Good/Bad for 2008

GOOD:
1. Bush: for protecting us from terrorist attacks for another four years.
2. Obama: for selecting Rick Warren for the inaugural prayer.
3. Israel: for finally responding to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip.
4. Bush Administration: for finally getting Iraq more or less under control with the surge.
5. Congress: for not giving in immediately to the big 3 automakers' demands for government bailouts.

BAD:
1. Bush: for warrantless wiretapping.
2. Bush: for pushing through a $700B "rescue" bill for the rich bankers without oversight.
3. Congress: for letting Bush push through the ridiculous bill.
4. Congress: for not fixing Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac in years previous when the Republicans wanted it fixed!
5. Blagojevich: for major ethics violations.

Ethics

U.S. Senators and Congressmen must follow the same laws that government employees and contractors are required to follow in the areas of gifts, personal contacts, etc. We must curtail the influence of lobbyists. Former government employees should be prohibited from becoming lobbyists for a period of two years after they work for the government.

Religion and Government

According to the Constitution, religion should be free of interference from the government, not vice versa. The “establishment of religion” clause means “taxation from people to directly support a state-sponsored sect.” That’s one thing government is not to do. The other is to not “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That includes the free exercise of religion or absence of religion of those in the government!

There is no doctrine of “separation of church and state” found there—it is a recent phenomenon invented by secularists of the 20th century. Recent Supreme Court rulings have affirmed that students and teachers are allowed to pray in schools, provided no one is forced to participate. Local, state, and national government entities open their meetings with prayer—the Supreme Court has affirmed this practice. It has also affirmed that the words “In God We Trust” on our currency is constitutional.

However, the government should not interfere with the right of each person to choose his or her beliefs and act on them, provided they do not break the laws or interfere with others' rights. Neither should churches be allowed to sponsor or promote a particular candidate or party.

Marriage and the Family

Marriage has always been defined throughout history as a social and legal union between a man and a woman to live as husband and wife and become a family, possibly conceiving or adopting and raising children. Just because two men or two women or a man and a giraffe may live together and share their lives does not make them married. There is no reason to directly contradict thousands of years of precedent.

Marriage laws are non-discriminatory, provided the marriage is between a man and a woman. There never has been a fundamental right for one person to marry another person of the same sex. Civil unions currently provide many of the same benefits for gays and lesbians in some states. In other states, filing a few legal documents does the same thing.

Abortion

Abortion is the law of the land. We may never see the Supreme Court reverse itself on its Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973. However, to make it safer and rarer, we can regulate it in a much better manner.

Few people know this, but most modern abortion methods were developed in the Nazi prison camps of the holocaust (according to Abortion and Social Justice, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1972). The documents explaining the methods were put under seal right after World War II along with most of the other captured documents and were not released en masse until the late 1960s. It may be no coincidence that the abortion industry started pushing so hard at this time for legalization. Many of these documents are still available through the Freedom of Information Act from the U.S. Government Printing Office.

Based on principles found in many macro-economic textbooks, I believe that abortion started negatively affecting our economy about fifteen years after it was legalized by judicial fiat. How? By reducing our birth rate, we reduced the rate at which the economy could grow and reduced the number of young people able to take on the entry-level jobs and be consumers. This forced the government to turn its back on immigration laws (see Immigration). Donald Mann, President of NPG, said that “Macro economic growth requires a growing labor force so that GNP can increase constantly. A growing labor force is only possible if population grows, and population growth in the U.S. depends largely on massive immigration.” By reducing abortion rates, we can improve our economy without illegal immigration.

Late-term abortions are extremely dangerous and must be eliminated. This includes such practices as “partial-birth abortion”—inducing a dangerous breach birth, leaving the head within the birth canal, and destroying the baby’s brain with the medical equivalent of a pair of scissors—are barbaric by any standards. The one exception to late-term abortion should be when the mother’s health is endangered. Even then, the child can be often be delivered by caesarian section and saved anyway. The survivability rate of children born normally after 6-month terms is very high. Mid-term abortions should only take place to save the life of the mother, or in the case of rape or incest.

Abortions performed on minors must be with a parent’s consent. No other medical procedure is allowed without it. Why should this be any different? If complications result (and they do in as many as 25% of cases—see Abortion Complications for more information), the parent must know what is wrong so he or she can make informed decisions about medical care.

