Monthly Archives: January 2010

Politics

Why not let them filibuster?

I understand that the Senate rules allows a Senator to speak for as long as they can and that it takes  3/5 of the members to close the filibuster. I guess what wasn’t clear is that just the threat of filibuster is good enough to keep an item off the floor for discussion. This is as so not to impede the other flow of Senatorial business. In regard to the Health Care Reform debate, why not let the Republicans actually filibuster? Let them impede the flow of other Senatorial business. It will help keep the issue at the forefront of the news cycle and may actually cause the press to better present the issues being discussed. Not likely, but possible.

And if they want to keep the filibuster running all summer up to the mid-term elections, so much the better. After all that time I would hope the electorate would have a better realization of what they are voting into office.

I even have a Campaign Slogan < Just Say No! – Vote Republican >

I would also suggest that the Democrats put together the best health care package they can that will get 51 votes in the Senate  and not worry about currying favor with the Democratic outliers.

Economics, Politics

A health care option

I guess I would have to put myself in the single payer camp on health care. I would like to see an expanded Medicare system be the primary basic health care insurer/provider. Everyone will get a Medicare account at birth and keep it until they die, and beyond. We will pay for it with a payroll tax such that Medicare and FICA will be 15% of a pay-check. That should provide enough income to both systems to grow flourish as the baby boomers hit their retirement age.

A condition for this payroll tax is that the monies go into the Medicare and FICA trust funds and not into the general fund.  As away to ameliorate the impact on household incomes, I would also suggest that every household get a deduction equal to the median household income.  (I believe that is somewhere about $50K today). No other deductions, just one flat deduction and then tax everyone above the average household income what is needed to balance the rest of the budget.

Politics

Reform we can live with

The Supreme Court recently reversed a long-standing tradition that corporations couldn’t directly fund political advertising. I believe the core argument for the reversal is that the restrictions impinged on the corporation’s right to free speech, as though a corporation is a person.

Alarmists are warning that corporations will flood the airwaves  with political commercials in the days before an election to promote their bought and paid-for candidate, or to denounce the candidate they couldn’t buy. That may be, but what is the price of Free Speech, enshrined in our holy founding documents? 10 billion dollars? 100 billion dollars? We shall soon find out.

I would like to suggest a political finance reform.

Only registered voters are allowed to donate to political campaigns or to fund political advertising. I would allow unrestricted amounts to be donated, with the caveat that all donations must be made publicly available within 24 hours with a means to uniquely identify the donor. Using the name and address and precinct where  they are registered should be sufficient. And publicly available means something like an election board website, generally available to the general public and not hidden away in some hard-to-access site that only policy wogs are likely to know about.  I want to know who is trying to buy my representative; you can tell a lot about a candidate by who is paying to support them.

This includes contributions to PACs. As a collective they are allowed to accept contributions from registered voters and to use those contributions for a common goal. They also have to disclose the source of their contributions – same list. And any other political entity, like: Party, Committee to elect or re-elect, etc.

PS. For any corporations that I hold shares in- I do not approve of the use of corporate funds for political advertising.

General

What are they thinking?

I heard that the Post Office is considering going to 5 day delivery to reduce costs and is thinking of dropping Saturday delivery.

What are they thinking? If you want 5 day delivery, drop Wednesday, not Saturday. I really don’t want to go 2 days in a row without delivery.