What Would You Do As President? 1455
With the elections continually in the news there is constant discourse on what each candidate has done or will do. However, rarely do people get the chance to say what they would do. Here is your chance, you have been elected President of the US (god help us all), what items go to the head of the class and how would you handle them?
Top Three Things (Score:5, Interesting)
My top 10 (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Legalize ALL drugs (this includes regulation and taxation. Want to end the illegal drug trade? This is the fastest way.)
2. Require all able-bodied citizens between ages 18 and 35 (male and female) to undergo military bootcamp. This is NOT a draft however; after going through bootcamp, you are not required to serve in the military.
3. Abolish the two-party system
4. Erase all censorship from all media...This includes: Internet, Television, print, video games, music, etc.
5. Build a border-spanning fence. Every 75 miles, have a reinforced entry way in which people are allowed through.
6. Require that any immigrants that enter the US to be able to speak English prior to being granted citizenship.
7. Allow high school students to pick all of their classes throughout their 4-year High School education.
8. Allow all fifty states to have their say in gun ownership laws (I personally am for personal gun ownership.)
9. Require application for parental certificates (the program would be known as "If you can't feed em, don't breed em". It would be based on the financial situation of the parents, as well as their mental well being and relationship status...i.e. do they constantly fight, or are they constantly in love, etc.)
10. Legalize (and actively regulate) vigalante justice. (if everyone knows they can get their ass kicked by their gun toting neighbor, they are more likely to behave themselves)
bio-fuels and nuke plants (Score:3, Interesting)
3 year plan to create thousands of small community owned pebble bed reactors situated in every army, marine, national guard and air-force armory in the nation. The reactors are small, the armories are (should be anyway) well guarded, so they do double-duty as power stations.
write huge incentive cheques to small inventors for producing commercially viable diesel electric hybrid cars running on the above two fuel sources.
Once those are in place, remove the IRS and current tax law, replace with a 3% flat tax. The huge increase in GDP caused by the above two will more than offset the taxes lost through the current corrupt system.
Jail many lawyers, politicians. Use them to feed the algae from #1 above.
Honest answer. (Score:3, Interesting)
Put SCIENCE back in the classroom.
Tax religions like any other business.
Put people before corporations. (I love Capitalism but we've denigrated to Corporatism)
Move the US to metric. :)
Tsiangkun 2012 (Score:4, Interesting)
2) I will tax the top 5% and distribute the wealth through increased funding for basic academic research, reimburse college loans for students carrying 3.2GPA or higher, national daycare programs, and national health care programs.
3) Prosecute the supreme court justices who appointed Bush, and every person in the federal governemnt who continued to aid and abet the terrorist regime.
4) Establish a department of peace, reduce military funding, and give anyone a seat a a negotiating table so we do not have to fight them "over there" or "over here".
5) Reparations for the victims of hurrican katrina who were failed by their governments.
Might as well... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Use our armed forces for national defense, not the world's police
2. Divert savings from needless wars into balancing the budget and paying down the debt
3. Reverse laws that punish victimless crimes and legislate personal morality
4. Pardon and release non-violent drug offenders to help with prison overcrowding
5. Revise the tax code to bring fairness and relief to the working/middle classes
Since it doesn't look like Dr. Paul will get the nomination, vote me in 2016... if we're still here.
Grand scale and vision (Score:4, Interesting)
But what ever happened to thinking big. Last time we thought big was the 60's I guess and the space race. We're a large country, I want a large project. One that inspires us (try putting a price on inspiration), and that becomes a legacy for an entire generation. One whose impact will last for decades.
I would love to see some grand project. Lunar colony (not in 20 years, but like, let's start doing it now). New space vehicle. Particle accelerator bigger then anything on the drawing board today. Something. Anything that inspires us and improves the planet.
I know! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I thought you asked "who."
Let's see, what would I do as president? I think the speech would go a little something like this.
"Hey, folks, you know how they say there's nothing that gets an economy moving like a war? Let's consider that for a moment. We're talking about uniting the entire nation behind one goal. We're talking about reordering the economy to meet this goal, every working man and woman either directly engaging in the mission or serving in a supporting role. We train the flower of our youth, equip them with our treasure and send them thousands and thousands of miles away to foreign lands, all this effort just to drop a bomb in someone's lap. Could you imagine going to this sort of effort to give that same guy a helping hand, rebuild a house, provide a hot meal or maybe just a cold beer? It's laughable! And what a sad joke we are as a species that we feel this way.
