What Would You Do As President?

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?

Comments

well..

[gangien]

call up Ron Paul and ask him what he'd do, and probably do that :P. I imagine starting with getting all our military home, would be one of the first few things.

Re:well..

[Retric]

This is my personal to 10 list.

1. Quickly end the war.
2. Limit military spending to 3 times any other country. (Saving ~428 billion a year.)
3. Fiber to the home. Every home.
4. Remove the income limit on SS / Medicare taxes. (It's the #1 reason why the middle class pay a higher tax rate than the super rich and the reason SS is having trouble in the first place.)
5. Invest in proven solar / wind systems that are close to the break even point. (EX: Solar hot water systems and wind farms.)
6. Fund mass transit.
7. Limited universal healthcare (90% coverage up to 10k per person per year.)
8. Increased regulation of the home lending market.
9. Limit maximum APR on any form of lending to 15% over inflation so credit card's are limited to around 17.5% APR / year.
10. Fund ITER and other large science projects.

Re:well..

[Sancho]

If I was the President, I'd do 1 and 2. The rest of what you've suggested aren't powers allocated to the president, so he can't do them (though he can try to convince Congress to do them.)

If I was the President, I'd try to return the Executive branch back to its Constitutional roots.

Re:well..

[Arthur B.]

Thanks for making my point. Ron Paul's stance on immigration has been breeding the worst kind of legal positivism. Illegal immigration is illegal because the federal government decided it was. Just because the fed govt says something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong or immoral. No amount of bold or italic on the word "illegal" is going to change that. And why the hell can't Ron Paul fans understand that immigration != naturalization. Who said anything about becoming a citizen ?

Re:well..

[Rei]

Let's talk for a moment about "fairness". A person doing hot tar roofing earns $9 an hour. Tiger Woods earns $171 a minute for playing golf. Stephen Spielberg earns $632 a minute. Paris Hilton is set for life for doing absolutely nothing of value. Is that a fair rewarding of labor?

We live in a (mostly) free market economy, and that's generally a good thing. It means that we pay for goods what they're worth. It means we strive to reduce subsidy and get mad when we see it in some form or another. It tends to lead to optimal use of resources. All of this is great, except that it treats people just like another good. The hot tar worker is like sand, available on the cheap, while Tiger Woods and Spielberg are like gold. They're rare, so the market pays more for them, exponentially more, obscenely more. Wages in a free market economy are naturally distributed along an "L" curve. This isn't "fair" in terms of the amount of labor people put in (or even how "smart" they are, or how much risk they were willing to take), but the free market doesn't care about "fairness". It doesn't care about anything. To it, people are just goods.

Now, while wages may be distributed exponentially, human needs are not. A poor person, buying necessities, has no money left over for luxury. A wealthy person simply cannot buy enough necessities to even dent their luxury budget. And if they did buy necessities for other people, that would be "charitable giving". Our income tax is designed to approximate a tax on luxury; the poor, being unable to spend much on luxury, pay the lowest rate, while the wealthy, unable to spend a significant portion on necessity, pay a luxury rate. And if they give to charity, it's deductable.

Now, one might argue that a sales tax that directly taxes luxury would be more equitable than an income tax. I'd agree. The problems, however, come in the implementation. Is a $0.30 cent head of cabbage luxury? I doubt anyone would argue that. Okay -- how about a $1.50 pack of buttom mushrooms? A $5.00 pack of Shiitakes? A $60 pack of truffles? How about a beat-up 86 Olds? A 2001 Saturn? A 2007 Prius? A 2008 Lexus? When you look at the big picture, you can't classify the level of luxury based on the category of an object; it really just doesn't work. Sure, some things lend themselves better to luxury taxes -- groceries having no base level of taxation, jewelry having a high level, and so on -- but you can't capture the extreme level of variation within a given field. Hence, the income tax, having brackets for different income levels, fills in the gaps.

Taxing luxury spending higher than necessity spending is a lot more "fair" than treating people's labor the same way you'd treat a market price for sand versus gold. Flatting out the "L" curve is a lot more "fair" than leaving it in tact. Now, people working harder, taking risks, getting educated, and generally making themselves into the "gold" that the market wants *should* be rewarded. It's only "fair". But it's hard to say that, say, Bill Gates deserves tens of thousands of times the level of reward as a hot tar roofer; it's hard to call that "fairness".

