teachers I worked with had Master's or Ph.Ds, and not in education but in the subject matter they taught. For a couple of decades, there would be 50 applicants for each job opening. That started to change in the late 90s because returning veterans from WWII filled an overwhelming majority of teaching jobs. They were given preferential status when hiring because the feds gave the district money to help pay their salaries for up to 5 years. They started retiring en mass. All of a sudden there was a demand for teachers and not enough new teachers graduating with teaching credentials. I was hired without having to test in my subject area because I had a Ph.D and worked as research scientist for a few years. I was hired and immediately labelled a highly trained teacher (under No Child Left Behind) something that took the average teacher to achieve in 10 years.
Today, the average new teacher has a college GPA of 2.5. When I was hired, the average GPA was 3.8.
Well, the best and brightest are not going into education. They can earn more in the private sector and they do not have to deal with poor behavior from students and parents. For those with science degrees, many are hired onto companies that give 6 weeks of vacation a year and many other perks.
The new teachers are often the ones that cannot get hired anywhere. So they go into an intern program to teach while earning their credential. These are the ones that are most likely to be poor teachers. They are only there for the paycheck. They can assign their students all the assignments from the Internet and sit back and do nothing else. They do not help students, they do not interact with students, they are just a warm body with a credential. They can get poor evaluations and never will be let go. They cannot find a replacement.
With the focus on graduation rates, schools do what they are. best at find creative ways to give students credits without them having to do any real work. They just have to put in seat time in front of a computer. They get as many chances they need to get the correct answer. They also tolerate students using their cell phones to access AI to get the right answers. They meet the expectation by lowering the standards.
I had planned to teach until I was at least 70. It keeps me active and gives me something to do with my life. At the start of this current school year, that all changed. I put in my retirement papers two days before the start of the school year. The district implemented many changes that required I do more and teach an extra class because they cannot hire new teachers. Teaching is the only profession that you get paid less for working overtime than you earn in your regular pay. I am maxed out on the pay scale because of years of experience and educational background. I earn about $180 hour for my contract hours. Now, I am required to put in more time (about 5 to 10 extra hours a week) that is unpaid due to professional duties (IEP meetings, parent meetings, district mandated training, monitoring sports competitions to ensure safety, and much more). Then, if I am assigned to teach an extra class because of a teacher shortage, I get $45 an hour, and that does not include prep time. I know spend an average of 11 hours a day at school. I do not haver time for things like doctor's appointments, taking my car in for repairs, or attending family events.
My health has taken a huge hit. I can retire now, at 63, and take care of my health to live a longer and healthier life, or continue working and expect to not live past 70. I have several health issues that can be managed but I cannot do it while I continue to teach.
I am out and moving to be close to my grandchildren. I will also find a job without the headaches and stress of teaching. I need to work to keep active and enjoy life.
All of your simple solutions are great, but they require a backbone and honesty to implement, neither of which our basic politicians, too numerous to name, possess.