Planned Parenthood’s motto is “Every child a wanted child.” In practice, the result is “Every child a wanted child—if not, kill it.” So, what do we do with all the “unwanted” children? First, let’s attack the myth about unwanted children. With an increase in infertility rates here is the USA, there is a shortage of infants up for adoption. This has been true for the last twenty years and more. Many people are forced to go overseas in order to find babies. There are no unwanted infants. As far as the older children go, there are studies that show that “unwanted” children show no more deviance or problems later in life than “wanted” children. There remains the problem of abandoned and abused children. We need to change the laws to make them easier to adopt instead of forcing them into perpetual foster care. Furthermore, we must encourage families to adopt them and provide those families with support to handle the potential for emotional and behavioral problems caused by abuse. Click here for more information.

Social Security

The Social Security revenues must be taken back out of the general fund and kept in their own bucket. Future benefits for those currently under 40 years of age must be reduced, while giving them the opportunity to put more money into retirement savings accounts (e.g. 401K, IRA, Keogh) tax-free.

Salary Caps

The current system of setting salaries and bonuses for company officers is highly incestuous. CEOs and others often make out like bandits while the company fails. Why? Because everyone sits on everyone else’s boards, voting each other raises and bonuses. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” This practice must stop!

The status quo was caused by current governmental regulations. We must change those regulations to prevent these types of relationships. If necessary, we must cap salaries based on some formula of sales, profits, number of employees, average employee salary, etc.

The Banking Industry

Extravagant spending must stop. We must pass laws that specify that banks and S&L’s: (1) build less expensive buildings; (2) eliminate luxury trips for officers; (3) reduce ridiculous salaries and bonuses (see “Salary Caps”); (4) stop predatory lending practices—don’t increase credit card limits unless asked by the customer; (5) require larger down-payments for housing loans; and (6) reduce credit card rates.

The Stock Market

The stock market must be brought back under control, eliminating all derivatives that add no value. We must increase the amount of money required for buying options from 5% to 25% of the stock value, eliminating heavy leveraging. Short-selling must be stopped altogether.

Government Spending

Government spending MUST be brought under control. The latest bailouts will do very little to help the common man—the rich will benefit in the short term and all will suffer with higher taxes in the long term, prolonging an otherwise short economic downturn.

Here is my plan to limit spending:

(1) Kick out the illegal aliens. They sap our economy by using our schools, our universities, our hospitals, and our public facilities, paying almost nothing in taxes, since they live mostly in an underground economy.
(2) Pass rules in both houses of congress to limit earmarks to no more than 1% of a fiscal bill. Give the President a line item veto. It is clear that the founding fathers didn’t conceive of the huge spending bills we would have today—for the first view decades, each “line item” was a separate bill, requiring every single spending proposal to stand or fall on its own.
(3) Limit spending increases to no more than the current inflation index.
(4) Pass no new entitlements and start phasing out all the existing ones except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Food Stamps. Remove the revenues for these programs from the general budget and manage them separately again.
(5) Eliminate programs that don’t work.
(6) Eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse.

Taxes

First, a little history. Originally, income taxes were only for the top tier of earners. It’s still mostly that way. The Top 20% of wage earners pay 90% of the taxes. After every tax rate reduction (under Kennedy, under Reagan, and under Bush II), revenues went up due to the economy being stimulated. When the government increased tax rates (Herbert Hoover, F D Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Clinton), within two years revenues decreased due to a downturn in the economy. And contrary to current popular wisdom, Bush II’s tax cuts shifted a larger burden of the tax collection from the poorer to the richer. In 2006, the top 5% of U.S. taxpayers, those with gross annual incomes of at least $153,500, paid about 60% of all income tax collected, while reporting only about one-third of the total income of the U.S. This is up from 55% under Clinton. The top 20% pay 80% of the taxes.

The current tax rates are about right and should be extended before they expire in 2010. Some minor adjustments can be made to optimize revenue. Raising taxes on the rich only ensures that they will not be able to hire as many people, spend as much on goods, or take as many vacations. This is disastrous to the middle class, since the money would go to them. The poor shouldn’t be paying taxes—however, neither should we use “tax rebates” to “redistribute wealth.” This only encourages laxity.

Let’s get one thing straight—corporations don’t pay taxes, consumers pay them. Before you think about “soaking the corrupt corporations,” ask yourself, “Do I want the cost of everything I buy to go up?” Let’s leave corporate taxes where they are.

