Proposed Changes in U.S. Domestic Policies
There is no naivety here with these proposals. On the other hand,, at one time it was an absurdity that men would be able to create a machine to fly around in the sky, or that slavery would ever be abolished, or the 4 minute mile ever be broken, or —as Thomas Jefferson thought he stated the obvious, when he said it would take thousands of years to fully populate the U.S.—that our land was endless.
There have been many historical setbacks in the evolutionary process, mainly due to sudden environment changes leading to ice ages, flooding, meteorite collisions, etc. This is the first time environment changes great enough to cause danger to most earthly species are caused by the activity of one species—the human species.
For example, there is no serious political debate whatsoever about responsible reproduction. Most people, if asked, would say of course the planet cannot handle a doubling of the world’s human population in the next generation as it has doubled in this past generation. But having said this, few humans are interested in any serious population control measures. It would be political suicide. When decent concerned parents say they fear the kind of future for their grandchildren, it is disingenuous babble. Americans, for example, invade other countries right and left on borrowed money, many feel climate change is a myth, they favor tax cuts over balanced budgets, and on and on it goes, hardly a ripple of genuine concern about grandchildren.
Nothing proposed below is likely to happen in the short term. But over the long haul, thousands or millions of years down the road, what is best for evolutionary progress tends to become reality. So nothing below is necessarily anything which I am predicting will happen in the short term. But if there is any truth to it, it will happen in the long term.
Domestic Policy
Capitalism, with it’s inherent competition, is good. Unregulated, unlimited capitalism is bad. Therefore limits must be placed on just how much wealth of our society can be accumulated by 2-5% of our citizens. It is no coincidence that our country had it’s most rapid economic growth for everyone when there was a 90% federal tax on the very wealthy and estate taxes which prevented most earned wealth being passed on as unearned wealth to offspring. Teddy Roosevelt got it right.
Every citizen should, by law, be limited to two children who do not die in early infancy. Records at birth will keep track of all this. Failure to abide and cooperate with the necessary rules will require jail time and any children over the limit put up for blind adoption to adults licensed to adopt children. The rules will apply to both male and females via genetic testing. All citizens will have a genetic blueprint on file.
Every person will be required to have a card, or whatever, which proves they are legal citizens. All employers must only hire those with such proof of citizenry. Those here illegally when this starts, if they have no serious criminal record, will be allowed to stay because both parties were at fault—the immigrant and a government who enticed them here, under the table, to work at slave wages.
The military draft will be reinstated. All military actions must be paid for up front. No more borrowing money for military invasions. Whenever there is military action all segments of society must contribute to the action via a military draft or increased taxation. There will be no more wars which send huge number of young men at the bottom of our economic ladder into our battlefields and leave major portions of affluent society totally untouched by such invasions ( no risk to be drafted and no loss of income via increased taxation). I, for example have lived through dozens of invasions and have never been financially burdened by any of it. All this above would make all citizens think twice about invasions of other countries, and all citizens required to participate in the cost of the war, one way or another. No more free rides.
All citizens will be entitled to good health care, period. In an ethical society citizens treasure the welfare of each other as they do their own family.
The same amount of money will be spent to educate all children and the money to do this come from the Federal budget. There would be no more property taxes to finance education unless it is some form of federal property tax. The federal government would issue the money to varied school districts on a per student capita basis and the district would control the kind of educational methods and priorities. Competition is good here, and those districts going down the wrong road would feel the pressure by parents to change their educational approach. Every child is entitled to a level playing field in matters of education.
All citizens will be periodically tested, especially children, for their levels of stress hormones. Chronic stress harms virtually every system of the body, especially during the formative years, and especially the Central Nervous System, while the damage is often permanent. All citizens, and especially children with chronically high levels of stress hormones, will be sent to Stress clinics which will be available in all areas of the country. These licensed Stress Clinics, along with Addiction/Compulsive Behavior Centers across the country will replace drugs, religion, and motivational seminars which simply influence the mind to pretend things are okay when they really are not. Trying to alter the mind (via drugs, religion, or motivational seminars, in some form or fashion, to pretend a problem doesn’t really exist or matter, is never a solution).
