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If you were elected President...

Sunshineinabag

Active member
Since we have people here representing both sides here, what would you do to change the course of what we are facing, both economically and pandemic wise?

You are handed the "Keys to the Kingdom". How do you steer this massive ship?

Please give some solid reasoning to your ideas as well instead of just bullet points. I'm curious to see what your entire idea is.

For me-

1. $2000 a month Universal Basic Income per person over 17. Minor children's parents would receive $1000 for the first, $500 for the second, and I could see scaling down from there. Once your income exceeds $75-100,000, ramp it down. No earner over $100,000 a year would receive UBI.

Reason - If you want less losers in your country, help people not be losers. Yes, there would be folks out there happy to have the bare minimum. And UBI would provide for shelter, food, utilities, and maybe a few luxury items if those people chose to save up. But that is all they would receive. If you chose to work, you could afford a nice house with a 2 car garage. You could afford to have the wife stay home and raise your kids if she chose to do so. What a UBI provides is something so American everybody should be screaming for it - Freedom. Freedom to know that if you start a small business you can keep the roof over your head and food in your children's stomachs. Freedom to know that if your business fails for whatever reason (like a pandemic), we as a nation have your back. Freedom to take chances and pursue your happiness. How many of us here have had a soul sucking job in their working career? How many haven't? What could more freeing than not having to work those kinds of jobs?

Speaking of - what about those jobs that need those low wage earners? Those workers will always be there. There will still be those that would be happy working behind a bar, or stocking shelves, or working at Best Buy. Hell, I'd love nothing more than to be a simple budtender somewhere. That would be fucking amazing to me. But I could never afford to. With a UBI, we could keep the minimum wage at $7-10 bucks an hour. And folks could live a decent life with that.

Who pays for it?- No more corporate tax loop holes. No more multi-millionaire tax breaks. No more off shore holdings. Slash the Pentagon's budget 25% by reducing our footprint around the world. You know who doesn't pay for it? The bottom 85% of American earners.

2. Medicare for all - Not just 97% there Uncle Joe. ALL! Again, this is all about freedom. Freedom to not have to worry about putting food on your table and a roof over your head so you can buy your insulin. Freedom to know that if you want to start a small business your children will have healthcare. On a personal note, I know my medical costs have skyrocketed since Obamacare was enacted. I've had bills go to collections because I couldn't pay them with what I was earning. I had to have a hip replaced 3 years ago that I'm still paying for. Not do anything within my control, but because of bad genes. If I had gotten cancer, I would have been screwed beyond belief. It is insane that in this day and age America is the only country that doesn't have universal healthcare and a for profit health system.

Who pays? The aforementioned corporate taxes and slashing of the Pentagon's budget. We need to stop feeding the industrial military complex.

3. Getting America back to work - compulsory masks for everybody. Masks get you 90% protection. Social distancing gets you another 90%. Together, that's 180% effectiveness! OK, not really. But it does get you 99%. And that's as good as you can hope for if you want to get the economy going again. Right now, experts are saying that 50% of small businesses are not going to come back from where we are now pandemic wise. Let's not increase that number by needing to shut back down. WEAR A MASK!

3a - Take 10% of the 25% cut from the Pentagon's budget and invest in America's infrastructure. 2020's New Deal. No it isn't sexy. No, there is no short term return on investment. This is the long play move. Our current infrastructure is falling apart. Our power grid is woefully inadequate for our needs. We have dams and bridges that are in serious disrepair and need to be fixed. We have 30-40 million American's unemployed right now. Let's get them back to work!

4. The current 800 pound gorilla in the room - systemic racism. I'll break this up into 2 parts.

4a - Police reform - Invest heavily in the police. (Fun fact - I used to interact with cops on a daily basis high as balls.) Most of them are woefully under trained to deal with what they need to deal with. I really like Jocko Willink's take on it - Navy SEALS spend 20% of their time training. We should be doing the same for the police. Not only force on force as in the SEALS, but de escalation techniques. Also, reduce their workload so they only have to deal with the bad guys. Have more Community type officers and train them up to do the mundane tasks of accident reporting. Hire more social type workers to handle the psych cases and domestic disputes. The police are so overwhelmed with stupid things that they were never trained on how to deal with, so their response is always to escalate so it ends in violence. If you want to wear a badge, it takes a 4 year degree and another year of training to earn that badge. And your training never stops.