Inheritance taxes destroy small businesses, which employ half of all private sector employees, pay nearly 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll, and have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade (according to the SBA). Even if let the current inheritance tax holiday expire, we must eliminate all inheritance taxes on small businesses to keep our economy strong.

Interpretation of the Constitution

I grew up learning that the Constitution of the Unites States of America was a “living document.” I thought they meant that was living in that it could be changed by adding amendments. Later on I learned that some people mean that its meaning can be changed and adapted to the times. This is ridiculous. If this is true, then we have no Constitution and the Rule of Law becomes nothing more than a Rule of Feelings. This leads to arbitrary law established by an elite judicial oligarchy, which can lead to the worst kind of social injustice.

To find out what the Constitution means, we need to look at how the people who wrote and ratified each article, section, and amendment viewed them. In other words, what did they mean them to say? They mean no more and no less. This is called "original meaning." The Constitution was written in plain English and was meant to be understood by the common man.

In order to prevent a few judges from ruling the land based on their arbitrary views, we need to appoint judges that interpret the Constitution using the principles of original meaning.

Global Warming

I’m sorry, but there is not irrefutable scientific evidence that the globe is on an irreversible man-made warming trend. We haven’t even been warming for the past 10 years, and we’re cooling right now. While we do need to be responsible about the environment (see Pollution), we don’t need to spend any money on any Kyoto Protocol--the money would be better spent on the poor and on developing countries. If the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hysteria is true, there is little we can do about it. Let's spend the money on helping those hardest hit to cope with it.

The Earth's climate changes naturally all the time. If we're warming, we're warming no faster than the other planets, indicating variations in the sun's output may be the cause.

Pollution

Since 1960, we in the U.S. have reduced the pollutants making it into our environment by over 90%, even though we have nearly doubled our industrial output. How? With higher technologies. High-tech doesn’t pollute nearly so much as low tech. The biggest remaining polluters are China, India, and Russia. Smaller third-world countries are polluting correspondingly. We must freely share our clean technologies with the new emerging industrial bases and insist through treaties that they responsibly enter the manufacturing world. The major portion of our foreign aid should go to this end.

We still have some problems: illegal dumping, new pollutants from the electronics industry, and farming runoff. One thing will stop rampant illegal dumping: heavy enforcement. Polluters must be fined more heavily and jailed longer—these are crimes against many people as well as against our plants and animals.

Energy Policy

We must keep energy cheap and available for our people. We must not burn our food supply, as we are currently doing! Instead, we must follow a three-step program:

(1) Short term (1 - 5 years). Drill here. Drill now. With the technological improvements in drilling techniques, the danger of spills like we saw in the past is almost gone. We must drill in ANWR and off our coasts to supply our oil and natural gas needs. We must continue to mine coal and to use our best, cleanest methods of burning it to generate electricity.
(2) Medium Term (5– 15 years). Build more nuclear power plants based on French technology. Long-term storage of nuclear waste is not a problem. In the past it was believed that we would have to store the waste products for thousands of years. We now know that is not true: a mere one or two hundred years is all that’s needed.
(3) Long Term (15 – 30 years). Encourage the development of wind, tidal, recyclable waste, no-food bio-fuels, solar, and other technologies through both direct government investment and tax incentives. We don’t know what the next breakthrough will be. Therefore, we must start a myriad of small investments in many potential technologies, then weed out those that show no promise after a few years.

Intelligence

Missing actionable intelligence, as we did with 9-11, is inexcusable. As part of defense, we must maintain an intelligence capability more capable than any other in the world. As the only superpower left, we must know exactly what is going on and be able to respond to clear, actionable intelligence when needed. Getting it wrong, as we did in Iraq, cannot happen again—it’s simply too costly in lives and money. We must rebuild our HUMINT mission, as well as strengthen our SIGINT and IMINT capabilities.

War on Terrorism

We should continue to partner with other nations to go after terrorists where they live, train, and plan activities. An international conference on terrorism must be called and a treaty or accord signed on how to deal with terrorists not associated with organized governments. This includes temporary incarceration, rights to trial, punishment, and freedom of action guarantees.

