Jack E. Lohman has a great blog at the moneyedpoliticians, and advocates for campaign finance and health care reform. He's come up with a smart list of ways to undo years of hardship at the hands of the Republican wrecking ball. I have a few of my own suggestions as well.
To get out of this mess we need:
1. Public funding of campaigns, and at $10 per taxpayer per year (at the federal level) it would be a terrific bargain. We need politicians working for us and not them. If politicians are to be beholden to their funders, those funders must be the taxpayers. CEOs don’t give campaign cash unless it is paid back in taxpayer dollars, and that is killing our nation’s economy and driving the middle and poor classes even further into the hole. (The wealthy are doing quite well, in case you haven’t heard, so they’ll fight against cleaning up the system.)
2. Single-payer health care, like a Medicare-for-all system that the total population pays for and the burden is removed from corporations. Then companies can better compete with foreign product that does not have healthcare costs built into them. But the insurance industry fights this with heavy campaign cash. They consume 31% of healthcare costs without ever laying hands on a patient, so they like it just as it is.
3. Zero taxes on corporations that (a) pay their CEOs below 100 times their lowest paid worker and (b) do not outsource their manufacturing to other countries and instead keep their jobs in the US. Corporate taxes are passed to the consumer anyway, so we should use “strategic taxing” to our benefit. Corporations won’t like this so don’t count on it soon.
4. We must add tariffs to products that are imported, which increases government revenues and reduces the glamor of cheap foreign products and encourages domestic jobs. But corporations don’t like tinkering with their bottom line, and they own the politicians. Wal-mart won’t like it, because this would repay the taxpayers for their gigantic subsidies that allows them to sell so cheap.
5. Politicians must implement a taxpayer-owned Oil-USA system which will add much-needed competition to the OPEC countries. We cannot remain in their grasp. We must also build more nuclear power plants, drill in the deep gulf to head off problems years from now, develop electric cars, fuel cell, clean coal, and harness wind, solar and wave power. Companies like GM killed the electric car and killed better fuel efficiency standards and are now close to bankruptcy. Some would say they deserve it.
Now let's get to some of my own more ridiculous but important idea's, some that may be off the trodden path to the above issues:
a. This is a radical idea that I still haven't thought completely through, but after discovering our only major newspaper, The Wisconsin State Journal, is cleaning house with more major staff buyouts due to lost ad revenues, how about a quarter cents sales tax dedicated to support our local newspaper? I know, they have something call...a subscription service for those who want to get the paper. But think about it, if a person has a vested interest on how there tax dollar is spent, maybe they'll look at the darn fine print, a' la news stories, and be more involved and informed. That's a big maybe, but after all, this is the Fourth Estate, the government watch dog for the American people.
This would come with strict regulations. First and foremost, and this will sound petty, there must be a limit on picture size to allow for more of the printed story, since regulating how much story is included would be impossible. I love graphics, as you can tell from these blogs, but they only provide visual interest to draw you into the story. Right now pictures are meant to replace the hard copy. Like I said, it seems a little crazy. It also seems that most of the stories in our paper right now are limited to about 250 words, which is similar to a letter to the editor, eliminating controversial elements to an issue due to lack of space. Bottom line, we're dumbing down folks.
More to come, right now, I've got to attend my new puppy.
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