What I would do if I were President...or a God, I guess
1. Legalize Marijuana
2. Drastically Increase Funding for Head Start
3. Create a National Health Insurance Plan (or in some way, ensure that everybody has health insurance or health care)
4. Revive the estate tax. And the capital gains tax. And raise the income tax rate for the highest tax bracket. And put an income cap on social security. Basically, tax the fuck out of the very rich.
5. Tighten up campaign finance rules on 527s and 501C4 nonprofits.
6. Require credit card companies to lower their interest rates
7. Increase federal education grants
8. Pull troops out of Iraq
9. Not start a war with Iran
10. Drastically increase funding for smart, well-targeted international development
and relief efforts. (microcredit, elementary education, women's rights, property
rights, sex education)
11. Increased funding for renewable energy research
12. Legalize Drugs
13. Make abortion illegal
14. Do something about genocide in africa? (don't ask me what! I'm not actually the president, for christ's sake!)
15. Provide student loan forgiveness for public service (not just military service).
16. Make sure our intelligence and military agencies have people who actually speak the languages and know the cultures of the countries we're spying on or fighting.
17. More federal money for schools
18. More sensible and realistic approaches to educational evaluation
19. Better regulation of pork-barrel congressional spending.
20. Increase spending on social service block grants and, if at all possible, concentrate them on high-crime, high-poverty areas.
21. Whatever money we can't get from taxing the fuck out of rich people and reducing pork barrel spending and not fighting stupid and ineffective foreign wars and reducing entitlement obligations, we get by cutting fat from bloated programs (which means we need to spend more money on evaluation of programs). The military budget might be a good candidate.
I think the country would be a better and happier place if we did this shit. But few of these are politically feasible, and some are not legal, and some require cooperation from multiple branches of government.
This list is totally unrealistic. But if I were the king of this country, this is what I would do.
posted by Joe @ 8:17 PM
1 Comments:
I’m with you on all but the following.
#3 Are you okay with rationing?
#4 has been in place for years in many European countries and in the US (70% marginal tax rate pre-Reagan) and it has never substantially increased tax revenue. There will always be loopholes. Remember pensions and expense accounts (among many other dodges)? Even if it was possible to close them all, rich people tend to be smart and if one was rich the smart thing to do would be to move income/assets to a nation less hostile to the well capitalized. You do want rich people in your country don’t you? They do pay for basically everything as it is (top 20% already carry 75% of the burden). How would you make up the missing revenue if their money just left?
#6 are you okay will denying the poor access to the credit market? Cost of capital and risk can’t be decoupled.
#11 Many $100’s of millions of federal dollars have already been spent on this already since Carter with basically nothing show for it other than some really stupid photo ops over the years. Is it the government’s job to compete with the private sector in this field? What about tax refunds to create incentive for energy economy/alternative energy consumption to increase private sector investment?
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