Slow servers would be one
Monetary surpluses?
Some schools (notably many of those in urban areas).
Monetary deficits 
Upgrading gov’t equipment.
… that’s about all I can think of.
Ooh! Ooh! Me! I’m a problem to society!
Daniel
holding out his arms
– okay, seriously, do you mean, “which of society’s problems need tangible resources in order to be solved?” or do you mean, “which of society’s problems will be solved by an indiscriminate allocation of resources?”
If the first, then virtually any serious problem requires tangible resources for a solution. If the latter, virtually any serious problem requires an intelligent allocation of resources for a solution. So depending on what you’re asking, I’d answer, “all of them,” or, “none of them.”
Hmmmm, Poverty?
Wellp… perhaps that’s better solved by giving people training. Letting them accomplish something, giving them confidence. Thats not necesarilly something you throw money at. I dont think a welfare state is the solution to poverty, but only a temorary stipend to make sure you dont starve to death.
That being said, I think that quite a number of areas could be helped considerably by ‘throwing money at them.’ There is a common misperception that the government is a very wasteful spender. This is not nearly as bad as people believe. The pressure for government officials not to waste money is present, though that pressure is not as strong as private industry where you are often working toward your own profit. However, that sort of pressure leads people to cut serious corners.
Homeland security?
Thats an interesting one. Can we fix poverty by simply giving money to the poor? Or is poverty rooted in something more deep seated like mental disorders and child abuse?
The problem of certain locations being insufficiently covered with money.
What’s the opposite of inflation? If it’s a problem, then throwing money at it will work just fine.
Maybe high dollar value. If the dollar gets too valuable, we can throw more money into the pot with no compensation behind it and bring the value of the dollar right back down to pre-problem levels.
Sure, if the only thing separating the poor from money is location.
More money can fix deflation.
Perhaps a way to rephrase the question would be:
“Which of societies problems can best be addressed by allocating more money to their solutions, as opposed to restructuring the way the money is currently being spent?”
Or, more succinctly:
“Which social programs are currently underfunded, as opposed to just pathetically inefficient or poorly conceived?”
To which I will answer: precious few. I think the fact that we keep addressing problems by indiscriminately throwing money at them only makes the problems themselves worse.
Jeff
Jeff, do you have any support for this thesis? It seems counterintuitive that one comes closer to solving or addressing a problem by doing nothing than by attempting to help but doing so inefficiently.
I think my original aim was something more like which problems are problems simply for lack of money and which are due to more inherent problems in how our society is run.
For example, I think crime would be a problem that no amount of funding could get rid of. You could spend billions on creating a totalitarian police state and people would still murder/rape/jay walk.
Education is a mixed bag. While there are some horribly underfunded schools, a lot of the problem comes about through lack of motivation, not alck of resources.
Poverty, I think is something that looks easy on the surface but there lurks a deeper problem underneath. Do the long time poor still both the motivation and the ability to stay out of poverty once they are given a chance or will they slide back in unless we give them hand out after handout. If we did have to resort to that, would more people resort to not working?
I think the War on Drugs ™ has shown how futile throwing money at trying to prevent illegal narcotics has been.
I would doubt that any amount of money could make the Western world free of terroism.
In the UK at least, that might be termed ‘recession’, namely the ‘bust’ part of the commonly observed and ideally avoided boom-and-bust economic cycle. I’ve heard it suggested that avoiding recession is the real reason for the existence of a welfare state. The theory goes that when the economy starts to take a downturn, people will lose their jobs and hence their income, consumer spending will hence decrease, company profits will fall, more people will lose their jobs etc. and the process repeats (oversimplification obviously). But by having a welfare state, people who are unemployed will still have some spending power, and hence the spiralling decline of the economy is halted. If the welfare state does indeed have theis effect, whether or not by design, then it would indeed be a good example of how throwing money at something can, in and of itself, achieve something.