Economic solutions
April 13th, 2008If I were running the country, my first focus would be fixing the economy. Here’s what I’d do:
1) Pull out of Iraq. Osama bin Laden is not in Iraq. He is either in Afghanistan or Pakistan. I want his head on a pike and would be a nice ornament for the White House lawn. Also, it will show future terrorists that we mean business. Bush doesn’t mean business. He’s just another chickenhawk, you know those people who talk tough, but carry a little stick? Plus, the Iraq War is a HUGE drain on the economy.
2) Tax outsourcing. We cannot continually outsource jobs outside this country. This country needs more jobs, not less.
3) Go after folks who hire illegals with heavy fines. Work should be done by Americans, especially when the economy sucks and unemployment is high.
4) Limit the H1-B visa program. H1-B visas are bad news for American tech workers.
5) Lower taxes on the Middle-Classes, Working Class, and poor folk. We pay too many taxes in this country. You want to see the economy take off? Well, lower the taxes on the Middle-Classes, the Working Classes, and the poor folks. With high taxes, none of them have the money to spend.
Today’s politicians, besides Ron Paul, are too vague. They say vague things that mean nothing, like “I’m the Candidate for Change.” What the **** does that supposed to mean? Or, “I want to be known as the Education President.” Ok, fine. What will you do to be the education President? Make kids take more stupid tests?
Here are real solutions. If you want me to go into more details, please say so in the comments section and I’ll answer with more specifics.
2,3, and 5 i agree with. 4 i am not knowledgeable enough to comment on either way. i am very torn over 1. it is indeed a huge drain on the economy. i don’t want us to be in iraq for the next 10, 5 or even 2 years but i do fear that if we pull out completely too soon there will be a huge vacuum created and that it is likely to be filled with a much worse situation than exists before we went in or what exists now. the whole thing was poorly planned and executed and now the place is just an unstable,volatile mess. sorta seems like when you screw up a place that badly you have some sort of responsibility to restore order…and yet i want it over and i want our soldiers home.
anyway, that being said, i’d love to see a post on each topic you present here.
The unemployment number isn’t really very bad and where I am, hiring any kind of skilled labor is impossible.
We should already be out of Iraq but the soft and weak won’t let us fight.
armys are built to make war, and for defense, when you don’t allow the generals to make war then you have a glorified police force. So take the gloves off kick ass and pull out, but the ass kicking is hindered by the pany waist people in this country.
Thank God they weren’t as powerful in WW1 or WW2 of we would be speaking German.
Or during the Civil war or slavery would have lasted another 50-100 years. They need to finish there or we will go right back, we have to because the goddang enviro Nazis won’t let us drill, until we drill we have to have them for the oil.
Everyone better learn we came in to existance with a gunshot and a whole lot of damn good people have died keeping the freedom we have, if we pull from Iraq now we would look like France took over the leadership here and we would be run over by every aggressor in the world. The only thing about france does better than us is Nuke energy, again the panty waists.
I’m way off point.
they do have it all FUBAR I agree with that for sure.
Completely agree with you on all the issues you mention - which is mind-boggling, considering I’m such a leftist and you’re not.
I disagree completely with Sage wanting to drill anywhere & everywhere. We’ve fucked up the environment enough, let’s keep something pristine and non-polluted. The problem is that people tend to be Keynesian (i.e., Who cares about the future? In the long run, we’re all dead.) There are other alternatives and we should put money into finding them and making them viable, instead of always looking backwards and saying “Let’s drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, even though there’s very little oil there (I’ve read there is only a few months worth of oil there, and we won’t get to it for another ten years).”
6) train people on welfare. you can’t feed yourself if you don’t know how.
Along Kate’s thought - don’t punish people on welfare when they get a job in order to help themselves along. Encourage that, along with education and training (a la Kate). And if they’re able, make it a condition of receiving help!
All those ideas are excellent. We must not forget in order to be in control of our destiny, America must stop selling our corporations to foreigners. I suggest we make it illegal for more than 25% of stock in any corporation to be foreign owned. If we fail to do that, our corporations will be bought out by nations like China who are swimming in US dollars. We will lose contol and will have foreign interests dictateing our policy.
