English spelling irregularities

English spelling is pretty eccentric, I wonder if it would ever be possible to switch the spelling of words to a phonetic base. Would be hard as spelling is so engrained, and also many other countries speak English as their first language. However, other languages have tried to make modifications over time, i.e. like High German dropping the sharp-s character, so "Grüße" becomes "Grüsse", I still see the ß charcter widely in use, so the government trying to change may not necessarily make it successful. Also, do we really want to have to change languages back to just latin letters..?