End foreign aid – While we are borrowing $2 billion every day in order to make ends meet, we’re also donating tens of billions of dollars to foreign nations in federal aid. Although I have a certain affinity towards some nations, such as Israel, it is not the role of the federal government to take your money through taxes and donate it to foreign governments – especially ones that you may not support yourself. Americans donated over $300 billion last year, much more than the federal government gave, so even ending foreign aid will not stop Americans from sharing their money with nations and causes that they support. One must also remember that most of our Founders cautioned supplying foreign aid for these very reasons. They foresaw the damage we could do by picking sides, showing favoritism financially or otherwise. Find out how much we spend in foreign aid here.

Reduce our world military presence – We currently have military bases in 130 countries, giving us a world presence that exceeds any other nation in history. The cost of maintaining such a presence is draining us financially. It is overstretching our military and is causing us to be involved in foreign affairs much more than we should be. We still have our military stationed in Germany and Japan, yet have convinced ourselves that we will be able to remove our presence from Iraq. We need to maintain a high quality, powerful military that will obliterate any threat to us, but we also need to return to our philosophy of fighting defensive wars. Our Constitution gives the president and Congress the ability to effectively fight our enemies, foreign and domestic, and we can do that without 700 bases around the world. While we should not have our military scattered throughout the world, we should also still maintain a military that strikes fear in all who challenge us.

If you read this essay, you can see that by slashing some of our current spending (like within the above areas), we have the potential of saving our nation at least $2 trillion a year!

I think it's dependence in foreign materials (oil, etc.) that makes most of the population support or tolerate these kinds of policies. Under the current model, most people simply think that if they don't support buying oil from the Middle East, then they won't be able to afford gass to go to work.

With regards to oil, I think ending dependence on foreign sources of energy is a much more urgent goal than green energy.

A lot of the way we are viewed the world over is the direct result of our mixed foreign policy. While we are champions of freedom, we shouldn't be the world enforcement police. The ironic thing about our situation is that the world will not be happy if we do/don't not intervene militarily, and they will damn us for cutting off foreign aid. The founders were right in basically saying "Leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone." If we would have adhered to their admonitions, then we would be much more secure and prosperous IMO.