Correcting the situation behind the chronic stress will be far more difficult than even regular medical practice. Over time, the effort by the Stress, and Addiction/Compulsive Behavior Centers will improve, but total success would seem far down the road. Still, government should always try.
To eliminate the need for politicians to reflexively promise tax cuts, a reasonable level of taxes to accomplish all of the above would need to be established and that level rise automatically with the cost of living increase.
The cost of all these services to the public in general is bearable for several reasons. First, when 2-5% of citizens no longer own 90% of our wealth (let’s not quibble here about the exact accuracy of these figures) then imagine how much more money the federal government will take in just by this. Tax rates will rise for everyone just as they are higher in those countries which already spend more money on education and health care for all, but the trade off is that people in those countries score much higher on happiness polls precisely because they don’t have to worry about health care, good school, benefits for the aged, and so on like so many Americans have to worry about these things. True, we have less money to spend after the high taxation, but what is left can be spent on pleasurable things, not endless matters pertaining to our health and economic welfare. Naturally any military invasions require an automatic tax increase to pay the costs of the invasion. By law, budgets will have to be balanced, no more one generation borrowing money to be paid off by the next generation.
The government would take responsibility for job opportunities and safe neighborhoods. Many neighborhoods today cannot possibly be made safe simply by police toughness. Many of the very people we want to get tough with via police treatment have nothing to lose. Short of hanging them up by their limbs and torturing them everyday, how is police action going to make their lives any worse? Jail or freedom becomes a toss up for these society ‘neglected’ citizens.
To enable job opportunities be available to all citizens depends on level playing fields in education, welfare, and ‘quality’ of parenting. Let’s forget this nonsense of expecting the less fortunate in our society, all walled off and out of sight, out of mind, depending on success by pulling themselves up by their own boot straps. This is a joke and an impossibility for the vast numbers of those born into less advantageous environments. There are few people in those situations with the genetic willpower and learned focus to accomplish success on their own—like a Terrell Owens. We have already talked about how to level the field in education. Now we need tackle welfare and ‘quality of parenting’.
We currently have the government license, fine, and monitor a lot of our behaviors—like driving, like protection of individual rights, like safety requirements, and so on. We are not free to do whatever the fuck we feel like in many situations. But we are allowed to procreate via whatever means, place, and time we choose. Okay it is illegal for adults to have sex with minors, which is loosely enforced, but vigorously sometimes. Marriage should be required for procreation, not of course to have sex. But then sex can be safe sex and that would be the responsibility for all citizens. If a child is born out of wedlock, then that counts as one child out of the allowed 2 for both participants. Getting a marriage license should require both parties to pass a test on basic responsibilities for parents. If they pass the test they can proceed to have children, BUT if the family situation changes after childbirth and becomes such that basic needs of the child cannot be met, then the government intervenes, not to punish the parents but help the children, not for their sake alone, but primarily to help the children in question. So parenting would be monitored loosely, but sufficiently enough to become aware of dire situations.
At this point we need focus on job opportunities. This is tricky in a global economy. For example, workers cannot be protected as long as there are no global minimum wages which rise regularly based on cost of living increases. Naturally cost of living increases vary globally so this all gets tricky. But with modern computers, reasonable variations in these increases could be effectuated. As long as some workers somewhere can work for slave labor, this puts workers making good wages at a huge disadvantage. In the absence of global wages then Americans will be prevented from purchasing goods made abroad via slave labor. Bargains are fine unless the product of slave labor. We are fortunate in America in that, when push comes to shove, we have the resources to make our own essential products.
