As huge as our defense budget is, equal to the entire rest of the world combined, it is only around 4% GDP on average and we get what we pay for. That spending has bought us and everyone else a lot of peace. A 'major conflict', for us and everyone else, is one in which a few thousand people die, or maybe a few tens of thousands in multiple years, back when our planetary population was less than half of now it wasn't unusual to lose that many people in a few days. We do need some cuts, there are wasted or outdated projects and some general spending cuts to defense wouldn't be bad, but even ignoring our own local security that stability bought by the US juggernaut and it's only slightly less potent NATO allies has probably paid itself off in economic advantages secured through stability and safe trade. Oil would be a lot more expensive, and grain, if the freighters carrying them needed to have cruiser escort and deck guns to avoid piracy. Trade goods from cheap labor wouldn't be so cheap if they were cut off from trade and had to use their minimal - and even more minimal if there were conflicts - industrial base to make guns and tanks.



When we say 'most crime are drug and alcohol related' we're actually saying that people take criminal action while on the stuff. Very few people get sentenced to real prison time for simple use. But I agree marijuana is fine to legalize and doubtless will be legal most places soon. It won't 'benefit the economy' much though, an addictive drug know for causing lung problems and making people lazy, as opposed to cigarettes which do the former but not the latter, yeah! Cocaine, PCP, things like that, different stories. I will never criticize the hobbies of an adult of sound mind who isn't damaging people or their property or putting them and a significantly elevated risk, but someone on certain types of narcotics can't make even a vaguely credible claim at the 'of sound mind' part. And then there are sales, no sane company is going to want to sell PCP or crack on the market, the liability issues alone would be absurd and they'd know every jury would be predisposed to dislike them. You casually make this a simple issue but while much of a our prison pop is drug-related, it is drug related the way a drunken beating is alcohol related. It wasn't simple consumption that got them do serious time. Consumption virtually never gets you arrested, it is doing something while under the influence that does. Like reckless driving, assault, etc and the members of our population who do consume this or that narcotic, legal or not, at home or semi-responsibly, rarely get into trouble. You just don't get arrested - barring anomalies - for smoking a joint at home, and you certainly don't get serious prison time. Our prisons aren't over-crowded from the people doing 3 days in the county jail and fine/community-service, it would take hundreds of such sentences to equal the standard major felony imprisonment.

As for your other three, you won't hear objections from me about cutting red tape and taxes, but not with a carte blanche and casual approach. The Us is the world's largest manufacturer too, slightly ahead of China which use a larger percentage of it population and labor forces - 4 times bigger than our in the raw, to make about the same amount of $$$, that's not the jobs we want back. China cuts, corners, uses 6x times the people to manufacture the same $, and has absurd control over their population which is absurdly poor, and still does less with it. Manufacturing will die as a labor force everywhere eventually, anything a man can do a that machine can, a machine should do instead.