The following is a sort of a minimal list of reforms which I'd view as needed at this point....
Awesome. Let us dissect this.
Money System and Financial Reforms
The money and banking system which was set up in 1913, along with the income tax and IRS which was set up to pay interest on debt while using debt as a primary basis for money, has reached the end of its useful lifespan. Glass-Steagal should be implemented immediately, the so-called "Super Priority" of derivative counterparties hould be abolished immediately, and a major effort should be made to devise a rational system of money for the United States. The Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the income tax should be abolished, and the power to coin money itself should be reclaimed by congress. No rational government should ever borrow money into existence.
Except that all of the above work and will continue to do so. What is the alternative? Going back to the awful gold standard?
Governments can and must borrow money in bad times to create more good times when it can be paid back. That is what responsible governments do.
Political Reforms
The first item of meaningful political reform HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.
That may be reasonable. Maybe.
There should be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding ANY public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.
For God's sake why? This sounds like a great way for people to screw over an entire political party out of spite.
There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices.
What would qualify them? I have my own ideas of what qualifications someone should have for office.
Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.
You mean it would have prevented two good Democrat Presidents from doing their work? Why would I want to support that?
Think of how easy it would be to keep good people out of politics with this. See a good viable opponent coming up the ranks? Just get a buddy to refuse him/her a security clearance for unknown reasons and watch as they cannot now run. You'd end up like the USSR where a person was disqualified from many political positions because they weren't members in good standing with the Communist Party.
Another item on such a list would be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.
If the crime doesn't involve the VP why get rid of them? And does this imply that you think Clinton should have been removed?
Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time.
Well as voting fraud already doesn't happen I guess you can call this MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Our entire voting system is fubar and needs to be replaced and a fraud-proof system would not be that hard to devise; it would involve biometrics and p2p networking and the idea that ANYBODY could do his own vote tally and that all tallies should match. It also should involve the idea that a person could have total assurance that his vote did not disappear or get counted for the other guy. What I'd envision would be keeping my vote on MY computer with a fingerprint reader like you see on all govt computers i.e. a record of my contact info and a biometric reading and a national database to check biometrics for me and everybody else, and a p2p network to allow ANYBODY to do his own tally by calling for votes the same way you'd ask or a copy of "you aint nothing but a hound dog" on Kazaa, and all tallies should produce the same number within statistical limits.
Considering fraud already doesn't happen why waste so much money on this?
We should consider the possibility that, when an election is within one percentage point, we send both people to congress with half of a vote each.
And....why? Why not an automatic new vote?
There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on some issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that, while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.
*snort* Yeah like that would work. I've seen this in action. People voted to defund our local parks then screamed bloody murder when the parks were closed off. They didn't seem to understand the consequences of what their vote meant.
Drugs
The "War on Drugs" and the Prison/Industrial Complex should be ended immediately, along with "No-Knock Raids".
The "war on drugs" leads to
- "No-knock" raids, which are a clear violation of the fourth amendment and of the common law principle of a man's home being his "castle". In fact technically a homeowner who were to shoot and kill one or more government agents in the process of conducting a "no knock" raid would be entirely within his or her rights.
- The incarceration of large numbers of people who would otherwise never have had contact with prison systems. For many this amounts to a career training program for serious crime.
- Gang wars, drive-by shootings and the like.
- Corruption, the rise of drug cartels, and outright civil wars in other nations which supply drugs to the illegal drug enterprises here.
It is that final item which some would use as a pretext to eviscerate the second amendment, which is the link pin of the entire bill of rights. Consider the following from the former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Bush administration no less:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/17/weapons-ban-urged-to-rein-in-mexican-drug-war/
The problem here clearly is not guns and it is clearly a problem of economics. The drugs one of these idiots would use in a day under rational circumstances would cost a dollar; that would simply present no scope for crime or criminals. Under present circumstances that dollar's worth of drugs is costing the user $300 a day and since that guy is dealing with a 10% fence, he's having to commit $3000 worth of crime to buy that dollar's worth of drugs. In other words, a dollar's worth of chemicals has been converted into $3000 worth of crime, times the number of those idiots out there, times 365 days per year, all through the magic of stupid laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.
A rational set of drug laws would:
Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.
Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.
Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, and/or other Jeckyl/Hyde formulas.
Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.