4b - Invest in communities we have "left to the wolves". I really think a lot of the issues we have with neighborhoods falling into disrepair would be solved with not only a UBI, but investing in traditionally marginalized communities of all colors. I've driven through the dirty south. I can tell you ghettos know no color. White folks just call them trailer parks to make themselves feel better I guess. Any place that is the result of any kind of shift in manufacturing. I'm looking at you Detroit, Northern Indiana, coal mine country, South Chicago, Oakland, East LA, etc. All of these places and more need to be invested in to raise them up. "A rising ocean lifts all boats" or some such inspirational slogan. This could easily be rolled into my 2020 New Deal package. The same with Police Reform.

There is more, but this is a good platform to launch from.

So, do I have your vote? :yay:

Very simply put .....using yeti cups as an example......it wouldn't read designed in Texas,made in China....it'd say designed and made in the USA....and 98 percent of everything that's been sent overseas would be re-established back here. Completely dismantle the millionaires and homeless population disparity that's pervasive everywhere now in America. That's my start......native Americans would be playing a heavy role in all aspects of local and federal govt
 

armedoldhippy

Well-known member
Veteran
Sunshineinabag;8946749 - native Americans would be playing a heavy role in all aspects of local and federal govt[/QUOTE said:
they SHOULD have a role. not sure if they like the rules of the "game" as it is currently played though. what do we do when they put anglo-saxons on reservations & tell the rest of us to go back to where you came from? fair is fair, right?:shucks:
 

BlackBart

Active member
Veteran
One of the first things I would do is take half of the money if not more from the military and spend it on education . I would have affordable health care and housing and get people off the streets . That's just a few things I would start off with . Oh and did I mention that I would impose the defense production act to help rid of this fucking Covid 19
 

GOT_BUD?

Weed is a gateway to gardening
ICMag Donor
Veteran
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Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. 125 nays. People need to remember this **** come 2022.
 

GOT_BUD?

Weed is a gateway to gardening
ICMag Donor
Veteran
The Case for 'Universal Property' - An idea pioneered by Alaska could inoculate society against extreme inequality

When voters went to the polls in November, one outcome was certain: America would emerge as a nation deeply divided. President-elect Biden’s pledge to “unite and heal” will do little to remedy this reality unless good intentions are matched by bold policies that truly bring Americans together. Universal property—an innovative idea that goes beyond income to the economic bedrock of wealth—offers a way to move in that direction, one that could win support on both sides of the political aisle.

Americans cherish both equality and liberty. The problem is that when these appear to be in conflict, the nation is torn between those willing to sacrifice some liberty for greater equality and those willing to do the opposite. This underlying fault line was in evidence between those who voted for Biden and those who voted for Trump. It is also a source of ambivalence among the many Americans on both sides who value both.

The notion that equality is the enemy of liberty, and vice versa, is founded on the view that government is the ultimate guarantor of equality, and private property the ultimate guarantor of liberty. The balance between equality and liberty thus morphs into the balance between the state and the market. A quintessential exposition of this line of thinking can be found in the writings of antebellum South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun. In his Disquisition on Government, published in 1851, Calhoun juxtaposed “two great classes”: one comprised of taxpayers (including slaveholders like himself) who fund the government, the other of “tax-consumers” who live on government handouts. The 20th-century free-market avatar Ayn Rand gave Calhoun’s classes more vivid labels: “The creator produces,” she wrote in her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, “the parasite loots.”

Around the same time that Calhoun was penning his Disquisition, across the Atlantic two German émigrés offered a very different notion of class struggle. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels portrayed the working class as the true creators of wealth, and the owners of capital as parasites. A key plank in their program for building a more egalitarian society was state ownership of “the means of production.” The shortcomings of this recipe became all too clear with the advent of Communist regimes in the 20th century. The belief that state property would in a meaningful sense belong to all was belied by the rise of new elites, whose power like that of capitalists rested on control of property—property nominally belonging to the governments they ran. In Russia, three decades after elite “reformers” in the U.S.S.R. leveraged their political status to reinvent themselves as post-communist oligarchs, wealth is distributed even more unequally than in the United States. And in China inequality has reemerged with a vengeance.

The lesson: Neither private property nor state-owned property is sufficient to guarantee equality and liberty for all. The first can allow economic elites to monopolize wealth and power, the second can allow political elites to do the same. But there is an alternative type of property that can never be concentrated in the hands of an elite. It was pioneered in, of all places, Alaska.

