The SDMB mock election Debate #2: Economy, Health care, Social Security & Poverty

Great Debates
1

Welcome to the second SMDB multiparty 2008 campaign debate.

Today we will debate and discuss your policies concerning some major domestic issues.

We welcome the candidate to post their positions & solutions and be prepared to defend them. We welcome posters to ask questions related to this debate and challenge listed methods.

The revised list of debates:
Thread 1 Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran & Pakistan.
Thread 2 Economy, Health care, Social Security & Poverty
Thread 3 Global Warming, Energy Policy, Green Issues & Technology
Thread 4: Education & Science & Space
Thread 5: Military & Veteran’s affairs and speak to your stand on the US use of torture and waterboarding.
Thread 6: The question of Gay Rights/Marriage, Civil Rights, The candidates position on abortion and if this will play into his or hers judicial appointments.
Thread 7: Foreign policy, highlighting China, Russia, Cuba & Israel and whatever seems important to people.
Thread 8: Ethics & Campaign Reform
Thread 9: Homeland Security, The Patriot Act, Domestic Spying & Immigration

2

For the Libertarian Party

Economy, Health care, Social Security & Poverty

The moderator asks for our positions and solutions to these. I can tell you my positions, but I have to tell you I have no solutions. And if anyone else tells you otherwise, I’d advise that you question them thoroughly. If they say they will put more money into this or that, ask them where it will come from and what exactly they will do with it. Pin them down because every election cycle, they promise to fix this whole list. They never do.

All that said, here are my positions.

Economy

I will ask Congress to restructure legislation affecting the economy in such a way that it is aimed at allowing people to trade as freely as possible without interfering with other peoples’ equal rights to trade. The maximum freedom possible, I believe, is brought about through the suppression of coercion and fraud. Our entrepreneurs are the people who are fueling our economy. Our goal should be to remove the hostilities from our market that presently motivate them to move production overseas, while hiring people here whose legal status forces them into cheap labor.

I believe that people have a right to bargain collectively, but I also believe that people who own businesses have a right to run them in whatever way they see fit so long as they conduct their affairs peacefully and honestly. No employer should represent his conditions as “safe” if in fact they are not, and I would ask Congress to pass legislation that severely disincentivizes such misrepresentation. Same thing for manufacturers who represent their products as safe. If they do, they’d better be.

The economy is like language. It rise up whenever people gather together, and controlling it is impossible, no matter what my opponents may tell you. The best way to stimulate the economy is to encourage free enterprise so that jobs can be created, money can be invested, people can generate wealth. That’s how money is supposed to be made. It’s not supposed to be made on printing presses at federal banks.

Be especially wary of those who promise you “stimulant packages” that consist of government spending in the billions and hundreds of billions. Spending puts government in debt, and economic progress does not come from debt. You know this. Don’t let them get away promising magical solutions to problems that their very plans have caused.

Health Care

Health insurance and care have not always been prohibitively expensive. I grew up in a very poor family, but I did not want for regular doctor’s care and my parents had affordable insurance for our family. So what happened? In short, government interference and coercion happened. The biggest single lobbying influence in Washington today is the Insurance industry. Congress has partnered with those companies in such an intimate way that there have been times when the companies have drafted legislation language that Congress has adapted and passed.

Be very wary of promises for “universal health care”. It is code language for “universal insurance scams”. What will happen if Congress takes over health care is that the insurance companies it has favored over the years will take on the lion’s share of premium payments. Companies who do not cooperate or have not in the past will be put out of business.

If you simply must believe that a universal health care plan is the holy grail, at the very least insist on details from those who promise it. Once again, who will pay and how will the money be used? Just because they name big numbers doesn’t tell you a thing. Will it pay doctors or insurance companies? How much in proportion to each? How much will hospital administration cost? How will the plan handle your treatment? Will you be put on waiting lists with others? Who will determine priority? These are details that a person who says “I have a plan” should be able to tell you. If they cannot, then they do not have a plan. They have a dream.

