A Better Way to Do the People’s Business

                What does it say:  Stop Government overreach, and create a clear delineation of powers.  Impose limits on spending and require more transparency in all spending. 

                What does it mean:  Rein in the Executive Branch, Judicial Branch and government agencies, and make them beholden to Congress.  Create more red tape to constrain government agencies from operating efficiently. 

                What Will and Won’t Work:  I’m not an expert at the ins and outs of daily governmental work, but this entire plan is to create a government that runs as effectively as the Republican controlled Congress has the last few years.  Seriously Speaker Ryan?  This is a multi-year government shutdown waiting to happen.

Progressive Twist:  There is a lot of good stuff in here that will make things more efficient, so let’s start with those:  simplify legislation to be clear and easily understandable, expedite rulings between government agencies/bodies, conduct a comprehensive inventory on spending, and make spending data more accessible to public.   Some of the specific regulation changes may be good too, but I am not experienced enough to know the subtleties. 

There are two other changes that need to be made to return the government to the people.  First, Federal and State Congresses are too gerrymandered to truly represent the will of the people.  In 2016, more Americans will vote for Democratic Representatives than Republican ones, however congress will remain controlled by the GOP.  Rather than outright prohibiting gerrymandering (through proportional representation), I like the idea of an election tested gerrymander that would require redistricting if the number of seats assigned were too far off a proportional number.  This article provides a good explanation of an “Efficiency Gap” metric and a legal argument that could pass a Supreme Court challenge.

                The second major change we need to implement is to ensure that our government does not shut down to score political points with a political base or extreme fringes of a party.  There needs to be some more checks and balances against a branch of government overstepping authority through inaction/deadlock.  For instance, provide congress with the ability to veto executive orders within a certain number of days with either a 2/3 majority vote or passing a bill that affects the same issue.  Conversely, the President should be granted emergency powers to enact legislation through executive order so that the government can keep functioning.  Finally, develop a method for congress/president to overrule the court short of an amendment.

A Better Way to Keep Us Safe and Free

                What does it say: Protect the Homeland from internal threats, illegal immigrants, and cyber-attacks.  Take the fight to the terrorists, build a stronger military and police force.  Defend freedom around the world.

                What does it mean:  This is all pretty straight forward.  Mostly it is a return to our foreign policy under President G.W. Bush.  In this context, “Defend Freedom” means that we will use our military might to lean on other countries to benefit our economic and political interests.

                What Will and Won’t Work:  I like using a slightly more forward approach to ISIS than President Obama has been using, but it costs a lot of money to have troops deployed overseas.  Also, part of the reason we are not as involved in Syria is that it is costing the Russians a lot of resources to prop up their allies in the region; resources that could be turned toward Ukraine.  Under the Obama administration, it feels as if we have a much better relationship with our allies than we did under G.W. Bush with his pushier tactics.

                 Progressive Twist:  There are some good progressive ideas in here, especially when discussing an update of the State Department, international communications and outreach.  There are not any details of how to change it, just a critique of the current administration (Thanks Obama!).  It is hard for me to develop a better plan as I do not have a full grasp of what assets we have available, or who we are dealing with.  Sometimes you need to use a carrot, sometimes a stick, and sometimes you need to accidentally (?) drop a bomb on an embassy…or two.

A Better Way to Fight Poverty

A Better Way to Fight Poverty

                What does it say:  The current welfare and entitlement systems are not working.   The current systems are set up to reward complacency and not those who want to strive for something better.    Reward work, Improve school and skill training, match benefits to people’s needs, plan for retirement, demand results. 

                What does it mean:  If you want to not be poor, get a job.  Scrap all of the disparate welfare programs and create one big organization that can handle all programs.  Find ways to privatize social programs for poor.  Create a way of measuring the real benefit of private programs and tie funding to those metrics.

