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.