Slashdot Mirror
The NSA Would Be Eliminated Under President Gary Johnson (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson says he'd sign an executive order eliminating America's National Security Agency if he wins the 2016 election. And he's also forcefully arguing that domestic surveillance of internet activity and phone calls in the United States is worse than in China. Johnson took issue with an interviewer at The Daily Beast who pointed out that China monitors political dissidents, saying "What do you call the NSA and the satellites that are trained on us and the fact that 110 million Verizon users are having everything we do on our cell phones being data-collected?"
Johnson also wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, replacing both income taxes and corporate taxes with a single federal consumption tax, and says he'd be willing to sign legislation eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Commerce, which he says fuels "crony capitalism". "I'll sign legislation to eliminate any federal agency that they present me with."
Johnson has also said that if he were elected President, he'd pardon Edward Snowden.
Johnson also wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, replacing both income taxes and corporate taxes with a single federal consumption tax, and says he'd be willing to sign legislation eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Commerce, which he says fuels "crony capitalism". "I'll sign legislation to eliminate any federal agency that they present me with."
Johnson has also said that if he were elected President, he'd pardon Edward Snowden.
He can't abolish the IRS, but he most certainly can abolish the NSA and the Departments of Ed, HUD, and Commerce. All of those operate under the authority of the executive branch, and as long as the president doesn't want to spend more money, he can effectively do whatever the hell he wants within his own domain.
The headline makes it sound a bit more radical than it is.
First his beef with the NSA is domestic spying. He says he'd still have "the sattelites" but make sure they were outward looking not domestic. By "sattelites" I am fairly sure he's using that as a proxy for all the NSA does in scooping domestic intelligence. And after all isn't that exactly what gets slashdotter's all uppity. The things that Snowden pointed out? So really for slashdot this is bowling a strike.
Second, a federal consumption tax. Now normally a consumption tax is regressive: if you spend your whole pay check, as a poor person, then you are paying a greater share of the tax. That's not quite as bad as it sounds. Even if you have a progressive income tax, Where people richer than you or corporations pay income taxes they want higher wages or higher margins and so it drives up the cost of the poor person's consumables. You can make a consumption tax somewhat anti-regressive by making any residual income taxes more progressive. I don't know if Johnston is planning such compensation. I'd like to see his numbers. But I'm not going to flatly reject it.
Eliminatine the dept of education? Well as long as states can manage it, okay. I'm sure congress will tie the fed kickback to the states to educational standards so things won't go to hell in mississippi or texas.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But they're not fucking assassinating political candidates or office holders.
Of course not, GP has mistakenly associated to the NSA what actually is a CIA job.
People forget that the part of the NSA that does spying is just that - part of it. There's also the Information Assurance Directorate, whose sole job is to make computer and communications systems in the government _more_ secure. They're the people who brought you SE Linux. And of course, never mind the fact that there are foreign countries that probably need spying on (North Korea, just to name one). The problem was never about the NSA's very existence, it's about what it's been pushed into by the people in charge in recent years.
Now, if you want to talk about an agency that's been horribly toxic to civil liberties, and really is not serving a positive purpose at all, to abolish, why don't we talk about the DEA?
Yikes, no citations. Let's fix that. The following is from the Swedish government education site. Executive summary: Sweden has centralized and uniform funding, entrance exams, curriculum, teacher training/certification, and grading. Even independent charter schools must follow the same system!
https://sweden.se/society/education-in-sweden/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think the problem here is that people don't have a good picture of what that 1% really are - they're generally picturing the 1%'ers of the 1%'ers.
The 1% includes athletes, doctors, professors, engineers, people at the top of their field who are very much still working for it.
You knock that down to the 0.01%, and now you're looking at the CEOs with golden parachutes, the winners in the speculation fund manager market, the inherited wealth crowd, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
What you're talking about is the Republican Liberty Caucus. Small l-libertarian, as opposed to the Libertarian Party. Actually has Congressional supporters, etc..., as opposed to only a couple of local school board members and a dog catcher or something like that.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.