Steps to recovery:
1) End all offensive military actions overseas. Finish winding down Iraq and abandon Afghanistan wholesale. These actions have cost several trillion dollars over the last 10 years. We can't get that money back, but we can stop spending more.
2) Defense spending is in the top 3 highest budget expenditures. Cut it by 1 third across the board. Maintain important overseas installations such as Japan and Taiwan. Given China's rise, its wise long-term to keep a presence in the region. Scale back deployments in Europe unless Russia still is still a threat to western Europe.
3) The most amount of money the U.S. spends is Health and Human Services. The U.S. health system is a fucking mess. Somehow we spend the most on healthcare and get some of the worst societal benefits out of any industrialized country. I don't have an answer here, but it likely involves completely tearing down the existing system to its nuts and bolts and building it back up. I'd love to hear ideas on this point from others that know more about it.
4) Social Security is the other one. My mom relies on it, so does a lot of my family. We're from meager backgrounds and traditionally have come from poorer parts of the nation. That being said, cut it.
When I look at my paycheck and see that upwards of 40% of my income is being sucked out by the government and used more for things I oppose than things I support (e.g. war spending versus scientific investment) it pisses me right off.
Yes, I have heard the naive argument "But taxes are there to run the things you use like roads and government services that you use every day". This is true only in part. Yup, we need an army. Yup, we need local police. Yup, we need roads. Yup, we need a justice system. But it doesn't take trillions of dollars a year to run those things.
The government shouldn't interfere with business like propping up failing business models. It should work to make sure that business plays fair, i.e. anti-monopoly or collusion, etc.
I'm more liberal than conservative, and definitely not one of these people that wants business to have free-reign over everything. But there are bottom lines that we have crossed and need to back off.