If you are concerned about the America you are leaving for the next generation, you’re not alone. I join you in concern not only for the next generation, but for you and me. I don’t pretend to know what to do about all the challenges we face in America, but I do offer these ideas:

#1. Quit borrowing. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is STOP DIGGING. I know that many say that some sort of economic cataclysm will occur if the U.S. doesn’t again raise its debt ceiling. They may be right. But in response I’d ask, what kind of cataclysm will our continued borrowing produce? I don’t understand the math at a national level, so let’s just think about it in terms of your family. If you are in financial trouble, and you’ve been borrowing more and more for years and years without paying down your debt, does it make sense that the solution to your problem is borrowing yet more? Or, is a money diet in order?

#2. Quit giving money away. According to the 2011 Statistical Abstract of the United States, U.S. Foreign and Military Aid to other countries tops $50 billion. Why, pray tell me, are we giving away $5o billion per year? I think the answer is “to buy friends.” Let’s think about that a minute. If your kid’s keeps giving her lunch money to another kid in school “so they’ll be my friend,” you explain to her that you don’t buy friendship with lunch money. Essentially, your kid is mobbed up! She’s being extorted. You wouldn’t tolerate that. Yet that’s the logic our government uses.

I’m all for helping the poor. I just returned from a leadership development trip to a third world country myself. The needs there are enormous. But our money doesn’t make a very big difference in the lives of very many people (though it does continue to enrich despots and dictators). So…….let’s quit, and focus that $50 billion on our needs at home.

Here at home, we’ve got to quit doing stupid stuff. For example, the government paid me a few thousand dollars to do some work on my farm that I would have done whether they paid for it or not. Of course I took the money! It was going to be spent, it might as well have come to me. But really, that’s simply goofy. Our country shouldn’t be spending money that way.

#3. Quit muzzling the ox while it is treading. There is a move in the U.S. to increase income taxes on people who make over $250,000 per year. (Fair disclosure: that affects me.) Let’s think about that for a moment. I’m a business builder. I have a proven track record of employing people—nearer 100 than 10. I’d employ more if I could. When the government decides to take more of my money away in the form of income taxes, that’s less money that I have to invest in growing my company larger and employing even more people. It financially restricts me from employing more people, and it psychologically discourages me from trying to grow and achieve. Increasing taxes on producers punishes productivity. Is that really the philosophy we want to promote in America? The harder your work and the more you achieve, the more we’ll take from you? Dis-incentivizing achievement will never make the country strong. On our farm, when the mother animals produce babies that are nursing heavily, we increase their feed and nutrient intake so they can raise the healthiest, largest babies possible. At our colleges, our athletes have special dorms where they get more and better food than the average student, because they are producing so much more physically. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Yet, when it comes to entrepreneurs, we ask them to produce more, and to voluntarily be punished for doing so.

My ideas may not make a big difference. I don’t know. But they are a start, and that is the point. We’ve got to get started

My three ideas, added to yours, and to the next guys…..pretty soon those of us who make America great can produce ideas that will put America back on the road to prosperity.

What’s your best idea?