It is to the advantage of any society as a whole to generate full employment. This is the responsibility of the government. Individuals can’t do this. Realistically, the government can only provide a job which matches an individual’s skills and capabilities. There is no way the government can be really accurate or fair here—and will often peg a particular individual’s skills and capabilities too low. But with fair minimum wages, there will be no job in which a person cannot at least pay for livable housing, decent transportation, health care, and adequate food. But the idea here is that individuals will use their spare time off the job to improve their skills or abilities so that they can then begin to move up the ladder. Keep in mind the government is guaranteeing full employment opportunity and only that. If you went to some school and got a license to be (I’ll make this up) an Events Planner and there is no one wanting that person because of limited job openings, the government is not obligated to find you such a job. The government’s job is to find you employment at a job which clearly meets your qualifications. Otherwise you would end up unemployed with all the downsides which comes with that situation.
So how, we might wonder, is the government going to do this? Where is all this money going to come from? First we might remember that when 43% of adults do not make enough money to pay federal income taxes, the government is losing tax money from those unemployed or working at slave wages. So all the money the federal government never gets in these situations is now flowing into the treasury since everyone is now paying some federal tax since they are employed at livable wages. Thus, the cost of welfare goes down but the cost of maintaining full employment rises. When everyone has a job with a livable income, crime rate goes down, illegal drug use due to chronic stress goes down, parental responsibility goes up, and welfare eliminated in terms of unemployment costs. What, we need ask, happens to someone who can’t hold a job for which they have the skills? Well, they can’t get welfare, and if we have to jail them for this reason of refusing to work a job at a level of skill they have, then they do go to jail and work hard labor for food until they decide to hold down a job on their own.
The biggest change to ensure government has enough money to support all the changes being favored here will come from a more honest way to tax citizens. I will use Donald Trump as the example but this legal basis to escape taxation is rampant among the wealthy and even those just quite affluent. The biggest welfare costs to our country is what we let the affluent take via various loopholes and tax exemptions. Instead of just taxing some income and letting real accumulated wealth be pushed to the future when it is possible to avoid taxes ever being paid on it, taxes every year should be based on wages and accumulated wealth during the year. Period. Of course wages income will be taxed but all at the same tax rate. No more taxing the guy who pushes a wheel barrow around at maximal rate and give huge tax breaks for those whose income comes from shuffling papers around in speculative ventures. There would be no more citing legal paper losses which enable a person to pay no taxes at all. Thus when Trump declares bankruptcy and declares these huge financial failures a loss, it will mean nothing since during the same time period his personal wealth grew by billions. Since change in personal wealth is now taxable he is nailed on that. The nice thing here is he may as well pay his investors and contractors since he then will be taxed less for having done so, as his net wealth will not have grown so much. Most affluent citizens will be affected. I, for example would have to pay taxes not only on stock dividends, but on any increased stock values—not be able to push the can down the road to the end and then leave all this non taxed earned wealth to offspring thereby giving the offspring huge unearned income without any taxation ever. The offspring never earned that money and the government has been cheated out of the taxes owed. Of course these stocks are real wealth. We could buy an expensive house by selling these stocks although there are escape clauses here which would be removed. The principle here is that all wealth, lying around anywhere, would be taxable every year, at least the accumulated wealth for that particular year. The earlier wealth has already been taxed. There would be no loop holes whatsoever. If a stock portfolio increased in value by $20,000 then taxes will have to be paid on that $20,000. If your stock portfolio fell by $20,000 then a $20,000 wealth reduction will be available. Even I will whine about this, and maybe the loudest, but no one is going to stop investing in stocks or other adventures likely to increase our wealth. Sure, we could just put a lot of cash in a suitcase instead of investing it and our wealth would not then increase at all because of that suitcase of money doesn’t grow.