Piracy on the high seas, whether done by state sanctioned privateers or independent groups, is growing rapidly. In many cases piracy is funding terrorism. We need to convene a new international conference and decide how to deal with the pirates. Can we set up decoy ships? Can we arm merchant vessels? In any case, we must deal with the problem before it becomes worse.

Stationing of Troops

We should bring all troops home over a period of 10 years, starting with the oldest stations, unless the government of the country they are in pays for their stationing or remunerates the U.S. in some other acceptable manner. We should improve the capability of our expeditionary forces to be able to deploy in a matter of weeks instead of months.

Defense

The Common Defense is one of the pillars of the Constitution. Let’s face it—the thing an armed force was made to do is to kill. In this light, we must continue to develop the best weapons and maintain a technological edge to protect ourselves while reducing civilian casualties. However, where civilians are sheltering the enemy, we cannot be afraid of inflicting “collateral damage.”

We should spend between one-third and one-half of our non-discretionary national budget on defense, making certain that our troops are well-supplied with the best technology we have to offer for the money.

We must never send our troops on a mission without the proper weaponry, outfitting, and supplies. Furthermore, we must give our forces under the United Nations the right to disobey orders that they see as foolhardy. For instance, in Somalia in 1993, U.S. commanders believed we were under-gunned before going into Operation Gothic Serpent, which led to the fiasco we now know as “Black Hawk Down.” However, they were constrained by President Clinton at the time to follow the orders of the local U.N. commander.

Policing the World

We can’t afford, monetarily or morally, to be the world’s policemen. However, we must use our leverage in the U.N. and in various treaty organizations (NATO, SEATO, etc.) to prevent and correct human rights violations. Isolating thug regimes by blockades, as well as confiscating their monetary resources, when possible, along with continual harassment from the air, is much preferable to putting forces in harm’s way. However, there will be times when invasion is necessary.

Further, we must realize that the U.N. is currently a very corrupt organization run by third-world dictators who want to be superpowers. We must get more involvement from the Western Europeans in helping to oversee and reform the corruption—kicking out those in office who break the rules and holding governments accountable monetarily who back them up. In the end, however, if we can’t reform it, we need to leave it.

At the same time, we must stop trying to bring into NATO countries that have been traditionally aligned with Russia. This will only provoke Russia to invade those countries, as it did Georgia in 2008.

Crime & Punishment

Currently, someone who is caught with a stash of drugs to use for a month can spend longer in jail that a person who kills another person while driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. This is wrong!

We need a top-down review of all levels of crime and their punishments to assure more equitable penalties—more heinous crimes receive higher fines and longer sentences. Furthermore, we need to address payment to the victims for theft or property destruction.

The overturning of many death sentences lately by the use of DNA has shown the corruption present in some offices of prosecution. Prosecutors must be held criminally accountable for withholding information that could clear defendants. We should enact a moratorium on capital punishment until we can reform how it's used.

Healthcare & Insurance

My dad called the insurance industry the “Legalized Mafia.” Rather than helping people through tough times, they raise your rates any time you make a claim. How do we solve this? The entire insurance industry (health, life, and casualty) should be made non-profit, or should be forced to accept a certain percentage of people who can’t afford it. Those who can afford it should be required by law to buy at least a catastrophic care policy. The entire cost of healthcare and healthcare insurance should be equally tax deductible for everyone. I hate government oversight, but more oversight is necessary in this case.

Education and Training

The public education system is broken. We need to give back to teachers the ability to discipline the unruly kids or remove them from classes to keep order. Current trends are to require more years of English, science, and math. This is the wrong emphasis. We must restructure the system to provide more vocational training in high school and not insist that all students be readied for college.

In elementary and middle school, we must concentrate on the basics and make sure students really grasp the material before passing them to the next grade. We must go back to providing “real recess”—an unstructured play time at least twice a day to let kids work off their energy. This will significantly reduce the behavior problems in the classroom—especially from young boys. We must also quit forcing males to act like females in the classroom, expecting them to do "cutesy" busy-work projects that really have no bearing on the subject at hand.

Above all, we need to encourage competition in the school system. Vouchers for students in underperforming schools will provide this, as well as raises for administrators and teachers in higher-performing schools. However, supplying vouchers for all is not the way to go. It will only cause chaos, raise the cost of private education, and hurt the good public schools. No more than 10% of the students in a state should be supplied with vouchers.