In 1976, as oil production commenced on Alaska’s North Slope, the state amended its constitution to create a new entity called the Alaska Permanent Fund. The idea was the brainchild of Republican governor Jay Hammond, who believed that Alaska’s oil wealth belonged to all its residents, and that all should receive equal annual dividends from its extraction. The fund is “permanent” because some of the money is invested so that future generations will receive dividends too once oil production ends. “That money and the resources it comes from belong to all Alaskans,” Hammond wrote, “not to government or to a few ‘J.R. Ewings’ who in states like Texas own almost all the oil.” Not surprisingly, the fund has proven enormously popular across the state’s political spectrum. The record payout, more than $3,000 per person including a one-time rebate, came under Governor Sarah Palin in 2008.

The Permanent Fund is neither private property nor public property in the conventional senses. Unlike public property, the right to the revenue belongs to the people, not the government. Unlike private property, this right cannot be bought or sold, owned by corporations, or concentrated in a few hands. It is universal property: individual, inalienable and perfectly egalitarian.

In 2001 Peter Barnes, a solar energy entrepreneur and co-founder of the Working Assets Long Distance telephone company, wrote a book called Who Owns the Sky?, in which he proposed to treat the atmosphere’s limited capacity to safely absorb carbon emissions like Alaska treats its oil: as a joint inheritance that belongs in equal measure to each and every person. To protect this precious inheritance for future generations, Barnes argued that we ought to strictly limit the use of fossil fuels, charge prices for the carbon emissions we do permit, and recycle the revenue to the public as dividends. Hammond, for one, found the idea intriguing. “Pie in the sky?” he mused. “Perhaps, but provocative.”

In his forthcoming book Ours: How Universal Property Can Transform the World, Barnes extends the possibilities for this alternative type of property beyond natural assets to include assets we have created as a society, such as the legal and institutional architecture of the financial system that underpins individual prosperity. The gifts of society and the gifts of nature would be treated as a joint inheritance belonging to all: universal property. Those who benefit from using them would pay according to their use, and the money received from their use would be paid out equally to all.

If implemented on a significant scale, universal property would inoculate the society against extreme inequality. It would provide an asset-based source for a universal basic income, not dependent on redistributive taxation. Charging for use of the sky’s carbon-absorption capacity would help stabilize the Earth’s climate by curbing emissions; similarly, financial transaction taxes would help stabilize the economy by curbing hair-trigger speculation.

Universal property is a bold idea that does not fit neatly into old labels. It is neither Democratic nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative, neither socialist nor libertarian. Or rather, it is both. It would advance equality and liberty together. And by bringing everyone into the same boat as co-owners, it could help bridge the divides that keep us apart.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-for-universal-property/
 

St. Phatty

Active member
How did Germany heal THEIR economy, and recover from the Weimar hyper inflation, after World War 2 ?

Somehow on a land mass about 3/4 the size of California, they developed an industrial economy that was the biggest & best in the world. "German engineering" etc., LOTS of machine shops.

I am referring to the time period before the first shots of WW2, which last time I looked were recorded as occurring in March 1936.

So, from the end of WW2, to February 1936, Germany became this HUGE thriving economy.

What did they do ? How did that happen ?
 

GOT_BUD?

Weed is a gateway to gardening
ICMag Donor
Veteran
How did Germany heal THEIR economy, and recover from the Weimar hyper inflation, after World War 2 ?

Somehow on a land mass about 3/4 the size of California, they developed an industrial economy that was the biggest & best in the world. "German engineering" etc., LOTS of machine shops.

I am referring to the time period before the first shots of WW2, which last time I looked were recorded as occurring in March 1936.

So, from the end of WW2, to February 1936, Germany became this HUGE thriving economy.

What did they do ? How did that happen ?
By investing in infrastructure and making sure small businesses not just survive, but thrive. So exactly the opposite of what the last several administrations have done in this country.
 

St. Phatty

Active member
By investing in infrastructure and making sure small businesses not just survive, but thrive. So exactly the opposite of what the last several administrations have done in this country.

infrastructure = electric rail, mass transit, aqueducts, roads, stuff like that ? and I guess upgrading power generation.

Yeah I guess they need to do some of that in California. They won't get an edge on wildfires till they get rid of the long haul lines to rural power consumers.
 

h.h.

Active member
Veteran
Well, now if I were the president of this land
You know, I'd declare total war on the pusher man
I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run
Yes, I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun
 

Tynehead Tom

Well-known member
hmmmmm if i was elected president.....

I'd name donald trump as my wing man/vice president..... my serbian wife would make an awesome flotus..... yowza!

then I would fake a medical conndition that made me unfit and I'd hand the reigns over to donald

hahaha !
 
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