Yeah, no one ever comments on my carefully crafted posts either.
I’d need more specific information before I’d ratify those ideas. I’ve seen some schemas for such things that look attractive, but I’m a bit wary in the absence of details.
If you want to see unions revitalized, get them to shift to an international focus. Corporations do. Shipping your good jobs overseas to places where labor is cheap and protective regulations thin to nonexistent is only possible because there are places on this planet where laborers’ wages are lousy and there are no protective regulations.
I disagree with you about abortion legality and would not want your policy to become law, but as a member of the loyal opposition I would work with you on the latter proposals.
Aside from the above comments, I tend to like your recommendations, although I think there are areas of concern that they do not address.
Any thoughts on mine? (No one else has any, apparently)
1, 2, and 3 seem to be a preamble and not particularly objectionable. #4 seems a reasonable foreign policy, save for the liberation of people from non-democratic governments. In much of the world, democracy is just never going to flourish, no matter what is overthrown.
#5 gives me a bit of concern when you speak of experimental alternative economies. What might these be?
#6 seems a bit optimistic that communications tech is going to push us toward a more true democracy. I think it has more negative potential than positive, as we see in the spread of false information.
#7 I tend to agree with this with the caveat that some health-related issues should be regulated from a scientific viewpoint (vaccination, fluoridation, motorcycle helmets) rather than a libertarian viewpoint. #8 I agree with in principle but recognize that for some criminal acts the prime purpose of law enforcement is to protect the citizenry.
Mine will follow the Jedi principles of the light side of the force. Based on these universal truths, the Jedi party would agree with or can tolerate most of what you say except:
I don’t see why we would redraw states. I think we should reform campaign finance (even if this requires a constitutional amendment), I think we should give redistricting authority to a non-partisan panel of demographers, I think we should have a national ID card that keeps track of everything from voter registration to driving.
What do you consider loopholes (the mortgage interest deduction? the taxation of life insurance? Might as well say you’re against wasteful spending and corruption in politics).
We cannot eliminate the state’s ability to tax for its own needs. How would we ever build football stadiums? (seriously that is probably an unconstitutional limitation on state sovereignty and severely reduces the state’s roles as laboratories for policy making).
I am still unconvinced that minimum incomes is a good idea but it might be.
Getting rid of the cap on payroll taxes is an excellent idea and one that is way past due.
I don’t know how I feel about what looks like a means based retirement age, I think that Yoda would dispprove.
Wait, you expect people to effectively outlaw selective private schools? Why not just mandate that all children be raised in a creche until they graduate college, that would really level the playing field.
Teaching will never make as much money as medicine as a whole, there are simply many more people that can be effective teachers than effective doctors. Average teacher salaries should be somewhat higher that the average income for their state but we really can’t afford to pay them the way we pay doctors or lawyers.
I agree we should make the application process race blind (a la University of California system). I used to support preserving affirmative action but I am slowly becoming convinced that the effect on total enrollment within the UC system was no longer being significantly improved through affirmative action and we would be better off dropping affirmative action for more equal resource allocation to poor schools and neighborhoods and address the effects of racism separately.
I strongly believe abortions in the first trimester should be covered by universal healthcare or whatever we end up with (including medicaid). I strongly believe that third trimester abortions should only be permitted if it threatens the life or health of the mother; or if the fetus is severely deformed.
Licensing and registration and get rid of all state/local laws. Teach gun safety in health ed.
I could live with most of this except:
So how do you determine who gets the services of the plastic surgeons?
A doctor trains for their profession until they are in their late 20’s early thirties. And at the end of that they can look forward to a life of indentured servitude to the state? We don’t need to turn doctors and nurses into indentured servants in order to provide universal health care.
This one is a silly way to throw away votes. Noone who would not have voted for you will vote for you because of this while there are a lot of people who would vote for you who will not vote for you because of this.
Or we can just start hiring out our army to our allies to help them resolve disputes with their neighbors.
I’d go with 200%.
Thats a bad idea. Cliff rates on taxes promote really bad behaviour and the guy at the 91st percentile is not nearly as able to withstand these sort of taxes as the guy at the 99.7th percentile. We should stick with progressive taxation.
Estate taxes should start at a point much higher than 500K. Better to have it closer to 2 or 3 million adjusted for inflation. You really want to hit the top 1 percent maybe less.
What is the difference between offering extra government services to the rich and offering tax cuts to the rich?
That really sounds like censorship.
So no affirmative action?
And I am not convinced that we have a significant disparity in pay for equal work.
Its all about priorites. If you increase spending on the space program, you have to raise taxes or cut somewhere else.
My view is this: the broadcast spectrum is a public resource and should not be used to spread lies. If some of the worst offenders like Levine, Savage, and Limbaugh repeated say demonstrably false things about the political opposition in order to incite fear and gin up their share of the electorate, they should be called to task for it. Obviously you can’t take away a microphone for an isolated error, but those repeated deliberate lies can and should be identified and there should be a court procedure for the opposition to file suit and demand that they be taken off the public airwaves.
I’m planning to wait until about five days after this thread stops getting hits, then pick-and-choose my platform from the hard work, in relative terms, that all you fine folks put in, then present that patchwork as my own position. I will call this the Opportunist Party.
While people have focused on the “with the exception…” part, it needs to be said that the act of choosing (by pretty much any process you care to name) who will and won’t have access to the public airwaves is in itself an act of censorship.
The original, somewhat clunky solution to this problem was a combination of the Fairness Doctrine and strict limitations on the number of broadcast stations in the hands of any one owner. It wasn’t a very good solution: it kept political conversation on the airwaves balanced by muting it almost entirely.
Since the abandonment of both of these controls, we’ve got Free Speech For Oligarchs on the not-very-public airwaves. That was IMHO a much worse solution.
In the Internet era, the answer, IMHO, would be to abandon ‘push’ media (media that send the same limited menu of programming to everyone, i.e. broadcast and cable TV, radio) entirely in favor of getting whatever programming you want off a neutral Net, where everyone is on a more or less equal footing.
My answer to the OP is: if I could be the founder of my own political party, I wouldn’t bother.
The point of a political party is to popularize and hopefully achieve the political aims of a group of people who roughly share a particular political worldview.
In the U.S., we already have two dominant political parties, and our system is set up in a way that a new party can only gain traction by pulling votes away from the more similar of the two dominant parties, thus empowering the more dissimilar of the two dominant parties. (We all still remember 2000.) Thus the founding of a political party would likely be a self-defeating action if it were to have any success.
Now if the question was, “if you could found a political party that would instantly replace the more similar of the two dominant political parties,” that would be more interesting.
The fact that you’re replacing the more similar party does make it interesting. Obviously, if you’re a conservative, you’d like to see a Conservative Party replace the Democrats so the two main parties would be the Conservatives and the Republicans. And a liberal would like to see the two main parties by the Democrats and the Liberals.
But that’s not the choice you’ve offered. A conservative would have to decide if he wanted the two parties to be the Conservatives and the Democrats and a liberal would have to decide if he wanted the two parties to be the Liberals and the Republicans. In both cases, the Democrats and the Republicans would be the more middle-of-the-road party and would probably gain in representation. You’d have the ironic results that the conservative would see the country moving towards the Democrats and the liberal would see the country moving towards the Republicans. Each got the exact opposite results of what they desired.
You’re right, there is some dispute about some of these facts but for the most part the ones that cause rifts between political ideologies are not really factual disputes. E.g. noone really disputes global warming, one side is simply lying or stupid.
(seriously that is probably an unconstitutional limitation on state sovereignty and severely reduces the state’s roles as laboratories for policy making).