Next, the ability of the wealthy to finance select politicians for office and have an army of lobbyists influencing elections will be ended. No more phony propagandistic media ads and TV. Defining issues will be limited to actual debates between candidates and this be free. Voting will be a duty just like paying income tax is a duty. Voting will last two weeks and a person is free to vote anytime in that two weeks by going to the designated local place to vote. If there is a safe way to do it online that would be ok too. Since the Government will have a list of all citizens, and all citizens have to vote, a lot of money will be saved from getting out the vote, and the money collected from fining those who don’t vote will make it a win-win for everyone except the professional brain washers and their disingenuous ads.
Primaries will be done away with. No one wants to put up with these primaries which go on for years and attract all kind of weirdos as candidates. Most competent candidates for office are not going to go through years of campaigning to get on the ballot. Party leaders will choose their candidates at party conventions in August like it used to be and then there is just two months for TV debates between the candidates.
Politics will be removed from picking a Supreme Court Judge. All judges who qualify to be a Supreme Court Judge will be candidates. Right now I am not sure who best judges which potential candidates qualify. Anyway, all the qualified names go into a hat and when there is a vacancy a name is pulled out of the hat. Nothing could be worse than the present system. And Supreme Judges would have to retire at age 65. Let the next generation preserve rights and determine what is law.
We need to pause here and remind ourselves of the overall goal in these domestic changes. It is assumed here that no society can long survive in which 2-5% of it’s citizens own 90% of the wealth. No society can long survive in which most of Government ‘welfare’ costs go to the already affluent. No peaceful and economically flourishing multi-cultural society can exist until most all it’s citizens have productive work and livable wages. No society is likely to achieve full employment when many citizens need work two jobs in order to survive. When 43% of Americans don’t earn enough money to qualify to pay federal income tax, just what kind of behavioral and attitudinal culture would we expect to emerge? The kind of changes needed today in our political structure rival the kind of changes needed when our country moved from a confederation of states to a republic under the original constitution.
Here is how dire our situation has become. We just elected a President who made billions of dollars by inheriting a few million for start-up money (all of which is unearned money for the receiver), then makes millions, all legally, by stiffing workers and investors by declaring a series of bankruptcies, each time ending up worth millions more while having to pay no income tax for at least 18 years. Here is a man who literally trashes individuals and whole groups of people as his primary personality. He never misses a chance to brag about how much money he has made, or in a political debate brags he has paid no income tax for years because he is ‘smart’, and parades some sort of trophy wife around and virtually turns the wheels of our government over to a cabal of rich ‘brats’. His first proposal for tax reform was to lower the tax rate from 35% to 15% for people who own businesses like himself. Statistics seem to show it is the workers who are suffering not the owners, although even more and more owners are being forced to close their businesses. We have waited more than 50 years for trickle-down economics to work. Only the rich still insist it works.
Historically, as more machines of some sort were invented to do work humans used to do by hand, one of the benefits was the working hrs per week went down steadily from like 80 to 40hrs per week and then mysteriously stopped going down. Why is this? With more and more inventions surfacing why isn’t the work week down to maybe 30/hrs per week. 30 hrs per week would make it more realistic for us to achieve full employment at livable wages. One thing is for sure. Full employment at 30 hrs per week would drastically reduce the now pandemic chronic stress syndrome in our current society. With living wages it would be illegal for a person to hold more than one job. To permit this makes it very difficult to have full employment. One point seems clear. The 2-5% who own 90% of our wealth are still not satisfied. Many got so rich by compulsive behaviors toward wealth and power. On top of this our government is now too weak to set limits and force much of that money back into society for others to subsequently flourish economically. Economic collapse along with chaos in the streets seems inevitable and is only a question of when.
