\t\t\t\tMy old buddy Kim asks me to comment on a laundry-list of proposals that pretty well encapsulate a great deal of the liberal\/progressive agenda for America. Here’s his list in bold, with my comments in roman:<\/p>\n
1. Return war powers to Congress<\/strong><\/p>\n They never left – while the executive claims it has war powers, they haven’t been exercised without Congressional approval in a very long time.<\/p>\n 2. Repeal the Patriot Act<\/strong><\/p>\n You may as well say “Surrender to Al Qaeda”. The Patriot Act contains necessary powers to fight the terrorist threat, and while any act can and should be amended until it reaches perfection, we shouldn’t radically alter this one as long as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas are active.<\/p>\n 3. Provide free education for all?through college<\/strong><\/p>\n We effectively do this already as well, because the Pell Grant will pay your full tuition at many, if not most, state schools. I personally believe that many people attend college who would be better served by trade school programs, so additional state spending – not federal – would be well-directed in that direction rather than college.<\/p>\n 4. Provide health care for all<\/strong><\/p>\n Our health care system is completely screwed-up because so much of it is funded by employers through insurance companies that the direct connection between patient and doctor is lost, and the healthy and conscientious people have to effectively subsidize lard asses who don’t want to take care of themselves. That being said, a sizable portion of business costs are health-care-related, and a sizable number of people aren’t covered. So I’d favor a model where we establish government-funded clinics to provide health care at means-tested rates primarily in poor neighborhoods. <\/p>\n 5. Require a living wage<\/strong><\/p>\n The definition of a “living wage” varies across the nation, and it’s not especially important that teenagers at their first job have the ability to support a family of four. Rather, let’s instill an ethic where we frown on people who reproduce before they’re able to support their offspring.<\/p>\n 6. Strengthen the social safety net<\/strong><\/p>\n I’m in favor of longer-term unemployment insurance for people who genuinely need it, but not in favor of long-term welfare for people who don’t.<\/p>\n 7. Keep Social Security out of corporate hands<\/strong><\/p>\n Strongly opposed to the present system because the rate of return is too low. We need to keep social security out of the government’s general fund more than anything, and use it to leverage business investment.<\/p>\n 8. Clean up the environment & public lands<\/strong><\/p>\n I wasn’t aware they were dirty, but why don’t we sell off some public lands to cover the cash flow shortage when we shift social security over to private accounts? There are way too many of them.<\/p>\n 9. Strengthen the Sherman Anti-Trust Act<\/strong><\/p>\n I suppose we could do something here to break up Microsoft and Oracle.<\/p>\n 10. Make the ?revolving door? between industry & regulatory agencies illegal<\/strong><\/p>\n Attempts to do this have failed because they interfere with the right of humans to make a living.<\/p>\n 11. Reserve human rights for humans, not ?aggregated capital?<\/strong><\/p>\n Huh?<\/p>\n 12. Keep Church & State separate<\/strong><\/p>\n I like faith-based programs because they work, and the government should fund things that work whoever puts them on. And I love prayer in school, so screw that.<\/p>\n 13. Abolish the Electoral College<\/strong><\/p>\n The nice thing about the electoral college is that it prevents vote fraud in any given state from affecting the national election in an especially dramatic way. Reforming it so that electors are awarded by congressional district is the way to go.<\/p>\n 14. Get corporations out of the voting process <\/strong><\/p>\n But leave special interest groups like NOW, the NAACP, and the Sierra Club in? And let George Soros and Marc Rich dump millions into every election? No, we tried that with McCain-Feingold and it didn’t work. The solution to money in politics is more money, and with the Internet the Dems can raise it just as well as the Reeps. Did you know that Kerry raised more than Bush?<\/p>\n My overall reaction to this laundry list is that it would be way too expensive to implement all of these things even if they were all good, which they aren’t. And you know who gets to pay the bill?\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My old buddy Kim asks me to comment on a laundry-list of proposals that pretty well encapsulate a great deal of the liberal\/progressive agenda for America. Here’s his list in bold, with my comments in roman: 1. Return war powers to Congress They never left – while the executive claims it has war powers, they … Continue reading “The Liberal Agenda”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-M2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}