On the Issues

Politicians always have an “On the Issues” page where they talk about their stance on the issues. I’m not a politician, but our lives our so impacted by politics that it’s ludicrous to take a back-seat position. Here is my “On the Issues” page.

Education

Education is one of the few investments that, in my mind, is always justified. We consider it imperative that our military gets every penny it needs. I cannot fathom why we don’t take the same approach towards education.

Funding

Everyone says they’re “for education,” but it’s all talk unless we’re going to fund it. We need some massive spending to actually address the issue. If a school is overcrowded, we need to build a new one. We need to raise teacher’s salaries so that young people want to be teachers, and so that we have a pool of qualified teachers, allowing us to be more selective.

College

College tuition has spiraled out of control. When people graduate $100,000 in debt just with college expenses, I think we have a big problem. With full understanding that it’d be expensive, I think it’s worth giving strong consideration towards subsidizing college educations. And frankly, I’d wager that what we spend on education will be more than returned in increased national production. Failing subsidized (free!) college education, we should at least offer some reductions. People going into critical jobs with labor shortages should have their loans forgiven, most notably teachers. I’m also a big fan of a service program. I don’t recall who to credit for the idea, but imagine if, post-college, one year of full-time community service to the nation equals one year of college tuition forgiven.

Credit Card Industry

I’m not so sure it’s an “electable” position, but I have enormous contempt for the credit industry. They’re sneaky, they’re shady, they’re deceptive, and they’re robbing Americans. Let’s start with a few rules:

  • No corporation is exempt from usury laws. Interest rates cannot exceed 20%. (I think the figure should be lower, maybe 10-15%, but I don’t want to start too radically.)
  • Credit bureaus must release information on exactly how they calculate credit ratings.
  • Credit bureaus must, whenever asked, provide an up-to-date credit rating.
  • Credit bureaus must disclose every type of information they collect, e.g. prospective loan applications.
  • A person’s attempts at taking out a loan or other line of credit cannot be used to influence their credit rating or interest rate.
  • Customers must be notified, in writing, in a clear, concise format that a reasonable person can understand, any time their interest rate changes or when their credit rating is changed significantly. (“Significantly” isn’t good enough; we need to define it. I’d rather omit that word entirely, but it might be laborious.)

Foreign Policy

This is a big issue, and something I don’t profess to be an expert on. But here are a few areas that we should work on:

Put America First

I am not advocating isolationism. But, given the choice of spending money to help another country or spending money to help our country, we should always spend the money to help our country. We shouldn’t be funding schools in Iraq when some of our own need funding. We shouldn’t be building new bridges overseas when our own bridges are crumbling in some parts of the country.

Foreign Trade

Foreign trade is important. Jobs are going to be moved overseas, and, in many cases, should be moved overseas. If it’s saving money for an American company, that’s higher profits for the American economy and more tax revenue from them. However, we need to do a few things:

  • Insist that job training be provided to those who lose their jobs when they’re moved overseas. It’s sane to use government funding for part of this, but by requiring companies to bear some of the cost, it provides a slight incentive to keep more jobs in America.
  • Hold companies responsible for the labor conditions in foreign companies. If a company is ultimately paying labor in a sweatshop, the company should be held responsible for abuses there. This is somewhat complex, hard to enforce, and hard for the company to monitor. But we can’t allow jobs to be moved to people who are being abused or malnourished.

Optimistic Unchokes

That’s a term used in BitTorrent, described to periodically unblocking (“unchoking”) ‘selfish’ peers who were downloading but refusing to upload to us. Some clients will, periodically, try lifting the ban in the hopes that the ban is no longer necessary. I think a similar policy would be useful in politics: every now and then (measured in years), try reaching out to world leaders we’ve effectively ‘blocked’ in one way or another. Let’s reach out to Raúl Castro, who seems a little less crazy than his brother. Let’s get a dialog going with Hugo Chávez. I’m not talking about lifting all embargoes and sanctions and bending to their will. I’m talking about, for the first time in decades, picking up the phone and chatting. If we started allowing American tourists into Cuba, would they work on improving their human rights track record a little bit? If we allowed trade of certain items, might they ease up and allow for freedom of the press? I only propose that we start to talk to them and see where things go. If they don’t go well, the conversations end, and we’ve lost nothing but a little time.