Do all of that, and the drug problem and 70% of all urban crime will vanish within two years. That would be an optimal solution; but you could simply legalize it all and still be vastly better off than we are now. 150 Years ago, there were no drug laws in America and there were no overwhelming drug problems. How bright do you really need to be to figure that one out?
Sounds similar to what they do in Switzerland.
Medical Reform:
The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.
Hmmm. This section is not off to a promising start.
The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care.
Really? That's what you get out of it? To me it indicates that we have tens of million of people that couldn't get health insurance (I was among them but thanks to the ACA I will finally be able to get health insurance). So any program to fix that would by necessity be huge.
Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy.
Of course it is a huge job. They are in a position to see over the basic health care of all their citizens. I would hope their job would be the biggest government job.
If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:
1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of oher doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.
Would a plumber or engineer understand the nuances of complex medical care? I think a better idea would be to emulate the German system.
2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.
Do you have evidence of artificial exclusivity?
3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.
Okay....not a bad idea. It would mean that FDA drug trials would be longer and more expensive however.
4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.
So....a rich guy with a tummy ache would be seen before a poor person who lost a leg and is in danger of bleeding out in just a matter of minutes?
Yeah, that sounds pretty terrible to me.
All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.
I'm not really seeing how. I mean none of your proposals would help someone like me who can't get health insurance because of preexisting conditions. What is your plan to help people like me?
Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.
Item 3. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. V., you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."
The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.
So...it seems you are not averse to the benefits of socialized medicine.
Item 4. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.
Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.
Well this happened to me once. As I noted before I couldn't get health insurance and I got very sick. I tried to ignore it and hoped it would go away as I just couldn't afford to go see a regular doctor right then but it got worse and worse and next thing I knew I was in an ER hooked up to machines. I lived but I got a huge bill I definitely couldn't afford. It ruined my credit rating. The hospital lost out on the money until I figured out how to start paying it back too.
Wouldn't it have been better if I could have seen a doctor at the very beginning before it turned into a huge life threatening issue?
Immigration
As in the case of the "War on Drugs(TM)", the only real solution is to take the profit out of it and in this case the profit is measured in votes.
We need a law and possibly a constitutional amendment requiring a person to be a US citizen for 18 years before they ever vote in a US election. That would not be difficult to justify; I had to be a US citizen for eighteen years before I ever voted in a US election and I don't see any immigrant group which appears better or more deserving of rights than I am.
No.
Just no. You had to be at least 18 years old to vote. It had nothing to do with how long you had been a citizen. If you live in the country, are a citizen and pay taxes you should be able to vote. To do anything else creates a multi-caste system of voting.
Education
Notice I didn’t mention public education/indoctrination in that one since to my thinking public schools need to be abolished and not reformed.
Why? Public schools serve a great good. I went to a public school and it was fine. My own kids will as well.
Obamacare is a total disaster, basically just a redistribution scheme. It does not address any of the real problems with medical costs. The reform I suggested above does.
No it won't. Your ideas wouldn't even allow me to get health insurance. Obamacare does. Why should I support your ideas?
Question... What other kinds of things would you like to try to implement as law on the basis of assuming them to be safe/harmless because they've never yet been tried?
Haven't been tried? You are aware that the type of system Obamacare will institute has already been tried and proven to be fairly successful in a number of places aren't you?
They aren't getting that NOW...
This was about education. What is your evidence that kids don't get educated in public schools?
Republicans have put themselves way out on this one. They wouldn't go to this much trouble on their own initiative or for the sake os ideology.
Sure they would.
You've got huge numbers of people being cut back to <30 hours on account of this,
Which is just evidence that corporations are unethical and heartless. How about a single payer system that keeps corporations out of it?
labor unions crying over it,
Well, yeah. They used their ability to provide health insurance to people that otherwise wouldn't have it as one of their major selling points.
polls (Rasmussen) noting that 51% of the public wants this thing stopped even if it means shutting down the government, and pretty nearly all of Obunga's favored groups demanding and mostly getting waivers from it.
If polls showed 51% were in favor killing all people named Tess or Tom would you go along with it?
Like I noted, the thing apppears to be a redistribution scheme, and that HAS TO raise costs for the people who pay for it. Again, it does not fix anything.
Well except it will allow millions of people, including myself, to get health insurance. I guess we don't exist or matter.
I want to talk more about abolishing the ER "sickest person first" triage system in favor of a "net worth first" system of prioritization.
I made a point to note that. It sounds pretty sick to me. Why should a poor person be denied life saving healthcare because some rich person has a minor ailment?
