If the democrats win the presidency next election and the senate stays in control of the republicans, what would be your two main things you would like to see the dems try to accomplish.
If the dems won it all, what three things are most important to you?
1. Taxes back up to Bill Clinton rates, across the board. Evaluate. Raise (likely) to whatever necessary to account for spending. Then deal with spending. Or not. We need an honest evaluation of what we can and cannot agree to change, then go pay for what we do.
When people have processed the bite, have a proper discussion about whether and what spending needs to go. We haven't had that yet because we aren't paying for what we're getting, and that is because we did so well last century that we've got a lot of maneuvering room. But like fools we're pissing it away. Like addicts, we're putting off the hard work until rock bottom, which is the most self-defeating thing a person can do.
2. An honest re-evaluation of much of the CFR. So few address this as it must be for a number of reasons:
- People already weren't paying enough attention. Now, most seem to have the attention span of a severely concussed goldfish. Thanks, AIM and thanks Twitter, and thanks instagram and **** you Facebook. More than two sentences --->
deeeeeerp, I go drool, then I wipe and put up new selfie! YAY!
Therefore, most debates about the CFR boil down to (1) all regulation is bad because government is bad, (2) deregulation is bad because regulations are good.
No. There's a big mix. And I know second-hand about quite a lot of inefficiency in production of regulations and their function because my wife and a number of friends are economists who actually
did or do this ****, and have horror stories about the slapdash way these things can get put to gether, about higher-ups following some policy goal and ignoring cost-benefit analyses that say the regulation in question isn't worth it given the cost, yadda yadda.
We need these agencies and we need what they do if we're going to work as a cohesive nation, but holy **** is it as mess. Too many good things are deregulated, too many other things are unnecessarily regulated. There's no rhyme or reason to it. This stuff builds up over time in shifting administrations based too often on the whims of the people trying to interpret the political goals with each administration. It is a life-sucking mess, and to the limited extent either of the two main parties talk about it they talk about it like
idiots. And that's not their fault. It's our fault, because as a group we have become a bunch of lazy cursed fools so self-absorbed that the idea of taking two hours out of an evening to try to learn something is unthinkable when there's using our smartphones while watching football games or whatever.
Yes, I'm bitter. ****ing bitter. I'd go be a hermit in the woods if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to do that, and if I didn't like computer games so much. Hence the asterix bombs here. And as I say in my lean, I really am "slightly liberal".
What drives me up the wall the very most is that there are very real things wrong with government. With agencies, with the FBI or DEA, with all sorts of things. The things that are
actually wrong are not the things we fight about. We fight about stupid ****ing bull**** most of the time, which means that even the people who claim to be opposed to wasteful regulations aren't even focusing on getting rid of the wasteful ones. They do hatchet jobs, Dems do....I dunno...drunken rebuilding when they regain power. It's a see-saw of idiocy, and it's our fault.