Social Security

I would ask Congress to provide incentives for young people to save for retirement in the form of taxes and education. If we simply must have a Department of Education, then it ought to start educating people. Personal finance is such a basic, core part of American daily life that it should be taught beginning in elementary school. Young people should learn how to save and invest their money for their futures.

I would also ask Congress to phase out the Social Security program currently in place. Those who claim they can “fix it” are lying or naive. You know better. Even if we were to tax Bill Gates himself at 100%, it would not begin to cover the debt from that account. Its money was spent long ago, and its future income is still being spent. There is no way out other than to stop doing it.

Poverty

I believe in the good hearts of people like you. No one is more charitable than Americans. But charity cannot eliminate poverty, and neither can government. Lyndon Johnson began a War on Poverty 40 years ago. If it had been successful, it would not be now an issue to discuss here.

Sure, government can do short-term fixes here and there, but plenty of people fall through the cracks. Homelessness and poverty are at all time highs. People with common sense know that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If Congress is going to take 30-40% of our earnings, then we cannot have that money to care for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.

I realize that I have not told you what you want to hear, and that many of you will disagree with me. But I’ve told you what I honestly believe, and the kinds of questions I would ask of anyone who thinks he has a plan that serves people in the South Bronx and in South Dakota — with very different needs — equally well.

3

Thank you for your post. I have seen here on this board, an explanation why Social Security is not busted.

How do you respond to arguments that the lack of Universal Health Care hampers our businesses and severely hampers our small businesses? It is harder for small businesses to hired and retain good employees as they cannot offer competitive Health Insurance. Some of our large corporation find the expense of retiree health plans to be a burden with which they can barely struggle.
I have hopes that some additional candidates will chime in tonight.

Jim

4

For the Green Party of Canada:

Economy:

I propose greater government benefits for Canadian businesses, alternative energy businesses and research, and businesses that have met stated objectives in helping the environment. I believe we should continue our efforts to expand our trade network outwards beyond the United States, and to focus research–both environmental and economic–upon Alberta’s oil fields.

Health Care:

I believe very strongly in supporting the public system, and wish to review our budget before diverting as much unnecessary expenditure as possible towards improving the education and hiring rate of new nurses and staff, and rebuilding old hospitals while establishing new ones for better access. I believe in adding a tax–not a huge one, but a moderate one–to private clinics wishing to operate outside the public system purview.

Social Security:

I propose a slight CPP increase in order to meet our target of $1.55 trillion in reserve funds, and a full-scale review of the CPP and OAS system–inviting all Canadians, regardless of age or income, to offer their own opinions on the subject.

Poverty:

I propose a slight increase in the PST, for those provinces who wish to opt in, for the stated purpose of funding charitable organizations like Out of the Cold and United Way, and the diversion of a percent of the GST towards opening new shelters and education programs in the cities.

taps microphone a couple of times

5

Thank you, What Exit?, for your comment about a thread you saw. Here is a report from the General Accounting Office that gives just one trust fund exhaustion scenario. One of many. Here is another from the Social Security Administration’s Office of Retirement Policy. You will be hard pressed to find a scenario in which a person who is 18 years old today will have access to benefits upon retirement without some change in either revenues or payouts. Even giving you that the post you’ve seen proves conclusively that Social Security is “not busted”, then why ask the candidates for our “solutions” to it? If it isn’t broken, there’s nothing to discuss.

Thank you for that question as well. I would respond by saying that the only reason health insurance must be provided by employers at all is because government has designed its regulations to incentivize it. People do not do things randomly for no good reason. Business owners always respond to incentives, and government spends much of its time incentivizing behavior.

Insurance companies do sell policies to individuals and families — even independent groups, but these are unaffordable because incentives and subsidies are in place to lessen the burden on employers. It is important to note that this does not necessarily lessen the burden on employees, because all it takes is for one employee to “break” an actuarial for rates to rise for the whole group. One hypochondriac will be expensive for everyone.