"So, what's on the agenda for the next four years? We're going to go to war. Not any of this silly war on drugs and terror nonsense, much more effective than the war on poverty. No, we're going to war on business as usual, the way we've always been doing things. We spend $500 billion on the military and what we have to show for it is worth maybe a tenth of that number. Our nation has lost its leading role in science and industry. The solution to these problems is not just throwing money at 'em, the solution is to use that money intelligently.
"It's a simple truth that centralized organizations are among the most efficient forms of human effort we've ever seen. The Soviet Union's economy fell apart because bureaucrats in Moscow tried to make decisions on how business on the other side of the empire should be conducted. The former genius of the capitalist system was the decentralization of authority to the periphery of the economy, let the businesses make decisions on what they need to produce and how to do it. Efficient organizations succeed, inefficient ones are allowed to fail, their capital and employees and resources free to be used by more efficient enterprises. Folks, the consolidation we're seeing with today's megacorporations is simply a repeat of the Soviet folly. And the growing wasteful bureaucracy in Washington is no better.
"Government needs to concentrate on what government does best in a 21st century nation-state. Such duties include providing for the common defense, making treaties with foreign powers, providing regulation and inspection of private enterprise to ensure those organizations operate in the public interest, national health care and retirement funds, and conducting basic research in the sciences.
"Government is not to be a piggy bank for special interests to raid. It is not a cash cow to be tapped by connected contractors who have made big donations to politicians. To that end, all political campaigns will be publicly funded. Anyone money recieved from outside the election funding system will be seen as a bribe and the criminal penalties will follow from that."
That's just a few thoughts I had off the cuff. I would assume if I ever were president and tried to say something like that, I'd be taken aside into a smoke-filled room and shown that film of the Kennedy assassination, but shot from a view I've never seen before, a view that looks like it's from the Grassy Knoll. "Any questions?"*
*With apologies to Bill Hicks.
I have some detailed plans for my run.... (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Have a camera and public feed of me at all times, as a true servant of the people.
2. Remove all surveillance cameras and traffic cameras.
3. Fiber to every home and free national internet.
4. No more war unless we are directly under attack.
5. Solar Power.
6. Break up the corporate monopolies.
7. Free the radio and television spectrums for public use.
8. Give the public the truth about JFK and Roswell and 9/11 (I'm not saying I know what it is, but as president, I would, right?).
9. Completely restore the constitution.
10. Go back to the Gold standard.
11. Eliminate the current credit card system.
12. National Health Care
13. Make copyright last no longer than 5 years, for any design or art.
14. Fix our defunct education system (something along the lines of OLPC/wikipedia).
15. Invest more in NASA.
16. Move from airplanes to a slower, cheaper, safer, more environmentally friendly zeppelin system.
17. Expand the peace corp.
18. Give every American a free cellular video phone.
19. Lock up all the criminals currently in power.
20. Repair our international relations with every country not actively involved in a genocide.
21. Give incentives for electric vehicles, like the Tesla Motor Car.
I have a few other goals, and I think they are actually realistic. Some will be harder than others, obviously. A lot of money will be saved over the current system as we are eliminating much of the corporate profiteering (health insurance, cellular companies, internet providers, cable companies), and by implementing a superior video phone infrastructure, there will be less need to travel or commute. Plus, once the solar infrastructure is all in place, it will be much cheaper to maintain than our current oil based infrastructure. After all the ground work is done I'd like to focus on safer and healthier food, quality of life, and mental health issues, as well as an improved food pyramid that reflects more of the true benefits of eating higher quantities of hormone free meat, and chemical free vegetables and fruit. There is plenty of evidence showing that the current food pyramid is dead wrong.
I'd also like it if as an aptitude test for graduating high school, kids could build a simple radio, fix a car, perform CPR, write a basic software application, and read music on at least one instrument. I also think reading, writing, and arithmetic are important, but we should be farther along by now.
