I have been voting democratic for over a decade now due to the anti-scientific, nationalistic, and theocratic stance of the Republican party (who gave them the right to legislate their morality?) For the most part I don’t mind the platform of the democrats with a few exceptions:
[ul]
[li]No more gun control. Studies show that >90% of all crimes involving firearms are performed with illegal guns. Legal gun owners are not really a problem.[/li][li]Nuclear power is a good thing. [/li][li]Would prefer to avoid more drilling in the US, but only because I would rather save these resources for our children’s petrochemical industry and become a world leader in alternative energy technologies. Let’s use other peoples resources while they are cheap and save our own and make sure that when we switch to non-hydrocarbon based energy sources we control the IP (IIRC, Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest researcher in solar energy technologies).[/li][li]I have no problem with clean coal or natural gas, but would prefer to move to sustainable technologies (see above).[/li][li]Taxes are a mess in this country. I would support a flat tax if we could eliminate sales and property taxes and get rid of most deductions. This would also require we tax capital gains as income, abolish corporate taxes, and disallow corporate write offs (company perks like cars should be taxed as income too, but inheritance should be given a pass). Meh. Definitely has problems. [/li]How about we abolish corporate, income, property, capital gains, and inheritance taxes and institute a national sales tax on everything except food and maybe medicine. Every time money changes hands, the government tacks on 8%?
Anyway, I do think taxes should be as low as possible, which leads to the next point.
[li]Government should be smaller and probably provides too many services that it has no business providing. Unfortunately, I am not sure where to cut this off. I don’t think that having citizens dying of exposure, starvation, or readily curable medical conditions should be tolerated. A basic level of existance should be provided for all of our citizenry.[/li][li]Education should always be provided, but it should also be earned. None of this NCLB crap. If a student of any age or background does well and wants to learn, we should (as a society) promote them and support them in any way possible. If a student does poorly academically, let’s push them toward vocational schools and if they do poorly there, kick them out. If someone who frittered their youth away wants a second chance in their 30s (hypothetically), let’s give it to them, but they have to earn it by working hard. If they can’t cut it, kick them out to make room for someone who can![/li][li]I have no problem with merit pay for teachers, but finding a metric to measure the merit has problems. (student performance, especially on standardized tests, has a lot of contributing factors and teacher ability is probably toward the bottom of the list).[/li][li]I am a big believer in the free market and believe there is, in the main, too much regulation (or maybe regulation in the wrong places). I do think it is good to have laws to limit monopolies, labor laws to protect workers, safety laws protect the public (and employees), laws to mandate the amount of capital/debt for financial and insurance companies, and environmental laws to protect the commons (air, water, climate etc…) from damage. But subsidies and other forms of price controls (including minimum wage) are bad.[/li][li]I believe immigration is a human right, but I don’t think we should give away citizenship easily. I do think that we should let people come to this country (if there are jobs, they will come) but give them workers visas, tax them to pay for any services they use (basically everything except social security), and send them home if they are not working.[/li][li]Yucca mountain should be used.[/li][li]Government should get out of the marriage business entirely. (Where in our constitution does it say it is the responibility of government to define the meaning of words? If you want to be married, be married. If one person’s definition is different than another person’s, why should the government arbitrate this? All people should be equal under the law, married, single, Christian, Islamic, black, white, straight, and gay. Why should our governement care if a person is married or not?)[/li][li]While I agree that our military should be strong and that we should take care of our soldiers and veterans, I do not like being a superpower. Let the world take care of and police itself; why are we spending our wealth doing this? Let’s keep our navy and air force strong, but close all the bases we have around the world. Let’s also beef up our intelligence and cyber forces.[/li][/ul]