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.