Another area of research we should invest more in is automated vehicles. The traffic and mortality rates here in southern California are pretty atrocious. My carbon-fiber solar powered zeppelin designs could go a long way to assisting in this endeavor as well.
Re:In all seriousness (Score:2, Interesting)
So you would pass the 'Let's All Become Muslim' Bill? Now, I think our foreign policy is a mess, and we have given ourselves a black eye with our military. But there is a sizable group of people that won't be happy until our men all have beards, and our women are wearing burkas.
10 Steps -- Whole Lotta Humility (Score:3, Interesting)
Step #2 - Neuter the Department of Homeland Security. Start finding different places for their employees to go because I would shut them down before my term is over.
Step #3 - Address the country and read to them the Bill of Rights and first bit of the Declaration of Independence... then apologize for the lies of many of my predecessors while thanking them for creating such a stable staging ground for the next era of development of the nation.
Step #4 - Befriend the ACLU and the NRA
Step #5 - Slowly, begin to trim the fat from various auxiliary military budgets and reinvest that money in raising the quality of Intermediate, Elementary, Pre-K education/childcare. (New Teacher Initiatives, Federal bonuses for X many years as a teacher, etc.)
Step #6 - Add debt forgiveness incentives against higher education loans if the student enters industries of high need and/or learns Arabic, Chinese (either), Korean, Spanish, Japanese.
Step #7 - Begin swapping US troops for UN Peacekeepers (2:1) in Iraq and sponsor a system of reconstruction that will allow for schools and infrastructure over profit-focused industry. (They can do that on their own)
Step #8 - Address the UN. State that the US has been wrong on many occasions and we will often continue to be wrong. However, today, we begin to acknowledge our shortcomings and will begin the long trek to become the nation we always wanted to be.
Step #9 - Re-regulate energy companies around the nation (If you want guaranteed profit, don't expect it to be a lot).
Step #10 - Sit down with the automotive industry and tell them that I will not be covering any of their butts for any reason until they allow their engineers low-fuel-consumption automobiles to hit the production line WITH attractive exteriors.
Re:Tsiangkun 2012 (Score:3, Interesting)
2) I will tax the top 5% and distribute the wealth through increased funding for basic academic research, reimburse college loans for students carrying 3.2GPA or higher, national daycare programs, and national health care programs.
3) Prosecute the supreme court justices who appointed Bush, and every person in the federal governemnt who continued to aid and abet the terrorist regime.
4) Establish a department of peace, reduce military funding, and give anyone a seat a a negotiating table so we do not have to fight them "over there" or "over here".
5) Reparations for the victims of hurrican katrina who were failed by their governments.
Excellent start, here's a few more if I may add to your list:
6) Introduce and pass a bill eliminating campaign contributions once and for all. Also ensure that any elected public official gives up the right to privacy of their financial information. Pass strict laws (including jail terms) for politicians who take bribes from interest groups.
7) Abolish the electoral college system. Create a new system in which No president can be elected without at least 60% of the popular vote. Perhaps allow voters to choose their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4rth, and so on choice. Use weighted averaging to determine which candidate is most popular.
8) Completely re-write copyright and patent law. Reduce copyright terms to 5 years, place far greater weight on prior art. If a "one-click" type patent can be proved identical to an algorithm written in 1975 in some obscure computer science textbook then that patent is immediately and irrevocably dissolved.
9) Federalize technologies like these [slashdot.org] and dramatically increase funding for alternative energy technologies. Create awards and grants that provide generous wealth incentives for innovators.
10) Legalize file-sharing and constitutionally equate it to freedom of speech, write net-neutrality into law. Clean sweep of the FCC and recreate it as a body which exists solely for the promotion of faster, more reliable, ubiquitous communication services to individual citizens.
11) In the same way Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System; fund and build a massive fiber layout to solve the last mile problem once and for all. Include provisions for alternative solutions like wireless hubs and repeaters. Portion a federal budget for the continuous maintenance of this network.
Actionable Items List (Score:3, Interesting)
- Carbon tax that feeds R&D and subsidies to clean tech;
- NASA reforms including purchases of commodity products as-delivered-to-orbit with no spec on how to get them there;
- Foreign aid money governed by transparency index (Transparency International at transparency.org);
- Emissions taxes that self-finance the EPA (tax all emissions and fines go to further enforcement);
- Net neutrality and passenger bill-of-rights acts;
- Repeal of monopoly power over broadband re: cable modems, etc.