I would argue that the best thing government can do for insurance costs is to enforce strict laws against fraudulent and coercive practices and otherwise allow companies to compete for the consumer’s dollar. If you have studied the work of Nobel laureate F.A. von Hayek, then you know that a central government is incapable of setting prices efficiently. It is frivolous regulation and favor given to some over others that artificially increases prices and makes insurance — and health care generally — unaffordable.

Look at what has happened in segments of the health care industry that are unaffected by insurance regulations. Costs of LASIK surgery, for example, have plummeted over the years. They have had too because it is one of the few health care scenarios in which people ask the doctor, “How much will this cost?” And then they shop for competitive treatments. When’s the last time someone asked a doctor, covered by insurance, how much something will cost? People have no idea what an MRI costs, or a blood pressure test, other than the amount of their deductible.

Interference in people’s affairs just naturally screws things up. Have you ever tried to, say, write a post while someone stands behind you trying to “help”. Government ought to interfere when people are abridging the rights of other people, but acting out the role of a backseat driver, just because it can, leads to many an avoidable accident.

And so my solution for restoring equitability between small companies and large ones with respect to insurance coverage is to stop incentivizing it, and let insurance companies compete in a coercion-free market. It is the administration of government regulations that is expensive to small businesses. I know. I’ve owned a few. When you have to pay lawyers and advisors to help you stay on top of everything from OSHA to DOT, your employees are deprived of much of the benefit of your profits.

6

For the Independence Party of America

Economy

I believe the best thing the government can do for the economy is stay out of it. However, there are two areas which I would prefer stringent legislation; those areas are pollution (not just in terms of global warming, but in terms of affecting the local surroundings of the sources) and protections against fraud and white-collar crime.

Health Care

I’m for Universal Health Care. I do not believe that having government-provided health care is a human right; I simply believe that having as many people as possible fit and healthy is a good thing for the rest of us in practical terms. Each sick person is a drain on the system; this will still be true with a universal health care system, but at least then we will be able to see more clearly the extent of that.

Social Security

I believe SS is in dire straits, and that it is infinitely preferable that people save for their retirement on their own. The problem with this though is that not all people understand a reasonable amount of money to put away or the different kind of investments and the like a nest egg could be put in. I think it should be kept, but in a significantly reduced form, while people are encouraged to decide for themselves how they will spend their money. With proper education, they know how best to save for their own futures, after all.

Poverty

I can sum up my response to this in two statements; I think that those who survive from welfare payments with no interest in jobseeking, or those who get benefits with no care to pay anything back, are unfortunetly a necessary part of aiding those who genuinely need a helping hand. The government paying out to a person who needs the money is a bad situation for all concerned, but sometimes I believe that it is necessary, again, not as a human right, but in practical terms, that people are able to consume and not sink into poverty.

7

For the Liberal Market Party:

Economy
The proper role of government is to ensure a stable financial system, maintain institutions which prevent market breakdowns, keep inflation low, and (in rare cases) correct for honest-to-god market failures which prevent prices from working.

There is no room for government to manage the details of running an economy. There is no room for the government to pick the ‘right’ technologies or set up incentives that promote one solution over another. Most especially, there is no room for government to own or control businesses which are perfectly capable of functioning on their own.

Tax Policy: The proper role of taxes is to raise the funds required for running the government while distorting the market as little as possible. Taxes should never be used as an instrument of social policy. There should be no ‘sin taxes’, or tax credits for engaging in the ‘right’ kinds of behaviour.

An area of particular concern are taxes that are taken from the same people who receive government benefits with the tax money. For example, taxing the middle class, then using the money to provide middle class benefits. All this does is inject government as a middle man and destroy efficiency. Therefore, before any benefits are aimed at any particular group, we should always ask whether reducing taxes on that group instead would be a better plan.

Government should aim to balance the budget, but there are times when this isn’t feasible. In any event, if government spending and revenues are shrunk to their proper levels, overall deficits will be reduced in scope as compared to the overall economy.