Immigration

I think this has become an insane political issue. We all agree that the flow of illegal immigrants into our country has to be stopped. But can we all agree that:

  • U.S. civilians shooting immigrants as they try to cross the border is murder, even if the person they shoot is in the country illegally.
  • There are millions of illegal immigrants, and deporting them isn’t going to work. Call it “amnesty” and sound the alarm bells if you want, but if they’re going to stay, we might as well work on giving them a path to citizenship. These “amnesty” plans are anything but freebies: every single one I’ve seen proposed requires that they learn English, pay all their back taxes and fines for coming here illegally, and then get in the back of the line for citizenship. People freak out when this is proposed, but what’s the alternative? Leaving them here illegally?
  • Building a huge fence across the Southern border seems pretty simple-minded. In places it’s very worthwhile, and in places it seems like our current system is woefully inadequate. But the massive border fence seems unlikely to actually accomplish much.
  • Hiring illegal immigrants to build the border fence is among the most colossally idiotic things that has happened in a while.
  • We need to go after people employing illegal immigrants.
  • A lot of people seem to mix racism in with discussions of immigration. Can we please not do that?
  • Giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants has been something that people freaked out over, too. But to me, it seems that the choice is to have illegal immigrants driving with no training or exam, or to have illegal immigrants take a driving course and pass an eye and written exam, and pay the state $50. I’ll take the people who can drive, thanks. They’re going to drive anyway.

Welfare

I don’t get this issue. We should care for the people who need it, but crack down on lowlives who live off of welfare when they don’t actually need it. But there’s yet another false dichotomy: Democrats want to pour tons of money into letting people slack off and live off of welfare forever, and Republicans want to abolish welfare because everyone is leeching off of the system. Can’t we realize that we need to provide for those who can’t, yet, at the same time, restrict welfare to people who actually need it?

Poverty

Plain and simple, I find it appalling that homeless people are starving on our streets. I think this is a case where our stinginess in caring for the needy, besides being inexcusably selfish, actually costs us more money in the long run. I think we need to:

  • Offer treatment, with amnesty (e.g., you won’t be criminally charged if you check yourself in) for drug and alcohol abusers.
  • Stop shutting down long-term care facilities for the mentally disabled! A huge amount of homeless people have psychological issues and are unable to hold jobs. Our solution was to evict them from hospitals and onto the streets. Are we that cold? Some of these people, with appropriate treatment for their conditions, could become valuable workers. And those that couldn’t at least deserve humane treatment.
  • I’m a fan of housing first. Yes, it’s expensive. But here’s the thing: criminals, who the government arguably has the lowest duty of care towards, get free housing and food from the government. I firmly believe that homeless people (err, everyone) deserves to be treated at least as well as prisoners. If we can afford to house hundreds of thousands of Americans who do bad things, we can afford to house hundreds of thousands of people whose only “sin” is being extremely poor.
  • Why the hell are we not giving extensive job coaching to these people? In one of my classes, we had the opportunity to talk to some homeless people and some homeless shelter volunteers. They don’t have the funding to offer job coaching, and guests at the shelter have early curfews and no phone number or address, making it very difficult for them to get jobs. This helps no one: it doesn’t benefit the homeless person who can’t get a job; it doesn’t benefit employers needing labor; it doesn’t benefit already-overcrowded homeless shelters who otherwise could have gotten someone making money; and it doesn’t even benefit frugal taxpayers, who, instead of paying a one-time fraction of a cent in taxes to hire a lot of help to get people into jobs, instead has to pay to house the person in homeless shelters in perpetuity.

Prisons & Recidivism

I have a few strong opinions here:

  • Every DUI conviction should carry jail time. First offense can be 12 hours or something, but there needs to be a taste of, “What you did could very easily have killed someone and we as a society don’t allow that.” And, as an aside, prison terms for DUI need to grow exponentially. How do people get arrested on a 20th conviction? By the third conviction, you should have at least a year in prison.
  • Prison should be an intense rehabilitation program. Why aren’t there ten thousand counselors working in the prison system? Why aren’t we offering GEDs, or even vocational training / Associate’s degrees in college?
  • Much like with homeless people, why the hell aren’t we doing more in terms of job placement for ex-cons? While I’m sure some people are “just bad people,” I think a lot of crime would be reduced if people had successful jobs. People with steady jobs generally don’t go holding up convenience stores.
  • I really think that the ludicrously-high (over 50%) recidivism rate (the number of people released from prison who end up returning to prison in short order) in our country is a giant, flashing neon sign saying, “We’re not doing nearly enough.”
  • A common argument against offering degrees/job placement to prisoners is that it’s ‘not fair’ to those of us who had to pay for college and find a job on our own. I think of it as ‘enlightened self-interest,’ though: a sort of investment. I really don’t think anyone’s going to be lunatic enough to commit crimes so they can get their GED in jail, and I really don’t think anyone’s going to have a hard time finding a job and get themselves arrested so a counselor in a jail will help them look. If we help them in this way, they’ll stop committing crimes. Sure, we’ll never eliminate crime, but I really don’t think we’re doing enough.