- College subsidies for U.S. citizens or foreigners that intend to locate here;
- Strict enforcement of current INS laws requiring workers to show proof of employability before being allowed to work here coupled with green card lottery (worldwide, not just to Mexico);
- Repeal of Patriot act provisions for search without warrents;
- Redeployment of almost all U.S. troops from South Korea;
- Change from a Class A to a Class B drug (legalization, under inpatient Doctor's supervision), of the Heroin addiction cure Ibogaine ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine/rel=url2html-972 [slashdot.org]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine/ >;
- No Child Left Behind act changes to ease regulatory burden and channel money where its needed;
- Expansion of the Peace Corps.;
- Possible construction of a Trans-Alaska highway / railway that can lead to a cross-Bearing straights bridge;
- Possible approval of a nuclear pebble bed reactor design and reprocessing facilities;
- A balanced budget.
Just some ideas.
Re:well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The charges are baseless bullshit. The South Carolina primary is coming up. It is being touted as the "indicator of the black vote". Ron Paul has more support among the African American community than any other Republican candidate. It's telling that the information is coming out right now.
Of course you posted AC. You're a worthless chicken shit who can't even associate himself with the slander that you're throwing around. Go fuck yourself.
Re:Two main concerns (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Abolish the IRS
2. Abolish the Federal Reserve
3. Abolish the Department of Education
4. Abolish the FCC
5. Abolish social security
6. Abolish medicare
Re:Number One Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
You americans are so tediously moralistic, the French have their guy on an 'incentive' program. The more manifesto promises he makes, the more 'rewards'. Mitterand had four mistresses.
I don't qualify under current law, but the first thing I would do is to look at how to make the current US problem in Iraq someone else's problem. Over the past five years Iraq has all but destroyed the US army. Whose army do we most want to destroy most (or care least about)? That would be Iran. So the US says to Iran 'your problem now', withdraw to Kuwait, see whether Iran prefers to have a festering civil war on its border or gets sucked in.
Second foreign policy position: Cuba. Eliminate all sanctions with immediate effect. They have not worked in 40 years and it is obvious that they never will. It is equally obvious that the Cuban political system can hardly survive if there is a massive influx of capitalist spending. Close Gitmo while we are at it and sign a retroactive extradition treaty. Let those who committed torture face a criminal system that is no worse than the one they created themselves.
Third position: Al Zawahiri and Bin Laden get a slotting. The US needs to withdraw from lost and irrelevant conflicts to concentrate resources on the conflicts that matter. Al Zawahiri has now had a major role in the murder of two US-friendly world leaders (Sadat, Bhutto). He cannot be allowed to survive. These problems cannot be dealt with by simply creating a bigger military, do that and some idiot neocons will come along and decide to use it for their own pet purposes.
Fourth: halt the deficit spending program. Congress will not lower spending, under the GOP earmarks and spending exploded under the Democrats the difference is that spending is rising less quickly. The deficits are causing interest rates to soar, they are tipping the country into recession. The only way to reduce the deficit is for the country to live within its means and raise revenues. So unless you believe in the tax fairy the choice is between raising taxes and crashing the economy. Don't wait for the Bush tax cuts to expire, repeal them immediately and institute a 2% war tax. Time to remind people that deficit spending is merely a deferred tax rise.
Fifth: comprehensive review of earmark projects, no-bid contracts and other potential graft. It appears that Haliburton and Blackwater owe the government rather a lot of money, we would like it back. Also Alaska can whistle if they think they are getting the idiot Stephens bridge to nowhere.
Sixth: Implement measures to protect the Internet economy against Internet crime and the risk that terrorists use the Internet for fundraising. (Full program described in The dotCrime Manifesto [blogspot.com].
Seventh: New Orleans, remember?
Eighth: Healthcare.
Climate Change, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can think of no issue that is larger today than global warming. At least to me, everything else seems petty and moot, especially if climate change is just going to undo in a really big way the strides made in the areas the other posters seem to care about.