Trade: The Liberal Market party supports free trade. Not ‘fair’ trade, which is just another word for protectionism. It is none of our business whether other countries have our same employment standards, training standards, education, or anything else. In fact, the lack of such standards may be the comparative advantage that very poor countries have, and demanding that they meet our standards before trading with us is tantamount to freezing them out of the global economy and condemning them to a poor existence.

The only exceptions to unfettered free trade are when the country needs to maintain an industry for strategic military purposes, and possibly when other countries indulge in industrial practices that cause externalities. Then by all means it is correct to make that country pay for those externalities, through tariffs if need be. But this can easily become a ‘catch-all’ reason for trade protectionists to see externalities everywhere, so there would be very stringent requirements for declaring an honest externality that must be compensated for.

Regulations: The Liberal Market Party would immediately abolish the ‘efficacy’ standard for the Food and Drug administration, and allow them to regulate only safety. This would ease the regulatory burden dramatically and speed up the adoption of new drugs. The Liberal Market party would also abandon federal CAFE standards, which are a very poor way to ensure that the country save fuel. A much better alternative would be to institute a carbon tax and then allow people to decide how much they want to spend on fuel.

In general, regulations should be reduced. The cost of regulation to the American economy has been estimated at over a trillion dollars per year. Many regulations exist solely to benefit special interests or to maintain a status quo. There would be no ‘closed shop’ laws, which would be seen as a violation of an employer’s right to hire whomever he pleases. The right to strike would still exist, but the power of a strike comes from collective bargaining and the employer’s risk of losing an entire workforce - not from government coercion.

Health Care
It is the position of the Liberal Market Party that in a wealthy society such as ours, no one should die or be financially destroyed because of an unforseen health issue. However, the LMP also believes that markets are the best way to organize societal resources, and therefore government interference in the health market should be kept to a minimum.

One issue the LMP is willing to address is the fundamntal breakdown of the health insurance market due to information asymmetry. This is an honest-to-god market failure, adn there is a role for government to correct the problem.

The LMP also recognizes that universal benefits carry with them a moral hazard - reduce the cost of medical care, and you reduce the desire of people to maintain their own health and/or to use the health care system frivolously. Therefore, there should always be some cost to the individual involved in using health care resources.

Given all this, here is the LMP plan for health insurance:

  1. Universal catastrophic medical coverage for all, with caps determined by wealth. For example, it may be determined that all medical expenses over $1000/yr or $5000 over 10 years shall be paid by the government for persons with an annual income of less than $20,000. The same catastrophic coverage for someone earning $100,000 per year might be $10,000 per year or $50,000 over 10 years. For someone earning $500,000 per year, the cap might be $100,000 per year, or $1 million over 10 years.

The goal is to ensure that no one is financially destroyed by health issues, while keeping the vast bulk of health care costs in the private sector. This catastrophic coverage would drastically reduce the price of health insurance by limiting the top-end liability insurers face. This would make ‘gap insurance’ cheap enough for most people to carry on their own, and would dramatically lower the health care burden on businesses.

  1. Provide subsidies for ‘gap insurance’ for the lowest quintile. Very poor people who cannot afford gap insurance should be eligible for government insurance with a deductible. Maintaining a deductible is important to ensure that the market can properly price services.

  2. Work to reduce information asymmetry by investigating ways of setting up health care pools and/or randomizing the selection of customers to health providers. In addition, we may look at providing free medical exams for the purpose of attaining insurance. Great care would be taken to minimize any impact this might have on the proper function of the market. Done right, this would actually improve market efficiency by making sure that information asymmetries are kept to a minimum.

  3. Drug deregulation, medical device deregulation, and a careful look at current doctor and nurse licensing regulation to ensure that licenses are not being use to restrict entry into the market and prop up salaries.

Medicare: Medicare will have to be means-tested. It is headed for fiscal ruin, and there are no ‘quick fixes’. The only way to save health care for the aged is to make sure that the wealthy pay for their own health care. The LMP finds it abhorrent that the poorest sector of society (the young) are heavily taxed to provide free health care for the richest sector of society (the elderly). Poor retired people should have full health care benefits - Bill Gates should pay his own way. It’s time stop treating medicare as an entitlement and turn it into a social program for poor retirees.