Pardons & Commutations

Governors and the President have the power to grand pardons, where a conviction is erased, and commutations, where a prison (or death!) sentence is ended. These tools are valuable safeguards; a last resort, of sorts. Most states, however, have chosen to be a little less arbitrary, and have formed non-partisan, well-balanced committees who have the power of powers and commutations, versus the governor alone. When Scooter Libby, George W. Bush’s assistant, was convicted and sentenced to jail, and then had his sentence immediately commuted, it sent a clear message: it’s high-time that we did the same for the President. Or, at the least, added some checks and balances so that the President cannot pardon his cronies for crimes he was potentially an accomplice to. (And lest you think I’m overly partisan, Clinton issued a ton of controversial pardons on his way out of office, a sort of tradition that I think needs to be curbed.)

Gun Control

I believe that:

  1. People should be allowed to own guns.
  2. It is permissible to prevent convicted felons from owning guns.
  3. The 2nd Amendment doesn’t make a lot of sense today. Hunting and owning a gun to protect your family should be allowed, but have nothing to do with militias. While I think both sides will be worried about the outcome, it makes sense to me to try to re-do the Second Amendment in a way that fits in today’s society.
  4. It should not be necessary to show ’cause’ for owning a gun. In the “shall issue” versus “may issue” debate, I think it should really be, “Shall issue unless a compelling argument to the contrary is shown,” e.g. being a violent felon or defined as legally incompetent.
  5. Shooters should be licensed just like drivers. You must be over a sane age to carry guns on your own (18?), pass a course on gun safety and the like, and demonstrate ability on a range and a written exam.

Same-sex Marriage

I’ve never understood the argument against same-sex marriage. I think it comes down to personal and religious beliefs, which should not be used to deny someone a right. Letting homosexuals marry has no impact on heterosexuals, and many benefits for homosexuals. Living in Massachusetts right now, the state’s decision to allow same sex marriage has had no impact on my life.

Health Care

Can we all agree that the current system is pretty bad? I think that health care should be a service that anyone in the country is allowed to use for free. However, universal health care has its own issues; one often-cited problem is enormous wait times to see a doctor. For seem reason, this is one of the many issues with a huge false dichotomy going on. Everything is painted in terms of sticking with status quo or copying Canada’s system. Let’s say that both have their merits but are bad ideas, and let’s think of other ideas! Surely, we can care for our citizens and do it without an 18-month waiting period?

Fuel Economy

I consider it a great failure of Detroit that the only cars American Auto has produced are hybrids. I think it’s a tremendous failure of the free market that people keep buying gas guzzlers. If we want to get serious about it, there are some options we can take:

  • Give subsidies to American automakers for hybrids. Sponsor accelerated R&D to get hybrids onto the lots at prices competitive with gas-guzzling cars.
  • Tax gas guzzlers. Draw a line in the sand somewhere: say 30 MPG. Impose a tax on the sale of every car below that standard, such as $100 per MPG. My car gets about 20 MPG, so I’d have paid a $1,000 premium for its crappy gas mileage. Use the proceeds to make the tax go in reverse, too. My mom bought a Prius, which gets about 50 MPG. That’s 20 MPG over the standard, or a $2,000 subsidy on the car. (Of course, these numbers are arbitrary.)
  • The American government has huge fleets of cars for its myriad agencies. Set aggressive fuel standards there. 30-35 MPG. (This has the added bonus of saving us huge amounts of taxpayer dollars on gasoline in the future.) The side-effect is that, hopefully, Detroit will ramp up production.

War on Drugs

I don’t use drugs. I don’t see the appeal, and frankly, I look down on people who do use drugs. But I also fail to see what the big deal is with forbidding drugs. In some cases, I can see why the government steps in: things like the crack epidemic or heroin use lead to violence, incredible addiction, and a public health crisis. But here are a few things I believe:

  • Marijuana has recognized, valid medicinal purposes, and it is downright insane to prohibit them.
  • Marijuana is a naturally-growing plant. It’s one thing to say that producing crystal meth is bad, but we’re outlawing a plant that’s, quite literally, a weed.
  • Marijuana is not dangerous. I guess if you smoked a ton of marijuana and then drove it might be an issue. But I think it should be treated like alcohol: you can’t wander around stoned out of your mind, and it’s off-limits to kids.
  • The only people who really gain by marijuana being illegal are those growing marijuana, who can exploit the high prices.
  • There are ridiculous numbers of people in jail for merely using/possessing marijuana. Not only is this pretty bizarre if you stop and think about it, but it’s costing us a ton of money.
  • Lots and lots of marijuana is sold. Since it’s an illegal industry, no one is jumping up and declaring income from selling marijuana on their taxes.

I really see no reason that marijuana should be illegal. And decriminalization isn’t the answer: legalization is. Decriminalization keeps it illegal, it just means that you get fined instead of arrested. It’s a step in the right direction, but we need to move towards legalization, where it’s, well, legal. We can collect tax on the sale of marijuana, drug dealers will be put out of business, we’ll stop incarcerating non-violent people who haven’t done anything to harm anyone, and we’ll have removed a pointless law from the books, letting the police go after real crime.