Generally, a pay raise for teachers will attract experienced people who have proven themselves in industry and business to the educational arena. Control of public education must be returned to state and local government, abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. We must reduce the cost of bureaucracy in order to allow more of the money to be used to pay teachers.

Where charitable organizations cannot keep up, local and state government should provide training in new areas to people who are affected by industry downsizings, but only if no other jobs are available in that industry. Workers should be encouraged (through tax relief) to update their education when downsizing is foreseen.

Immigration

Today, it’s too hard to become a naturalized citizen of the U.S. The process needs to be streamlined so people don’t have to wait fifteen to twenty years in many cases. We also need to let in more people legally from all countries. In addition, we need to enforce existing laws against illegal aliens. This has nothing to do with racism—it has only to do with upholding our laws. I am not a racist. Notice that I have already said that we need to allow more people into the U.S. legally and make it easier for them to become citizens. Would a racist call for that?

Why do we need to allow more people in? Because our economy will not grow otherwise. We have been killing off much of our growth for the last forty years by allowing abortion on demand. The only way to make up for it is to allow more people into the country legally and give them opportunities they don’t have where they come from.

If we allow more people in legally and enforce laws against illegal aliens, our economy will benefit because much of the money that currently goes into the underground economy will be shifted to the legal side of the economy, supplying more true income for legitimate small business that will provide additional jobs and additional revenue for the government.

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action should be education and opportunity, not quotas. We should concentrate on training the historically disadvantaged and those who traditionally are absent from certain jobs and make them competent to compete in those areas. We should not promote incompetence just because of who a person is, including making loans to people or organizations that have no hope of paying them back. To me, Affirmative action is overcoming my own prejudices (because everybody has some) and accepting others for who they are.

Hate Crimes and Hate Speech

All crimes are “hate crimes.” It’s not the government’s business to punish motives, only actions and intent (i.e. premeditated, immediate, or negligent). If you punish a perpetrator based on who the victim is, that’s discrimination—unequal application of the law—and that’s against the Constitution of the United States.

What is hate speech? Hate speech IS NOT saying you disagree with someone. Neither is it pointing out scientifically established negative consequences. Hate speech IS calling for death or persecution of a group. Is it wrong? Definitely. Can we stop it or punish it? No. We are a “free speech” society, and no matter how abhorrent the opinion, to curtail it is unconstitutional. Besides, if we outlaw it, the perpetrators will just go underground. At least with free speech, we know who they are and can fight them with our words of truth and actions of love.

Race Relations

We’ve come a long way since the 60’s on improving the attitudes and situations. We now have minorities at all levels of the government and industry, including the President of the USA. Unfortunately, bigotry and hatred still exist on all sides. Furthermore, many minorities are disadvantaged due to where they live and their parents’ incomes. Some “whites” still hold to the mistaken belief that Europeans are superior—we may always have these brainless bigots with us. However, I hope they eventually die out. Also, as a result of the years of repression and prejudice, some persons in the minority have understandably developed a hatred of the “oppressors.”
So how do we overcome this? Education and enforcement.

First, we need to continually reinforce these major tenets in schools, in advertisements, and in continuing adult education:
1. “All people are created equal.” No one is inherently more important than anyone else. No one should be denied a job or membership in a civic group because of race, creed, color, or gender. No one should be denied advancement because of these characteristics. In the case of churches or religious institutions, they should never be allowed to discriminate in hiring or membership based on race, color, or gender. Obviously, a faith-based group should be able to assure that those that join it or work for it believe as the group does.
2. “Don’t disparage other races, or your own race for that matter, in your speech or writing.” Don’t use racial epithets, period. Don’t tell racist jokes. Tell those who do that you don’t appreciate hearing that type of language.
3. “Try to understand other points of view.” Learn about their culture, the situation they grew up in, where they live now, and how they’ve been treated. As long as it’s not about corrupt practices (like rampant bribery in some countries), embrace cultural differences.
4. “Listen to others’ concerns.” You don’t know how they feel and can’t address their problems unless you listen.
5. “Show respect to everyone, regardless of situation.” Remember, they have all the same rights you do.
6. “Love everyone and help those in need.” Need I say more?

Next, we must continue to hold employers, government workers, and accountable for following the law and for training their employees in diversity and tolerance. However, we must never use “affirmative action” or quotas. Dr. King said it best when he said that each person should be evaluated on their own merits rather than by the color of their skin.