We find it especially abhorrent that some advocate an estate tax on the rich, but also advocate providing the rich with free health care. We believe it would be far better to abolish the estate tax, but make elderly people draw from their estates to pay for their own health care needs.
Social Security
Social security is not quite the mess some say it is - Medicare is in far more difficulty. Social Security also carries with it a moral hazard - the existence of a government safety net at retirement reduces the incentive to save, and reduces the incentive for families to help each other (or to even have families in the first place). Therefore, Social Security should be privatized - the money should go into low-risk investments and benefits paid out of the proceeds. Today, Social Security is nothing more than a tax, with a promise that for paying taxes the government will look after you in retirement.

Poverty
The vast array of poverty programs that exist today should be scrapped in exchange for an inverse tax credit system to guarantee a wage. Get rid of rent controls, subsidies, food stamps, education subsidies, and all the other market-distorting programs (many of which work at cross purposes), and go direct to the source. Set up a tax system such that at X income you pay no tax, and at X - Y income you receive a tax credit cheque. For example, the schedule may say that you pay no taxes at an income of $18,000. At an income level of $9000, you receive a $4500 tax credit. The credit would be set up such that you will always earn more money by taking a job, so there is always an incentive to raise your income through work. We can debate the exact amount of the credits, but this should be the goal.

I don’t know if this fits under Economy or Poverty, but the LMP would abolish the Americans with Disabilities Act. All it has done is act as an enormous burden on business, and it has created resentment towards the disabled and encouraged a ‘victimization’ of the disabled which is not good for them or for society. If you want to encourage businesses to hire disabled people, it would be much better to allow them to pay a lower wage (even lower than minimum wage), then provide income relief directly to the disabled to make up the difference.

8

What good is that money, that wealth, that fiat currency, under a government controlled system? Do you have any objection to returning to the gold standard?

9

A good question, John, thank you. I join Austrian School economists from Rothbard to Greenspan in advocating a commodity standard for currency, whether it be gold, silver, or something else of intrinsic value. Not to poison the well, but people should be mindful that the person who decided on August 15, 1971 that the US would no longer redeem currency for gold was disgraced former president and supreme huckster, Richard Nixon. If people support his policies of freezing the economy so that it cannot grow, then they should vote for candidates who support the fiat currency — meaning a currency based on nothing more than faith and hope, redeemable for nothing — which we presently use.

10

POINT OF ORDER FOR THE MODERATOR

I would like to ask What Exit? for a clarification on the nature of this election. My understanding was that it was a mock election for President of the United States — not of Canada, or the UN, or the World or whatever. If we can run for, say, president of Uganda, then how will that be handled with the vote? Will you ask people to specify what country and what person they’re voting for? I don’t mean any offense to the Green Party of Canada, but I have no idea how to counter proposals for a “CCP”, especially since I don’t know what it is. I thought that this exercize was to model the US presidential campaign, which is a part of current affairs. I don’t mind the Canadian Green Party candidate running, but shouldn’t he or she be running for President of the US?

11

I have three questions for the Liberal Market Party candidate.

  1. You mention “honest-to-god market failures”, and mention health care industry information asymmetry as an example. Could you detail a real and historical market failure where government intervention solved the problem in a way you support?

  2. You would abolish the efficacy standard of the Food and Drug Administration. What mechanism would be used to ensure that the average citizen would know with reasonable certainty what drugs are efficient and for what purpose?

  3. Regarding universal catastrophic medical coverage, would the caps apply to all forms of health care or only to serious issues? Would, for example, routine dental care count towards the cap?

12

Thank you everyone for the replies so far. We will let this debate run its course for a few days and then if their remains an interest move on to the the third debate.

This was meant to be a mock election for the US. I am fine with non-US members throwing their hats in the ring, but it was in theory suppose to be a debate about US policy.