                What Will and Won’t Work:  Some top level ideas should work, such as providing education and training programs to get people back into the workforce, and consolidate the disparate programs and create one that can be tailored to fit most situations.  However, privatizing social reforms has already begun and helps to keep people poor.  It also creates numerous quasi-legal ways to game the system similar to Medicare and charity scams that are difficult to discover and prosecute.  The regulations, monitoring metrics, providing specialized benefit plans for each person based on need would require a gargantuan budget to do right, or can be done poorly for much less.  I thought Republicans were for smaller government, less regulation and a more free-wheeling economy?

                Progressive Twist:  I’ve always have been a “Teach a person to fish” type of guy, so I like the idea of getting people back to work.  The easiest way to reduce the Welfare budget is to make people not need it.  However, the biggest drawback of Speaker Ryan’s “Better Way” is that it is about denying benefits to those without jobs rather than figuring out how to actually find them jobs.   How do you find 15-20% of the population jobs?  Especially if they have not had one in years?  Ever?

                This is a wild idea I like to call “Workfare”.  Start with a very basic “Welfare” program that provides non-working adults enough money and resources to live.  The next step is to provide free training and job placement services.  Once a person gets a job, they will continue to earn benefits from the government to supplement their initial income.  These benefits will be in the form of health care, child care, food stamps, housing allowances, savings plans, etc.  These supplemental benefits will taper off slower than their income increases until they are out of poverty.  The idea here is to provide a realistic path to go from poverty to middle class by incentivizing and rewarding moving up.

                I’ll have a bigger blog on Workfare, Minimum Wage and Jobs Programs later, so keep reading.

Is it Really a #BetterWay

                Rather than just bash Speaker Ryan’s A Better Way initiative as a Republican fantasy world, I thought I would actually take a look at his ideas, critically assess them and provide some progressive alternatives/modifications.  I want to tackle this because I believe Speaker Ryan is a good guy, smart, capable, but is a true believer in Conservative Ideology.  I actually like the fact that he put together a comprehensive and detailed plan for the government.  It has a number of good ideas, sounds reasonable, and logically makes sense as a whole.  What I don’t like is that the details assume that all 325M American Citizens are Paul Ryan and that a free market will magically fix everything that goes wrong in a free market.

There six major principles in his plan:

A Better Way to Fight Poverty

A Better Way to Keep Us Safe and Free

A Better Way to Do the People’s Business

A Better Way for Tax Reform

A Better Way to Fix Health Care

A Better Way to Grow Our Economy

For each principle I discuss Speaker Ryan’s plan, what the details actually say, what will and will not work in the real world, and how making a few progressive changes could improve on his ideas.  Again, I think this plan is great as a Republican platform, it just needs to be made much more moderate for it to actually work.

My Government is Smaller than your Government

The main contention between liberals and conservatives is the size and power of the government.  The trick to any organization is sizing it properly and having the right mix of checks and balances between all of the disparate parts.  This is such an important concept in the business world most companies hire outside consultants to routinely review every aspect of their operations and organization.

In order to properly size a government, we need to define what functions the government must provide.    A government for free societies fulfills two general functions: 1) Protect its citizens, and 2) Create an environment conducive to their citizens’ success.  While this sounds simple, just about everything can be placed into one of those two categories, so let’s break each down a little more.  Across most forms of government, “Protect its Citizens” has a uniform definition that can be broken down as follows:

• Protect Citizens
  • Internal
    • Prevent and Prosecute Crime
    • Prevent Government Overreach
    • Regulate Disputes between Citizens
  • External
    • Provide Military Defense
    • Regulate Trade
    • Diplomacy/Treaties
    • Natural Disasters

The second function, “Promote Success” is much more flexible and depends on the type of government and economy.  In socialism, the government will control most of the economy in order to enforce equality amongst its citizens.  This enforced equality often leads to reduced productivity and innovation, and an increased probability for government corruption.  For a capitalism, the government minimizes regulation and allows the market to control itself.  The danger lies in the tendency for corporations and the upper class to have too much power and influence over the government and average citizens.  The ideal mix between capitalist and socialist policies is achieved by investing to increase productivity and innovation in order to generate enough money and human capital to protect citizens (and pay off debts).

