How to end the recession in 12 months

Unemployment has hit 9.8 percent. New jobless claims grow each month. Federal spending is increasing exponentially, while current tax revenues are decreasing. The value of the dollar is in a nose dive.

The deficit for fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, 2009, has come in at $1.4 trillion dollars, nearly four times the deficit of any previous year in history.

Business bankruptcies are on the rise, while some businesses are literally hanging on by their cash-flow fingernails.

Newsflash! The $789 billion "stimulus bill" is not working. And no, don't give me that baloney that the stimulus needs more time.

The bill was philosophically flawed from the beginning, but the big-government-and-more-taxes members of Congress refused to even consider solutions offered by the less-government-and-fewer-taxes members.

Meanwhile, Congress is trying to ram a $1-trillion-plus health-care deform bill down our throats, with a Cap & Trade & Tax & Kill bill waiting in the wings in the Senate. The Democrats are also secretly talking about a second "stimulus" bill, but they are not calling it a stimulus. I call it more government spending with no new results.

Here are three suggestions that would get this country out of a recession in 12 months, not that the Democrats will listen or even consider any of these ideas. These are not original ideas. They are just great ideas from several sources that Congress and the president are ignoring because they would result in less government control.

The reason that we would be out of the recession in 12 months is that businesses would get excited and start planning to grow their business instead of making plans to just survive. It's just that simple. The prospect of bigger government and more taxes does not inspire businesses to grow.

Here's the solution.

Suspend the payroll tax for one year. This gives an immediate 7.65 percent increase in take-home pay to all workers. It also lowers the payroll costs for all employers by 7.65 percent for one year. A total of about $900 billion would be injected directly into the economy immediately, rather than through the inefficiency of the federal government.

The big-government types will say that it will hurt the already revenue-strained Social Security and Medicare systems. They are right. But it just means that we will have to solve those oncoming financial train wrecks one year earlier than currently projected. Facing these challenges with a healthy economy makes a whole lot more sense than trying to do it in the middle of a recession.

Suspend the federal tax on repatriated profits. Multi-national U.S. businesses are hungry for cash flow, which could come from cash they have sitting in foreign countries to avoid double taxation. The last time this was only partially done, in 2005 during the Bush administration, nearly $300 billion dollars came back to U.S. businesses from their overseas operations.

Replace the tax code with a consumption tax, popularly known as the Fair Tax. This would produce a huge sucking sound of businesses from around the world wanting to establish businesses here in the U.S. It would supercharge our economy like never before. The problem that the Democrats have with this proposal (H.R. 25) is that it gives power back to the people. What a patriotic idea!

Instead of secretly planning another economic stimulus flop, the Democrats could take these ideas and call them their ideas. Most of us do not care who gets the credit, as long as this economy gets the results.

The recession could be over if they would just listen.