As for the implications on the economy, people need rewards. Without reward, there's little incentive to improve, little incentive to work harder, little incentive to become that "gold" that the market wants. On the other hand, rewards several tens of thousands of times a hot tar roofer's wage distinctly are *not* required. Let's look at history. Anyone here know what our top income tax brackets were doing our nation's biggest boom time (the end of WWII to the late 1960s)? ~80-90%. We had this staggering level of taxation of the top rungs during this time, and yet the economy took off. Now, most of the credit to our boom belongs to the US being the main undamaged producer of goods after the war. But it's hard to argue that such taxation was some significant impediment. While I wouldn't argue for such extreme bracketting of taxation, in general, I feel the case for bracketted income taxes in terms of fairness is quite solid.

Two main concerns

[egarff]

First: Honestly, I would do my best to remove our military presence from Iraq (and yes, I know this would probably lead to civil war, but I think its going to happen anyway, just delayed while we're there). Second: I would see if I could get the ball rolling on government insurance (socialist medicine), our privatized insurance system has become the bane of the under and uninsured people in the country, particularly children in those 2 categories.

In all seriousness

[earnest murderer]

Quit doing things that make other people want to knock our buildings down.

Understandably this will make a number of very large corporations unhappy. But knocking a couple zero's off a few dozen people's income doesn't bother me much.

There's lots of other things I'd do, but this is the big one we've been refusing to make eye contact with for about 70 years.

If the economy takes a dive, I'll maybe push for a large domestic project rather than invent a war. Maybe an interstate highway syste... aww damn... I'll come up with something good.

Promise.

Simple answer

[SeanTobin]

In order:

• Have Ron Paul be my VP
  
• Get legislation introduced eliminating the DMCA, Patriot Act
  
• Get legislation introduced mandating consumer copyright bill of rights and resetting copyright terms to the term when the work was created
  
• Resign, enjoy my retirement, pension & SS protection
  
• Watch as Ron Paul fixes the economy, foreign & domestic policy
  

I'd try to get the first four items done within the first 24 hours. I don't think I could handle being president any longer than that.

'In God We Trust'

[CyberBill]

I would remove "In God We Trust" as the national motto, as well as removing the "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. After that, I'd put limits on advertising and marketing which are constantly being shoved in our faces. Then I'd make Network Neutrality a reality. I'd pull out troops out of Iraq. Gay marriage would be legalized at the federal level. Basically I'd pretty much change everything. :)

My top 5 priorities, off the top of my head

[jorenko]

1. Kick off investigations of the crimes of the Bush administration.
2. Scale down our forgein military presence (not quite to the extent Paul wants to, but significantly).
3. Do everything in my power to get all of the unconstitutional legislation that has been passed in the last few years repealed (Patriot Act, MCA, etc).
4. Balance the budget. I would lay down absolute ultimatums that government programs justify their existence and their tax cost to the American people, and cut anything that's not convincing. Maybe I'd even call for a vote on what programs get to stay. We would have to leave taxes at close to current for a few years and pay off our debt, though, I'm afraid.
5. Not overstep the bounds of my office with signing statements, etc.

Re:Tsiangkun 2012

[hey!]

Which illustrates the problem of being President.

People think the President can do anything. But in fact the office of the President does not have the power to any of the things listed here, not without cooperation from other parts of the government, or in case of #3, a grand jury (which you are not allowed to stack with partisans).

Ideas for solving problems are nearly useless to a President. What a President has to do is frame problems. People have to accept that (a) a problem exists and (b) it is just the way you characterize it. Expecting to get your way on (c) [this is what we're going to do about it!] is excessively optimistic.

So, you have backtrack on your solutions to defining the problem in a way that is politically attractive and leads to the kinds of solutions you favor.

1) "I will repeal corporate personhood." -- "Corporations are using their personhood status to meddle in politics, which is not what it is for."

2) "I will tax the top 5% and distribute the wealth ..." -- "The problem with giving big tax breaks to the wealthiest people is that it doesn't work like it might have in the past. In an era of globalization, putting more capital in the hands of the ultrawealthy is that it can and does go overseas to make people who compete with American workers more productive."

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." -- "Government is acting as if it is above the law, and institutions that should be politically neutral have become tools of party and in some cases personal interests."

4) "Establish a department of peace..." -- "We're asking the taxpayers to give tons of money for national security, but we're spending it in ways that make the country less secure."

5) "Reparations for the victims of hurricane katrina who were failed by their governments." -- "It's been three years since since Katrina, and we still haven't been able to marshal an effective response. We can't wait anymore for some bureaucratic program, we need to do something immediately that will make a difference right away."