I'm consistently more concerned and depressed by our lemming-like walk to the climate catastrophe cliff, but I had hoped that at least our part of the general population was aware and worried and, given the opportunity, would act in anyway they could to prevent it. If I were president, I would scale down on all the wastes of money this government currently has enacted, devote much of the money currently spent on petty projects into research and infrastructure so we can leave something behind for our kids. I would fight tooth and nail to get the corn and coal lobbies off the government's back so progress can finally be made in constructive action.
Bush has wasted so much of our time to act, why aren't we feeling the sense of urgency more widely by now?
Re:well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Could it be they prefer race baiting candidates who actually matter? The lack of Jackson and Sharpton tell everything one needs to know about Dr. Paul's chances. Those two are nothing if not masters of knowing how to use/abuse the mass media. Even they realize that attacking Paul is a waste of time because he isn't even accepted by the Republicans well enough to make their usual "see how bigoted all Republicans are?" attack. That Paul is either a bigot or a fool is self evident to anyone reading what went out under his name for decades but he is so irrelevant that even professional race pimps know making an issue of it would only bring name recognition to someone currently even more insignificant than themselves. Their usual game is to attack someone famous/infamous and create a huge media circus that they can then attach themselves leechlike to and suck media attention from it. But the Ronulans would probably suck more attention since they care not for public condemnation, just more opportunities to flog the troofer URLs in front of TV cameras.
Homey's master plan to bop the Man (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Recall U.S. troops from Iraq and probably Afghanistan, and any secret troops in Iran
2) Reinstitute Habeas Corpus
3) Initiate investigation into war crimes on the part of previous administration officials, as well as charges of treason (The Bush administration has gone WAY beyond 'impeachable offenses')
4) Release political prisoners in U.S. (of course this also includes Gitmo/Abuwhatever type places, but let's not forget people like Leonard Peltier, etc.)
5) Honor existing treaties with Native American tribes.
6) Appoint N.M. Governor Bill Richardson as Secretary of State, and send his ass out on a very long trip to start repairing U.S. relations abroad. I doubt this dude will be back by the end of my administration.
7) Find lackeys in Congress to start legislation I suggest, such as: no Congressional payraises unless a proportional increase in the minimum wage is approved at the same time.
8) Enforcement of the Constitution: try to get laws in place that forbid the kind of things W has been up to. Immediate legal penalties on politicians (including the President) if these laws are broken.
9) Fix the voting machine mess; mandate a auditable paper trail.
10) Fix the gerrymandering of voting districts - by either side.
11) Fix the EPA, and allow states to implement stricter pollution standards (but disallow looser standards)
12) Legalize, regulate, and tax the holy hell out of Marijuana.
13) Fully legalize hemp, and provide incentives to switch as much cotton production as is feasible over to hemp. (better for the environment, and actually more profitable for agribusiness.)
14) Legalize, regulate, and tax the holy hell out of prostitution.
15) Make lobbying a felony
16) Change the law so that corporations are not legal entities on a par with an actual human
17) Make animal abuse a felony, and make people convicted of it tracked; they often have serial killer tendencies.
18) No more subsidies to corn agribusiness
19) No more subsidies to oil producers
20) Much higher energy efficiency standards
And that's all I have time for now. I got a million of these, though.
Re:Two main concerns (Score:3, Interesting)
My dentist sends all his paperwork registered mail after headhunting a claim processor from the biggest PITA he dealt with and finding out that the particular company had a "clean desk" policy: any envelope not opened by the end of her shift got trashed unless it was sent registered mail.
Re:well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Number One Thing (Score:3, Interesting)
That may be so. Why does that make it the best way for the Federal government to spend over a billion dollars?
Government spending needs to be judged against a more accurate yardstick than which state happens to have the most powerful Senator with the largest mouth. The same money could have a much greater effect to a much larger number of people in much greater need down in New Orleans.
Ted Stephens is not the sort of person you want to make such choices. His son is facing federal corruption charges. He is almost certainly facing charges himself after a contractor benefiting from his earmarks gifted him an extension of his house.
Every earmark made by Ted Stephens should be put on hold. The Vecco relationship looks like a bribe smells like a bribe and should be considered a bribe unless and until proven otherwise.
As a more-or-less European looking across the pond (Score:2, Interesting)
1.) Basic Medical Care
2.) Basic Social Wellfare (we're talking 'basic' folks - not German style "luxury" wellfare) - the US lack the most basic social wellfare.
