36 two weeks ago.
I'm also on my second job doing work for the government during my lifetime.
The only reason I don't work for myself is I would have to hire another person just to take care of the government. I may be able to do that after I've built a foundation, or I may even be able to hit a stride where I can do it myself, but while I'm first starting out I can't do that. Too busy with the other job I have to keep until I get stable and other obligations that are non-negotiable.
Government corruption makes sure our gas prices are high and it's difficult to drill at home. Government corruption is part of what keeps us on gas to begin with. Government corruption means you have to seek licenses and permission to do many, many things that you shouldn't need it for, but it sure does make sure you don't compete with anyone else. Government corruption is why the super rich are super rich and the gap between them and the common guy keeps growing - inflation shoots right into their bank accounts and they trickle out what they want. If we stopped printing money they may have to spend what they have.
No. Shut it down and leave it down - mostly.
Social Security - we need that back. It should have never been established to begin with, but now that we've got it there's lots of people who paid into it all their lives that rely on it, se we need to start it back up.
The military - we need to keep that. We don't need to be the world police, but we need a military. My vision of the military is elite, well equiped, best of the best soldiers in the core military who keep militias and state forces trained and work with them, but not as part of them so that if we do need the miltitary our elite soliders have people they can work with. These militias and states forces will like have quite a few former US soliders in them. Dump shit tons of money into military R&D, give us awesome tech to rely on. You cut the military budget to 1/10th of what it is now, keep our forces at home and stop policing the world, keep them elite, trained and with cutting edge equipment. Money saved, nation protected, world does what the world does, it doesn't concern us unless they try to bring it here. (BTW - make NASA the official R&D branch of all military forces and you justify NASA)
Shut down most national programs and agencies. I mean most of them. Most national agencies serve functions once served by the states, stop taxing the citizens of states so damned much so that instead of "federal funding" fueling everything the states can get their own funding without all the federal middle-man fees between having it extracted from their citizens and getting their sliver back. The states can run their own programs. Powerball exist as a non-federal inter-state program. Why can't there be an inter-state education board? Why settle for one? Why not have two or three competing or "coopeting" with one another? Why not build a high speed rail system where the citizens get to vote on where the train stops go by buying the most train lottery tickets? (radio announcement in Austin) "Looks like San Antonio bought more train lottery tickets than Austin, so the station is going to be a little further south than any of us want to go to pick up our kids from college - how about it Austin? Go out there and buy some train lotto tickets and show San Antonio what's up. Don't forget about Dallas anymore, we don't want just a connecting line to them, we want the main stop, now go buy them! Last weeks winner in El Paso took home a cool twelve million dollars, not like they have too many cities to compete with for a stop out there!"
We don't need to be on the government teet. A graceful shutdown of most programs would be nice.
Article 2 of the constitution pretty much tells us what the feds should be doing and amendments 9&10 back that up. Anything else should be 9&10'ed to the states.