The number one thing that local, state and federal government officials need to do in order to reign in the ever-expanding debt in the United States is to stop spending. Any person who has worked and paid bills knows how simple this is. The first thing you do when you don't have any money is to stop creating more debt. It's not even a question of where will money come from to pay off the current debt, but more a question of when will our elected officials figure out that deficit spending is a BAD idea all around. Not creating new debt is the key.
If we could get them to first stop spending and then actually cut spending the production of the U.S. economy would quickly get us back on track economically. And it's not as hard as one might think if there were the political will to do it. The hardest thing is for the American people to get it across that we insist on the spending cuts! If that happens we can move forward on WHAT to cut.
There is a variety of ways to cut spending at all levels of government everything from eliminating earmarks and pork-barrel spending to simply cutting back on wasteful and unnecessary programs. The problem with trying to do this is that so many of our government welfare programs (and by welfare I mean ANY program falling outside the strict needs of military, courts and police) have become institutionalized.
The classic example of an institutionalized program is the United States Postal Service. There continues to be no logical reason for this to be a government run organization. Eliminate it and agencies like FEDEX or UPS would quickly fill the gap most likely running it at a much more inexpensive rate and in a more efficient manner.
For those of you who recognize that the government should not be manipulating or controlling the economy we could talk about a whole range of ways to eliminate debt and to restore value to the American economy. A return to the Gold Standard would be an eventual and useful tool to restore confidence in the paper money we all rely on. It would also be the best insurance against inflation and take the arbitrary control out of the hands of bureaucrats.
The main thing to understand is that government interference in the economy is the problem, not the solution. Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist said it best in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, " If a detailed, factual study were made of all those instances in the history of American industry which have been used by the statistics as an indictment of free enterprise and as an argument in favor of a government-controlled economy, it would be found that the actions blamed on businessmen were caused, necessitated, and made possible only by government intervention in business. The evils, popularly ascribed to big industrialists, were not the result of an unregulated industry, but of government power over industry. The villain in the picture was not the businessman, but the legislator, not free enterprise, but government controls."
The solution is to de-regulate and get the government OUT of the economy altogether.