3.) Education
4.) Gun law
5.) Media
6.) Election system.
7.) current ultra-kazillion deficit (Thanks to GWB)
Number 1+2 are obvious, number 3 is a large biggie and number 4 is the prime cause of unnatural death in the US. The US Education system is bad and needs attention. The gun problem I'd try to tackle by making the NRA a gouverment authority and requireing every US citizen who wants to have a gun to be member of the NRA and take a thourough official gun training (+ license) and psychological evaluation.
I'd fund german style 100% gouverment funded independant media (media is independant by constitutional law in Germany - a very good thing that the US desperately needs). It's one of the few things German authorities actually do right. I'd also change the US election system to be more true to reality.
Fixing dept along the way would be hard to do but nice to have - you'd have to reduce military spending or something.
Re:VETO! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words our government is presumably our mechanism by which we secure protection of our rights. (Granted, this is changing and badly so, but that is another matter.) One requirement for this to happen is that we be able to defend ourselves. Now, it's nice to imagine that a bunch of independent and scattered people living on their land in an Anarcho-Capitalist utopia could do this, but I don't buy it. Once a large enough group of people who don't hold to your ideals have moved in and they have sufficient numbers and are scattered through your 'nation' and they decide to change things, you don't have a say anymore. Let alone what happens if you face an actual invasion by an organized army when you've gotten rid of such things in pursuit of utopia.
I'll embrace concepts like Anarcho-Capitalism and borderless states when technology exists that allows a man to be an island onto himself. When I can guard myself and my plot of land against an organized force many, many times more massive and well funded. Until that time comes and geographical mastery is no longer an aspect of armed conflict, I'll live with nation states protecting their borders as a necessity to survival.
I believe that philosophy exists to serve man, not vice-versa. Natural Law can lead us to a much better place the Positivism. But like all abstractions, it leaks. This is one place where it leaks. Getting rid of borders, at least in todays world (and maybe forever), leads to likely death and slavery. If most of the world embraced the ideals of Natural Law then it wouldn't be an issue. But it doesn't and it is. Allowing yourself to be surrounded and intersected many times over by people who think Natural Law is a bunch of BS or who have never even ran into the concept before and then expecting they will leave you alone instead of forcing their own philosophy on you is naive.
In short, I'll not embrace a philosohy to an extent that it leads to my destruction. I am not a zealot willing to martyr myself for the cause. In any event, I do believe that an argument can be made with Natural Law that when faced with credible threat, seizing the means to defend yourself is justified. Borders are a regrettable necessity. Maybe one day they won't be.
Re:The question is not whether he is a racist (Score:3, Interesting)
And so we want a person for President who can't even be bothered to look at what people put out under his own name? Sounds a bit too much like the current one for my tastes.
Re:well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The notion here is to create a simpler tax system that does not require the IRS as we know it today. No reasonable person is proposing eliminating all collection of Federal taxes and, hence, some infrastructure to collect those would of course be needed.
As far as subsidized college loans is concerned (which really has little to do with the IRS)... The free and easy access to student aid is a vicious cycle -- the colleges just raise their tuition to match the available money, making it harder and harder for students who don't quite qualify for aid to get an advanced education. If someone needs a loan for college, let them go out and get one -- let the market decide if pursuing a degree in Ancient Interpretive Literature is likely to result in enough income that the student can pay back the loan. It's not my responsibility as a taxpayer in State X to fund the hobby of another person in State Y. The Feds could perhaps, via the power of the interstate commerce clause, have a role in making the student loan market more viable by making sure that a student can't just jump across the state border to avoid repaying a student loan (existing laws probably deal with this fine but might need some changes).
Meddling in interest rates, for example, creates it's own set of problems. Recessions are inevitable and not necessarily the worst thing - ask someone who has just lost all the equity (and retirement nest egg) in their house and just got foreclosed on if they could care less if we are not in a recession (yet)? Let the market work it out - yes, it may be volatile at times, but the "propping up" of the system by the Feds results in big bubbles instead of more little ones that burst early. We have a global economy now -- the Fed really can't change that and will be increasingly less able to achieve their goals anyway.
