So I guess it depends on what problem you want to solve, but if you're worried about the federal deficit, then higher taxes (even in the form of just eliminating the bush tax cuts) will absolutely help to solve that problem.
If I tell you, "Fred is always running out of money; in fact, he's deep in credit card debt," your immediate response is not going to be "He should get a raise so he can pay off that debt" or "Here, give this money to Fred."
I'm not sure where you're going with that analogy. It all depends on whether Fred's spending his money wisely or not.
So your analogy doesn't just do work for your position; it clearly cuts both ways.
Look, I'm no defender of gov't waste, but you can't blanketly say "bullshit" without specific examples. One's man bullshit -- the two Steves with their "toy computer" -- is another man's gold (Markkula, who saw the promise and invested early). Is NASA bullshit? Is protecting the environment bullshit? GPS satellites? The Coast Guard? Food inspection? I see the news headlines like everyone else trumpeting what look like screwy studies. What we never ever hear is any follow-up that one "stupid" study connected to a non-stupid study that led to a breakthrough. A breakthrough that most likely was just handed over to some private company to exploit for profit without any compensation coming back to taxpayers (this has been the case for decades with private companies taking government-tabulated data and reselling it as for-profit databases). This latter giveaway to private enterprise with original funding by working people is the ultimate bullshit to me.
So no, a country (or government) is not the same as a business.
No, it's not. It needs to manage its finances responsibly, but that is quite different from being a profit-generating business.
BUT, The goal of a country is to amass wealth, is it not?
The problem lies in that determining optimal services is a no-win game as it differs greatly in most geographically areas and person-to-person.
Corporations are far more focused on a particular set of goals and have a far smaller audience to satisfy (shareholders) who all generally want more wealth.
We need to:
• Invest in the future: We need to invent, produce, and export new renewable energy sources. We need to invest in robotic manufacturing because cheap people labor is not sustainable in any country - robotic is where it will go.
• We need to heavily tax imports like many other countries in the world do. And have American made things become competitive - we have sold our souls to Asia.
• Drastically cut bullshit spending. There are billions spent every year on...bullshit.
• Invest further in Entrepreneurship, and start bringing smart people from other countries here.
Those are big 4.
The big problem is our countries expenses vs. income is too high. At the end of the day, a country is a business. And right now, we are a company that is not running well. We need to clean out the board of directors (Congress) and start fresh.