This past Wednesday, Dave Miller made perhaps the best comment ever at this young blog where he described serious people.
It Looked Good on Paper…
Partisan politics is boring, which is why I rarely post about it, but brutal reality has both major parties by their nutball fringe shorthairs. It’s fun watching both parties cringe and highstep like a drunkard on the dusty streets of an old western town while crazed partisans fire sixguns at their feet shouting, “Dance, rummy!” but the situation has our government oscillating between paralysis and brute force unilateral stupidity. Meanwhile, our nation faces real problems, and the challenges are growing.
Instead of never-ending show trials, kabuki hearings and playing to the peanut gallery, I would like either party (preferably both) to run on some form of the following platform.
Political Platform
We are not running on lower/higher taxes, pro-life/pro-choice, or any of our other traditional issues. If you give us the presidency/congressional majority, we pledge to hold two years of hearings and public debates on the following issues. At the end of two years, voters and elected officials should have informed opinions that feed substantive campaigns and debates focused on what’s important.
Here are the issues:
Rationalize the nation’s health care market and let insurance options flow from there. Study the many proposals for dirt cheap catastrophic insurance so that no American faces bankruptcy over medical bills.
An economy that works for everyone. How can we shape the economic environment so that working people, especially less skilled laborers, are not trapped in perpetual economic precarity? Can me minimize societal disruption and still have an economy that works for everyone?
Crime. Gotta get a handle on it. How? Lets debate data from the field and examine what works and what does not.
Foreign Policy. What does the US stand for and how hard is that stance? What is worth military intervention, and what is not? Can we please try enhancing the Peace Corps and other forms of “soft power,” since our hard power generals and bureaucrats have smashed every finger and thumb with hammers and shot out their eyes with nail guns?
The Federal Budget/Federal Debt. Can we figure out how to fund our government without racking up trillions more in debt every year? Can we agree that an “investment” that drives us deeper into debt is a really shitty one? The US government spends on average around 25% of GDP/year, while tax collection is around 16-19%. Close the gap! Have the debate and make some hard decsions, because the easy ones are all used up.
Immigration. Control access to who comes in. Agree on an immigration policy instead of allowing the rest of the world to de facto craft it for us. Want less immigration? Explain how we manage a population decline that will produce more old people and less young people every year. Want more immigration? Explain what type, from where, how many, and how we assimilate them.
Infrastructure. How would you promote upgrading it? All federal programs? Grants to states and cities? Public/private? How would you watchdog this torrent of trillions so we know its not wasted? We saw what happened with the covid money.
Critical Infrastructure protection. How would you harden and protect our power grid, water, utilities and comm infrastructure from terror attack, cyber attack, emp, solar flares?
Education. Our public schools are a global embarrassment. How should we reimagine our 19th century industrial age school system and redesign it for the 21st century?
Other issues: Mental health, Too big to fail banking, bringing back toleration…
Finally, how does each party plan on turning down the temperature? We are at a slow simmer now, and the angry flareups are almost always over politics.
Conclusion
This was just off the top of my head. What say you?