Funny, I've never heard the Governor of a state say "We here in Hickstate are too stoopid to figure out how to lurn our kids - we need the Feds to tell us this". Instead it sounds more like "We here in Hickstate want money forcibly extracted from any state but Hickstate to help pay to educate our kids". States are free to band together to share R&D costs of education if they wish to, the Feds are not needed for that and the Constitution doesn't give them the power to IMHO.
Ah, finally something we agree at least partially on -- the allocation of frequencies and technical broadcasting standards seems to fall well within the scope of the interstate commerce clause as RF doesn't respect state boundaries.
Of course the sunsetting of Social Security will require a staged process so those that have put money into the plan will receive partial benefits and those that are already retired will continue to receive benefits until death. Yes, since the plan is basically bankrupt, there will be some combination of life support (covering shortfalls with general taxation) and benefit reductions during the phase out -- but not as bad if we continue the ponzi scheme for another 30 years. Not pleasant, but better to amputate the gangrenous lower leg now than to wait for the infection to spread up into the torso and internal organs - we infected ourselves with this disease decades ago and our attempts at fighting the infection have failed so drastic action is now needed.
Phasing out Medicare would need to be done much the same way as phasing out Social Security would be done -- in a staged fashion. As far as state-to-state disparity - that's life. People are free to migrate from one state to another state to seek a better life and have historically done so in the Unite
Re:well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, yes, in theory the country is a patchwork of individual land, but we both know better that that doesn't work in practice. And if you became the US Supreme Dictator and could enact such silliness, I would promptly buy the land on all sides of your's and threaten to shoot you for trespassing if you tried to leave your residence, just to make my point.
Re:VETO! (Score:5, Interesting)
Such a system would yield major advantages for everyone:
- Educate users. I'm a firm believer in education as a way to reduce harm and raise awareness.
- take away income from criminals and put it into the taxable real economy.
- use said income to mitigate medical and social consequences of (a)buse
- get rid of a lot of 'criminals' (small time dealers are usually opportunity criminals. no opportunity, no criminals.)
- not throwing away a lot of human potential over petty crime like posession or use
- police would have a lot of capacity to battle drugsrelated crime like theft, robbery, DUI, etc. as well as check the fringes like reselling to people without a license (meaning you get a fine and forfeit your license to buy)
After everyone has come to terms with that, perhaps you can put alcohol and tobacco in the same system as they are (hard)drugs themselves.
Will this end all problems? No. There will always be people trying to abuse the system for higher gain. There will always be addicts and their related problems. Issues with home-producers (meth labs, etc., not home growers of pot.) Lots more that I'm too tired to think of right now.
Anyway, 'The State' is harming users that get caught a lot more than most drugs will ever do. End that and you've done at least one good thing as a president.
more disclaimers: I don't see marihuana as 'completely innocent', I think all recreational psychoactive substances should only be available to people over the age of 18. Taxes should be imposed in relation to the cost to society.
Re:VETO! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd also argue that rather than freeing up police to "battle drugs related crime" that type of crime would reduce significantly. Although I can't prove it, I believe that most theft/robbery that is drugs related is due to the exhorbitant prices commanded by the illegal market. A federally regulated system would (should) reduce the cost to something more reasonable. This stuff typically costs nothing to grow & produce. The cost comes from rewarding the risk of those people willing to get it into the country and onto the market.
Re:well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh pshaw. You're valuing mindless entertainment over a necessity (rain-proof shelter). There's no comparison in any real assessment of what's important.
That's the point - shelter, food, clean water are necessities to existence whereas TW and Spielberg are not.
What the hell are you kids being taught nowadays?
tic
Re:Number One Thing (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact the first time (recently anyhow) it was stated that taxes should be cut to raise revenue (Reagan) taxes were lowered and revenue did rise. There is clearly such a thing as too much taxation for an economy (I suspect that value changes over time).
As to the trade between the Clinton economy vs the Bush tax cuts. Which Clinton economy are we talking about, the one he had when he started (basically the end of the Reagan boom discussed above) or the one he had when he finished? (a shallow recession and a .com bubble in the process of bursting.) The answer to your question depends on that clarification.
But don't let history get in the way of your rant, please continue.
Re:well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets hear it for extremism.