Sunday, November 16, 2008

RADICALISM? THIS WOULD BE A START


Clipped from: www.commondreams.org, Pierre Tristam

Health care

  • Eliminate the role of the insurance industry in health.
  • single-payer system such as Medicare
  • I'd much rather pay my $5,000-a-year premiums in the form of a national health tax
Bonus radicalism: End for-profit hospitals.

Taxes

  • Witness the absurdity of Democratic presidential candidates pretending $200,000 earners are middle class
  • Return marginal tax rates -- all rates -- to their Clinton-era levels.
  • Forget about a middle--class tax cut
  • Capital gains and dividend income? Tax it at the same rate as all other income.
Bonus radicalism: End the handout known as the mortgage-interest deduction except for low-income first-time homebuyers.

Energy

  • Implement $1-a-gallon federal surtax on gas
  • incentive to drive less,
  • energizes the alternative-energy sector and finance it
Bonus radicalism: An extra 25-cents-per-gallon tax dedicated exclusively to new mass-transit projects such as light rail and bullet trains

Star wars

  • We have spent $160 billion and barely a couple of pretend-success tests.
  • This is the absurd ballistic missile defense system that the US is trying to place in Poland and Czech Republic,
  • a system that doesn't work to defend against ballistic missiles that don't work either.
  • Time to junk it, along with the $380-million-a-plane F-22 Raptor fighter program,
Bonus radicalism: Welcome gays in the military.

Immigration:

  • A "blue card" to every illegal immigrant willing to work and pay taxes, as a first step to a Green Card -- and citizenship. It's not amnesty.
Bonus radicalism: Mr. Obama, tear down that wall going up along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Domestic security

  • Close the Department of Homeland Security
  • single-biggest, most useless and abusive (of dollars and liberties) expansion of government since Harry Truman signed the equally toxic National Security Act of 1947. Bonus radicalism:
Bonus radicalism: Abolish the CIA -- or at least half of those 18 spy agencies in the country's $40-billion-a-year "intelligence community."

Iraq and Afghanistan

  • Withdraw troops from both, replace them with plenty of economic aid and a few special forces focused exclusively on al-Qaida.
Bonus radicalism: Withdraw all remaining 35,000 to 45,000 U.S. troops from Europe. Time to let those Europeans carry their own weight.

That would be radical, at least relative to the fearful, self-serving conservatism of the past three decades. In reality, it's only mildly liberal -- and unlike anything Obama is proposing. As I said: If only.

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