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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?
1) Straighten out the economy. Oil prices, housing slump, and the mess that is the Federal Banking Commission. 2) Scale back the size of the Federal Government and lower taxes accordingly. 3) Get a kick-ass foreign relations team into the embassies and capitals to repair our good name.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
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. :)
1) I will repeal corporate personhood.
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.
Consider this a platform, since I'll be 35 fairly soon.
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.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
Every election is the same thing. Candidates with speech writers talk the talk of "at home" issues. They can almost never do anything about it because "at home" issues are mostly local issues. Outside of coming up with a way to tax more more, and going to war, Washington doesn't do much for me. When the fed cuts rates or raises them, that impacts me at home. Most of the at home issues they don't belong in anyways.
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.
That smokin' hot deaf chick on West Wing.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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.
Seventh: New Orleans, remember?
Eighth: Healthcare.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
In no particular order:
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.
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.
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
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
Karma? What's that again?
Obviously he should be paid less than someone like Tiger Woods who benefits thousands of fans per tournament.
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