As the Green Party of Canada candidate is not actually debate you, it would be fine to not pay attention to it. If any Canadians or non-residents with a good knowledge of Canada would like to debate her on her separate issues, I have no problem with it.

I have a few questions for **Sam Stone ** of the Liberal Market Party.

  1. On taxes, it sounds like you are against the specific Liquor & Cigarette Taxes. These sin taxes represent a large part of state tax revenues. Would you seek to repeal them? Additionally, what about gas taxes that are earmarked for roads and highways? Do you consider that a sin tax or an usage tax?

  2. On your new tax system and eliminating most of the poverty programs today. You mentioned an idea of tax thresholds where you either pay no taxes or receive a tax credit cheque. Will these thresholds vary by location or be the same for people living in West Virginia or Connecticut. California or Wyoming?

13

Forgive me, but I find that to be a mite troublesome. I think those of us who have committed to this project by taking a couple of hours to formulate and post our responses to each of your topics deserve a commitment from you to carry it to the end. People have already expressed that it is a great idea for a thread series. You have already announced the topics, and in general, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble yourself in setting all this up and generating interest. But if it so happens that you might decide after “a few days” that it isn’t worth your while, then it hardly seems fair to expose us to this kind of interrogation and inspection for nothing. And likewise, it seems unfair to Priceguy and others who have enjoined the process with thoughtful questions. Meanwhile, we know nothing of how you will evaluate “an interest”, whether it will be number of posts, number of views, or your e-mails and PMs with people who have those enabled. Respectfully, I think it’s up to you to decide whether you will commit to promoting an interest in this project, and I think you should decide that right now.

14

Tort law that allows you to seek damages for hidden defects would be one example. Another would be regulation that forces manufacturers to disclose certain facts about their products, such as ingredients labels.

While non-government, organizations like UL Labs and magazines such as Consumer Reports also help.

The same way they know if any other product is of good quality. Independent evaluation, reviews, doctor recommendations, consumer reports, etc. The vast bulk of products on the market have no such guarantee of efficacy by the government, and yet the average product is of known quality to the purchaser.

The FDA could continue to test such products for efficacy and advise doctors, but such testing would not be part of the certification process.

It would not count towards some types of elective or cosmetic surgery. There would have to be a schedule of treatments which are not covered under the law, and we would have to debate them.

In an ideal world, I would repeal cigarette and alcohol taxes. However, the LMP is a practical party and recognizes that there would be substantial resistance to this. So we would focus on preventing the encroachment of such taxes elsewhere, and hopefully on incrementally reducing existing sin taxes.

Taxes for road use are not ‘sin taxes’, so long as they can be justified as the cost of maintenance of the road way. In that case, they are actually taxes to pay for externalities, and therefore proper.

Thresholds for reverse tax credits would not differ by location - one of the powerful functions of the market is to cause people to move when they cannot afford to live in a certain place. We lose a lot of efficiency by subsidizing people to stay living in places where it is too expensive for them to live.

15

I will be happy to commit to setting up the 9 debates and the vote thread in the end. You are correct. I will make that commitment. I was fearful that there was a waning interest, I should not let that affect the debates.

Sam Stone, thank you for your replies. That clarifies much.

16

Okay, thanks. The interest may indeed be waning, but you’re a very popular poster and I bet you can drum it back up again. :slight_smile:

17

Honestly, it doesn’t seem like there’s any other candidates / people who care, so I’ll just respectfully bow out at this point. Y’all have fun.

18

Well, What Exit?, maybe it’s better just to drop it after all. Cutting your losses and all that.

19

I’ll start with the medical system in this country:

I’ve never been scared of socialized medicine. It seems to me that a system wherein the hospitals & doctors are funded by the state, & can treat patients according to need, is more compatible with our culture’s medical ethics, not less.

On the conservative end of reform, we can simply expand Medicaid to cover all those working poor who cannot afford private helath insurance, & keep indexing that threshold according to that reference point. Can you afford private health insurance? No? Fine, you get Medicaid.

