How Would You Handle Our Social and Economic Problems?

I read a friend's Facebook post recently, where he pointed to a statistic saying that about 1/3 of the public is on some sort of welfare.  Welfare, for the sake of this article, includes cash assistance, food stamps and Medicaid for sure.  It may include other payments, but I'm not sure exactly what constitutes "welfare" in the articl.  My friend, understandably and justifiably, got a bit irate at this, and said that there's just too much disincentive to work.  I partially agree with this.  There are a lot of people who will just sit back and take free money, without contributing anything to society in return.  This, however, presented a larger question to me.  How do we fix this?

Once upon a time, Iowa had a law that basically said that you can only get welfare for a certain period of time during your lifetime.  I believe it was five years, but it may have been ten.  I'm also not sure if this law still exists.  I think this time limit counted only toward cash assistance.  I don't think the time limit applies to food assistance or medical assistance.  I think this goes a long way toward addressing the immediate problem, but doesn't deal with the root problem... making sure that all Americans are able to earn a decent wage.

There are several problems here that kind of all tie in together...

-Medical costs are too high.

-The cost of education is too high.

-There aren't enough decent paying jobs.

-There aren't enough full time jobs with benefits.

-There is too large of a pay gap between the highest paid and lowest paid individuals.

-Our expectations are too high.  We don't all need 5 bedroom houses.  We don't all need cell phones, and our 12 year old children certainly don't need them.  We don't need a TV in every room of the house.  We don't need multiple game consoles for our entertainment.

Some people say that we need to remove government regulation, which would increase innovation and spur economic growth.  That's partially true, but it's simplistic.  While it would increase innovation, removing government regulation, in my opinion, would also lead to the end of the 40 hour work week, more pollution and more chaos in the financial sector.

Other people believe that we need increased government regulation, such as increasing minimum wage and forcing business to offer benefits.  This is also true but simplistic.  Increasing minimum wage tends to cause layoffs in entry level positions and contributes to inflation, which, over the long haul, tends to wipe out the short-term gains of increases in minimum wage.

So, my question to you, is this:  If you could single-handedly implement a complete economic policy, what would you do?