While the above balance can provide a reasonable approximation for the size of government, it needs to be constantly monitored and analyzed for smaller fluctuations.  The final keys to finding the right size of government are the changing views and norms of corporations and citizens.  Corporations can influence a government’s size by mistreating customers and employees, as well as buying influence through lobbyists and political donations.  While citizens can influence the size of government through a demand for services, ethnic/racial makeup, and changing social values, their largest influence is as a part of the economy.  Spending habbits, saving rates, consumer confidence, personal debt and changes in socio-economic status al need to be taken into account to keep a government a proper size to serve its citizens.

Navigating the Political Spectrum

              As this blog is intended to discuss civic ideas and politics, readers should know what my broad views and biases are within this spectrum.  From a social standpoint, I am fairly liberal.  I believe that a person’s rights end once they begin to infringe upon others.  If two men want to get married, go for it; there is not enough love in this world as it is.  I do have a problem forcing a business to enter into a contract against their beliefs.  To turn the usual argument around, would you force a gay pizza store owner to cater a Westboro Baptist Church “God Hates Fags” rally?

                The best economy is one that is in balance.   An economy needs to benefit all involved from the biggest corporation and the highest paid CEO to the lowest paid worker.  Current economic policies have been catering to big business and the upper class and have robbed the economy of money.  Most economic theory spouted by politicians are based on unrealistic ideal.  Republicans want to take more money out of the economy (see Kansas and Louisiana to see how that worked out).  Democrats want to spend more by giving out freebies.  Both will just make things worse.

                I try to look at the world as it is, rather than as I wish it to be.  Many people have an issue distinguishing what is real.  When a person has a strong belief or point-of-view, they view everything from that perspective rather than re-evaluating the foundation of that belief.  For instance:  Climate scientists all over the world have overwhelming evidence that climate change is real and mostly caused by man.  However, a person who does not believe in climate change would rather believe in a global      conspiracy of “everyone else”, including their grand-daughter, rather than be wrong.

                As a politician, I would be labeled a flip-flopper; I change my mind about issues when the data shows otherwise (I have a recent example about gun control).  A favorite quote of mine (I have tried to source it a few times, but to no avail, I think it is classical Greek) went something like this: “A Fact that cannot be proved false is an opinion.”  It means that every fact must have some underlying logical proof.  If at some time the proof is shown to be false, then the conclusion must be re-assessed.  If there is not a logical proof that could be proved wrong, then the “fact” is meaningless. 

                I will touch on a lot of these subjects later in the blog, so keep reading and let me know what you think in the comments below.

The Donald Trump Problem

Please consider one of my favorite passages from literature: 

"Wizard's First Rule: People are stupid. 

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything.  Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it is true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true.  People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool… People need an enemy to feel a sense of purpose. It's easy to lead people when they have a sense of purpose. Sense of purpose is more important by far than the truth. In fact, truth has no bearing in this…People are stupid; they want to believe, so they do.”

Terry Goodkind – Wizard’s First Rule

Over the past 8 years, the Republican Party has been ignoring reality and painting every person and organization that contradicted them as delusional and part of the problem.  This systematic attack on reality left the party primed for the rise of Trump.  Most conservative voters have believed the lies they have been told and refuse to use their own senses to identify reality; they cannot admit to themselves that their beliefs are wrong.  After 8 years of inability to pass the simplest of reforms, even with a majority in both houses, the electorate is looking for someone with a different message. 

Donald Trump has become that other voice.  He has built upon the Republican Party position of negativity and the lingering fears of expansion of social justice to all minorities.  Instead of pushing conservative rhetoric and values, he is campaigning on the rollback of social equality and strong-arm change; playing into their fears.  This is how tyrants are made. 

The worst part of this election has been the consolidation of the Republican Party behind him.  He does not represent their values or economic policies, and a Trump presidency is an obvious threat to our republic.  My goal over the next few months will be to remind my conservative friends that the best vote is for Hillary, if for no reason other than to preserve the status quo for another 4 years.  I may write a few more blogs on some ideas how to approach this later.