Employment Law

I actually consider myself more sympathetic to businesses than employees, which maybe doesn’t fit with what I’ve said here. A few more things I believe:

Drug Testing

The Federal government, except where there’s a “compelling state interest,” cannot drug test its employees, because it’s unconstitutional. Private employers, however, can, and do. And sometimes, pregnancy testing is done, or people check for health issues. A lot of this is entirely legal. It shouldn’t be. A person’s body should be off-limits to employers. Employers should not be allowed to inspect DNA, conduct drug testing, or do anything else with people’s body or medical information. It seems like it should be a pretty straightforward issue, really. Drug testing also seems pointless, for a few reasons:

  • There are major accuracy issues. A lot of medicines cause false positives. There have been numerous stories about people having poppyseed bagels and testing positive for opium use.
  • Drug tests don’t measure “sobriety,” they look for past drug use. It’s entirely possible to fail a drug test and be perfectly straight/sober at the time, and it’s also entirely possible to pass a drug test while you’re high as a kite (if you haven’t used drugs in the past month or so).
  • What you do in your free time is not your employer’s business. If you smoke marijuana after work every day, your employer has no right to know that. It shouldn’t take tests for your boss to know if you’re impaired at work or not.

Non-competes when laid off

This is a really obscure topic, but I firmly believe that if a person is laid off, any non-competes with that company should be immediately terminated. It’s not at all fair to restrict someone for working for your competitors and then abruptly terminate their employment.

“Teeth”

Laws need to clearly spell out penalties, and the penalties need to be sufficient. I’m typically not a fan of harsh punishments, but especially with companies, the reward of doing something illegal often far exceeds the risk of getting caught. (If you can break the law and make $600, and you risk getting fined $50, why would you follow the law?) This is just more of a general concept: we need to make sure that laws give people strong motivation to follow them.

Abortion

For me, the issue of abortion comes down to a question of when the fetus becomes human. I think “the moment of conception” is too soon, and “when the baby pops out” is too late. The thing a lot of people seem to miss is that Roe v. Wade doesn’t draw the line at “when the baby pops out.”

Corruption

We, the common people of America, make the government. We elect it to serve us. And yet how often we say, “Don’t trust the government!” I think political corruption is one of the worst offenses a person can commit: it’s an egregious violation of the public trust, and an insult to our nation. It comes back to the “teeth” thing–a politician revealed to be serving no one but himself (or herself) generally just apologizes and it goes away. If it’s really bad, they might have to step down and go on to become a lobbyist making even more money. I think we need to hold politicians to a really high standard: let’s say that certain offenses constitute high treason and result in life in prison. In particular, we should prohibit:

  • Taking bribes in any form, or accepting corporate contributions exceeding $5,000 or so.
  • Passing laws that benefit the politician(s) involved at the exclusion of an overwhelming majority of Americans, such as passing laws to benefit a company you control.
  • Blatantly lying when such lies have a material effect.
  • Adding irrelevant crap to bills, especially porkbarrel legislation or adding irrelevant earmarks to bills.

Transparency

I believe transparency is an essential component of democracy, and an essential element in ensuring honesty. In particular, I think:

  • The doctrine of Executive Privilege should be something that the Executive branch must demonstrate to the courts and/or Congress is appropriate to invoke: when you’re being accused of something, you can’t say “Executive Privilege!” and run away. Rather, you need to demonstrate specifically why complying would breach national security. Although it’s less than ideal, I’d be comfortable with this occurring as an interaction solely between the Supreme Court justices (and/or Congress) and the President, with the other party removed, so the alleged national secrets can be discussed. Although I haven’t too extensively reviewed historical usage, a cursory reading leaves me wondering if Executive Privilege has ever been used appropriately. Being President doesn’t put one above the law.
  • The full text of every bill, and every revision, should be public. To some extent, it is. But I’m envisioning a sort of Wikipedia of laws for Congress, where each Congressperson would make proposed changes.
  • Every penny of public money spent, and/or allocated, should be in a public, online database, including a notation of who proposed it and who will benefit. (And any obvious links back to lobbyists…) While some specific funding may be necessarily secret (e.g., the military might not want to give a precise breakdown, and welfare offices shouldn’t list each recipient of aid), in most cases, this should go down to the line item. This is how we’re going to catch wasteful spending, spending on conflicts of interest, etc.
  • I want every elected official that represents me to keep a daily blog of what they’ve done. I want a site listing all pending legislation, how they plan to vote, why they plan to vote that way, and how I can contact them. (This information is ‘kind of’ out there right now, but neither comprehensive nor all that easy to access.)