The RIGHT Policy - Part 3 - Economy

It's been over a month since my last entry in this series.  Wow, a lot of stuff has happened in politics since then huh.  And most of it has been related to the economy.  I wish I would have had time to put more thoughts down but things have just been too busy.

The economy is really the issue that brings everything together, which is why it's the last main policy item I wanted to deal with.

I'll start by breaking up economic policy into a few categories.

Taxes

All of a sudden Republicans and Democrats want to cut taxes.  That is something I should consider a success, right?  Well, maybe if they would CUT SPENDING it would be a success.  Now they basically want to buy votes by claiming they will cut taxes.

Here's the facts - your taxes are going to go up.  And very soon.  Regardless of who is elected president in a few weeks.  The Bush tax cuts are about to expire and Congress is absolutely not going to put anything worthwhile in their place right now.  Our national debt is way too big.  We may get some stimulus checks (as I said, buying votes) but I'd be really surprised if anyone got a real tax cut.

We can't cut taxes and go crazy with spending at the same time.  It's a formula for disaster as we are seeing right now.  Bush got the tax cut part right, but not the spending.  Obama and McCain will do the same.

I'll touch briefly on what the RIGHT tax policy would be.  I'd be ok with a fair tax (sales tax).  I'd be more ok with no income tax at all.  Think about this - Ron Paul said we could do that if we could cut our government spending down to 2001 levels.  What would we have to cut to get to that?  Well, a significantly reduced military presence in foreign countries would take care of most of it.  But we'd also have to cut\eliminate spending in some of these other areas also.

Entitlements

These are things like Medicare, Social Security, Education, etc, etc.  Not really hearing anyone talking about doing anything but making these larger, huh?  Yep, no real conservative choice here either.

The biggest things you'll hear about these are, "we have to take care of the children" and, "we have to take care of the elderly".  That's code for "we have to take your money and give it to someone else".  Which might be ok to most people if it didn't include, "but first we have to run it through some huge crazy government bureaucracy."

So how to deal with these?  I'd love to say we could cut the vast majority out entirely but that ain't ever going to happen.  I do think people younger than 35-40 should be able to opt out of Social Security if we want.  So something close to what Bush had proposed a few years ago.

As for Medicare and Education, I think the less direct Federal involvement the better.  The key to these is to have them as close to the individual level as possible, and folks making policy in Washington are no where close to that.  I think we could significantly improve our health care and education situation if the federal government were largely out of it.  I've said before that I think that Medical care could be handled much better if it were in the non-profit\religious sector.  I continue to believe that, as it gets even closer to the individual that way.

Overall, the first thing we need to realize is that throwing more money at these programs is not going to make them better.  If you have bad management or too much red tape, all the money in the world won't help.

"Pork Barrel" Spending

Or, more accurately - how our bills are packaged.  It is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE for our legislative bills to be filled with crap that is in no way related to the intent of the original bill.  We need bills where everything in them has a certain theme, and where every individual item gets a real vote.  So yes, if 50 Senators add something different to a bill, all 50 items should get voted on.  It's the only way to hold our Congress accountable for what goes into a bill, it's a great way to KNOW WHAT IS IN A BILL, and it's a great way to deal with corruption.  John McCain has been horrible during his campaign of saying that Obama voted for this or against that.  When the reality is that all of their votes can be said to be for or against anything.  It's simply misleading to say a person is against tax cuts when he votes no on an energy bill that includes a tax cut for some crazy unrelated thing.  Make the bills simpler and with a consistent theme.

Foreign Policy

As I mentioned above, if we would cut out some of the situations we are in outside of our country, we would be much better here.  We could do things with our military personnel like strengthen our borders (which would not only protect us from our enemies but would also create more jobs here for our own citizens).  We could also move some of the money that is going to our military to things like producing our own energy, which will make us more money and (again) create more jobs.  We've been focusing way too much on other countries when we have serious problems here.  We need to get our priorities RIGHT.  If the American people want to send aid to other countries, we should send it on our own.  The government does not have to steal from us to do it.

 

Ok, so as you can see and as I stated above, our economic policy really is what brings all of the other issues together.  I didn't mention social issues, but that's an easy one to correlate.  Our tax code affects things like gay marriage because of insurance deductions, tax structures for married people, etc, etc.  And the government has no business spending money on things like abortions and stem-cell research.  My social issues article dealt with these directly.

To summarize, this is really the overall theme for the way I see things.  The federal government is WAY too big.  It was originally intended to provide guidelines for the individual states and provide backup where necessary.  It's turned into an entity that basically is controlling everything we do.  This cannot continue.  There is no way that a few people in Washington can know how best to govern 300 million people.

It's pretty clear that our country is not headed in the RIGHT direction.  The next and final thing I'd like to discuss in this series is some of my thoughts on what the future probably holds and how I think we can turn things around.  More soon...