Trials in this country have become a sorry mess. Jury of our peers? Hardly. Lawyers make a sick game out of the jury system by having the right to dismiss a prospective juror for any reason, including the guy might be too bright and see through the defense or prosecution. Or he/she might be the wrong race, the wrong profession, and so on. The only person who should be able to dismiss a prospective juror is the judge. And where is fairness when one murder trial is over in a couple of hours and another goes on for three months? In the last 50 years we haven’t created a better society, just the biggest prison population in world history. We are 5% of the world’s population and have 25% of the world’s prisoners in our jails. We have gone on for more than 50 years throwing young ghetto kids into jail, often with mandatory sentences, for selling marijuana, a recreational drug which is only now becoming legal. Let’s acknowledge that throwing any young person in jail for a mandatory ten years is a death sentence. The odds of them leading any kind of productive life is slim to none.
So, in this area all recreational drug abuse will be considered a medical problem and there will be Drug abuse centers all over the country to assist victims with their problem, not just a few treatment centers for the affluent and their kids. Every child will be considered precious. And science, not the police or the politicians will set drug policies. Science will rank drugs in regards to toxicity, not the silly notion that whatever recreational drugs the majority uses will be legal, and any recreational drug used by a minority made illegal. Citizens need to understand that recreational drug abuse is simply a way to alter a mental state which is unpleasant and has become unbearable. Whatever is causing the unpleasant mental state needs to be addressed for successful treatment. This is not an easy challenge but is the only avenue for real success. The real tragedy is that we have allowed so many aspects of life in so many communities to be so stressful, filled with so many dead ends, that far too many people turn to a particular recreational drug for relief. Not all turn to drugs. Some turn to religion and convince themselves that God operates in mysterious ways, and that if they just hang in there Heaven will await them after death. Whether this is good, bad, or just sad is debatable. Others will attend all kinds of workshops which will teach people how to successfully develop the illusion that everything is really ok and they can be happy about their reality not being ok. We all have known people whose life is depressing them, not a lot of things falling their way, and yet suddenly, despite nothing much changing in their lives, they appear in public with this bright and cheerful ‘what a wonderful day, the birds are singing, the sun is out, and I am so lucky to be alive today.’ Ok, we know this forced effort to be so positive does not have a long shelf live. Some people spend their entire life jumping from one ‘training’ seminar to another. Is this bad? Hard to say, but for sure the best solution is always to find a way for a person to have success with their priorities and goals.
This is a whole new industry in the making if we ever seriously try to help people with their drug abuse, their compulsive behaviors, their addictions of any sort, and provide them skills so they can gain meaningful employment. There are so many avenues, all costing money, which we can, as a society, travel down to make life better for the maximum number of citizens. But we can never find the money to do these things if we insist it is ok for 2-5% of citizens to own 90% of our wealth. And we can never achieve any kind of prosperous and peaceful society if we can’t find ways to effectively impose global responsible reproduction. Then add that enough citizens cannot find decent wage jobs until there are global minimum wages. Finally, we need develop a culture in which people buy into understanding when enough is enough for so many aspects of life in which we end up with compulsive behaviors, chasing contentment down all the wrong paths. We even have a President now who has excelled in compulsive behaviors to the degree he is round the clock angry at just about everybody and everything all the time, never missing a chance to put others down, insult them, take advantage of everyone in every situation—calling it the art of the deal—-where the object with every interaction is to make sure the other person or side gets the short end of the stick. The mentality he fosters upon his own citizens is a toxic culture which encourages violence, dishonesty, disrespect, intolerance, hatred, and an obsessive drive to constantly punish anyone different from their own mirror image. Trump is the King of ‘family values’ and outside that family circle everyone else is the enemy. The atmosphere he is creating is more dangerous than his specific policy positions which change daily depending on which policy gives him an advantage with whatever the immediate goal at hand at the moment.
This musing will end now, not because all aspects of domestic policies have been covered, but because this is enough to illustrate the many fronts we need to address. Also, there is no pretense here to claim any real in depth expertise in these varied suggestions. Whatever skills I have, however modest, have always been the ability to see the bigger picture rather than the endless details. The devil is always in the details so probably every area addressed in this musing would need to be tweaked when it comes to the precise details to implement the addressed objectives.