As far as taxing outsourceing, that may be ok, but for any item having to do with our our security, outsourceing should be illegal and strictly enforced.
We should also refuse to buy products from countries that don’t meet the same pollution standards we’re required to do.
Our companies spend millions complying with pollution laws, only to be undercut by countries that don’t care what they spew into OUR environment!
I agree completely. I would have to add that I heard recently that some urban high schools have a TWENTY PERCENT graduation rate and many of the 20% still can’t read. I find it amazing that we have spent hundreds of billions in Iraq when we somehow can’t teach our own people to read. I freely admit that much of the burden rests with the students but this in itself is a national emergency and a time bomb as well.
I’d do pretty much the same things. So would a lot of other people - and unfortunately, they’re busy living their lives and don’t the time nor inclination to be professional politicians.
I’m not familiar with the HB-1 visas. What’s that about?
Uh, “have” the time.
I think it a bit irresponsible to pull out of Iraq cold-turkey, and I’m not sure you would actually do that without really considering the consequences. Getting out is a priority to be sure, but if you ran on the premise that you would then you would lose, because that course would lead to a total collapse, and you would be no better a person than Bush Sr. who did just that and abandoned the Iraqi people to be slaughtered. Nice idea, but you have to be realistic about how to do it.
I agree about the H1-Bs. It’s just another example of how corporations rule our government. If they are so concerned about labor shortages, companies should visit colleges around the country and convince students to take up a common interest. Maybe even give scholarships or pay for education outright for students who will promise to work at the company for a predefined period in exchange.
What you haven’t mentioned, Zombie, is our dependence on oil. You want to fix the problem of war? Then fix that. I think you would find that some of our other problems will magically disappear.
To become a great statesman, One must become a lawyer and divide your time away from screwing the public, driving taxi’s and cutting hair.
Lime - Will do.
Sage - Saddam didn’t bring those towers down. Osama bin Laden did. It is his head I want on a silver platter, not Saddam’s. We wasted valuable time there when we should have killed Osama and every other mother fucker associated with him. Pisses me off he’s still living and still laughing at us. he should have been dead years ago.
Kathleen - I won’t go into a tangent about energy policies just yet, but glad we agree on those economic issues. You live in a place where you see it first hand.
Kate - A good one.
Kathleen - Agreed.
Geopax - Are you going to take me up on doing a separate guest article on this? If so, email it to me. You know my email address.
Tshsmom - Agreed. Or at least tariff accordingly.
Beach - The sad thing is, our priorities are out of whack. Spending money on education gets results. It gets people to make more money, thus paying more taxes.
I’m a working class kid who went to college. I pay much more in taxes than I would have had I continued to do what I was doing before going to college.
SME - I’ll have to do a write-up on it. But to summarize, H1-B visas are special work visas given to tech workers. The sad thing is, ideally, it makes sense. In reality, companies favor them because they don’t have to pay them as much and could work them into the ground because if H1-B visa people give companies any lip, they get sent back. All it has really done is lowered American salaries and put Americans out of work, which I guess is great if you’re a greedy corporation.
Scott - This one if a toughie. I would like to pull out right away because I’m sick of Americans dying, but I’d hate to see a total collapse. What we need is a diplomatic President who will admit we made a mistake and get an international coalition to take over to keep order until Iraq gets a viable government in there.
I know you and I see eye to eye on H1-B visas.
As for our dependence on oil, I was supposed to write that article last month but kept getting sidetracked. Still working on it.
Vest - Driving taxis and cutting hair, you’ll learn a lot what average people are saying. As for lawyers, the last thing we need in this country are more lawyers. We have way too many already.
Amen brother!
Uhm, ZS, better replace your fact checker re: numero tres - unemployment is lower than ever (by ANY standard) in this country.
Anyways you now have Obama and MC to vote for, Clinton has lost the battle. I am sorry!