On the revolutionary end, we could nationalize the hospitals, treat all doctors & hospitals as employees of the state, & let those who perform a public service be paid by public funds. This is a libertarian enough country, I don’t think it will go that far; private health care will still exist alongside tax-funded hospitals, for those who want to pay for health care twice. But this is the plan I bring to the table.

Whatever system we end up with will probably be a compromise between these two points, & I’m willing to make that compromise. It might be a system with private hospitals but a public fund replacing the private health insurance companies, like Medicare already does for the most expensive users of health care in our country.

What I am not willing to do is a Hillary Clinton kludge which takes public funds & gives them away to private for-profit insurance companies. We can insure all Americans more cheaply by keeping the tax-funded part of the funding stream purely in the public sector, & your federal tax dollars should no more go into the pockets of for-profit insurers than your local taxes would go into the pockets of private security firms in lieu of police.

As for our entitlement programs generally:

The first thing is that all entitlement programs must at the very least be indexed to some measure of inflation. We have bank-issued fiat money in this country, which any economist worth his salt will tell is slightly inflationary in good years; any entitlement program that’s not guaranteed to match inflation is a scam.

I believe Social Security is fixable. I think it’s sustainable. I think what it needs is a better funding system. If we’d been inflation-indexing the income thresholds for income taxes & payroll taxes properly, we might have avoided some of that noise that it needed to be replaced with a “privatized” version of itself. So far Social Security has more than paid for itself; that balance will shift in the future, but that does not give lawmakers the excuse to cut it off once it ceases to be a cash cow to fund their guns & their pork. Going forward, we need at the least to honor our promises & obligations.

Beyond that, we can save the system in the long term if we do a few things now: We can means-test payouts for those retirees who genuinely don’t need it, raise the cap on the payroll tax, raise the floor on the income tax to match that, raise marginal income tax rates at the extreme high end to make up any budget shortfall, index all of this to inflation, & keep the system working. Beyond that, & this is far from definite, I would consider looking at a tax on corporate profits as an additional or even alternative funding stream for Social Security. A company shouldn’t pay less into the Social Security fund simply because it underpays its workers.

As to the economy in general:

A well-managed economy is like a well-tended garden. An unregulated economy is like an untended & wild garden.

I admit, I once ignored for too long a trumpet vine that was growing on the side of my house behind a bush. It climbed up the house, tore up the siding, & then managed to break the storm windows.

Wilderness is beautiful. I’m a conservationist, I believe in the beauty of wildness. But wildness in the midst of our civilization, where that wildness mars & demolishes our cherished order, has to be cut back & restrained, whether it’s vines in the foundation of your house, trees in the power lines, or the economic wildness of ungoverned & lawless businesses.

Our private banks have gone feral, our lenders are predatory, our major investors & largest companies are concentrating wealth in a few hands while small owners face losing what capital they have. A generation ago, we saw the collapse of the family farm. In the last ten years, we’ve seen the end of the family retailer. And we’re told this is good, for this is a free market. But if the land & capital needed to compete in the future are swallowed up by the competition today, then this is a market that makes more of us in real effect unfree.

So we need a better-managed economy, with a strong central government to act as a check on private power. It’s not the government that threatens small business; it’s the big businesses in competition with those small businesses. Our largest corporations & richest investors should face targeted taxes & regulatory restraints on growth, so that we can have a greater pool of business owners, & more of an ownership society. The GOP will offer you an ownership society, but their idea ends up being one where some people own & others get “owned.”

I want a real ownership society, where more of us get to actually own our own livelihoods, & enjoy the freedom that comes with that. And I recognize that means using government power to interfere in the private sector, to stand with the little guys against the big guys instead of pretending there’s no difference between a small income & a large one. We need progressive income taxes, & protections for the property of small landowners & small businesses against their larger “competitors” that would seek to destroy them. Because we must choose between the freedom to stand as equals in an egalitarian society or the freedom of others to make us beggars.

20

I had meetings all day today and am goign to be quite busy tomorrow, but I definitley still want in. I’m having fun, even though Liberal is stealing all the good ideas :smiley: