Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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August 14, 2016What Hillary Should DoI posted a shorter version on Facebook today:
My Grandpa Schultz was a wonderful old coot. He wasn't my real grandpa -- he was my grandma's second husband -- but my brother and I loved him, and he loved us. He never went past the fourth grade, but he was a good farmer; he truly loved the land, and watching things grow. He was so tight that when he took a nickel out of his pocket Jefferson blinked at the light; but when I cried when I was a little kid because I wanted a toy and he wouldn't buy it for me, that was not just because he was cheap: he was trying to teach me that you can't always have everything you want.
But he puzzled me when I was about ten years old. We were doing something or other together in the garage or on the farm, when he told me that he resented having to pay taxes to support the public schools, since he didn't have any kids of his own. Looking back now, I suppose what he meant was that that should have been my parents' responsibility, not his. But even at the age of ten, I thought that attitude was kind of weird.
I am a democratic socialist. Like most Americans, I love my public schools, my Social Security, my Medicare, my United States Post Office (which knit the country together in its early years), and my group health care plans, Blue Cross and the rest. The principle is that everybody pays in because everybody benefits: even if you rarely mail a letter or go to the doctor, and have no children to send to school, you benefit from living in a literate, civilized country, where health care is there if you need it.
(The reason Obamacare is a ragbag that nobody likes is because we can't get what we need and want, which is national group health care, like every other modern nation has.)
A letter-writer in the Wall Street Journal was worried about "Virtual government ownership of the means of production [and] lack of private ownership", which is nonsense. Democratic socialism is what makes the American way of life possible, no more a threat to it than was domestic communism during the paranoid 1950s, when everybody knew that the Soviet Union was a place where you had to stand in line to buy toothpaste and toilet paper; anybody who thought that the USA was ever going to go that way was a nut case, but our spineless politicians bent over backward to be more anti-communist than the next guy.
There is, however, something that so-called American "conservatives" are right about, from the Koch brothers to the tea party types. Bureaucracy grows, like a cancer; new laws are passed on top of old laws, which were passed on top of still older laws, and few of them are ever repealed. To be sure, folks like the Koch brothers want the rules changed to suit themselves, but the fact is that the government is too big, too expensive, too inefficient, and even though it is inefficient it is too intrusive. I am certainly going to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, but I agree with Paul Berman in Tablet: "I wish she would come up with something grander than a laundry-list of social reform."
If we can set ourselves free from ourselves we will became more prosperous, and many of the social reforms will take care of themselves. Senator Clinton needs to make specific policy proposals that make sense. Yes, we need to regulate Wall Street and the big banks and the big corporations, but once the regulations are in place, we need to get the hell out of the way and let them create prosperity. Dodd-Frank had its heart in the right place, but it should have been 100 pages long, not 2300 pages, to say nothing of 26,000 pages of rules. Start-ups are discouraged and new jobs not created because of the hassle and expense of doing anything at all.
Privatise Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. Regulate the lending business, but get the government out of the actual lending.
Trade is good, the more of it the better. What is wrong with the Trans-Pacific Partnership? I have heard that it gives too much power to multinational corporations; no doubt it needs to be tweaked. Can we hear some specific ideas, as opposed to knee-jerk slogans?
And meanwhile, why do we persuade multinational corporations not to bring their overseas profits home, by threatening to tax them on profits which have already been taxed overseas? We need real tax reform, and we need specific proposals, not "I'll raise someone else's taxes, not yours." Don't pretend that corporations pay high taxes; rather, lower the taxes and cut out the loopholes.
Start phasing out agricultural subsidies. We needed them 80 years ago, but now we don't. We protect American sugar and subsidise American corn, which is why much of our food and drink contains high-fructose corn syrup, basically an industrial chemical that tastes metallic. It is the reason why the Midwest is now a monoculture, which is dangerous; it is the reason why ethanol is made from corn, which is simply foolish. And why do we support the growing of rice, a water-intensive crop, in California, which is a desert? We can't even export it to Asia, because it's the wrong kind of rice.
Start to shrink the education department, and give the responsibility for K-12 education back to the states. If Texas wants to distribute textbooks full of superstition, some teachers will teach around that, and sooner or later parents will demand better books. Or they won't. Parents will start to insist that their kids get their noses out of their smartphones and learn something. Or they won't. There's nothing Washington can do about any of this.
(But continue to enable local community colleges and vocational schools. I have an honors degree in education; with that and two bucks I can get a coffee at Starbucks: I am glad I went to university, but nobody needs to go to university.)
The Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities Exchange Commission and a great many other government agencies (employing tens of thousands of bureaucrats) need to be got under control. A 200-year-old antique piano was destroyed by customs when the pianist tried to bring it back from overseas, because it had ivory keys. In August 2011 Federal paramilitaries wearing body armor and machine guns raided a guitar factory in Nashville. Lawsuits against Wall Street bigshots go nowhere, while the real sellers of worthless mortgages have disappeared back into the woodwork. If a pressure group obviously pushing an agenda is outraged at being audited, the solution is simple: abolish most of the tax-exempt categories; let the pressure groups (and the mega-churches) pay taxes like everyone else.
We have nothing to fear except fear itself, a famous man once said, but the nation is desperately afraid of stupid. I could go on, and some of these ideas will be debated, but if Hillary would make sensible, positive, specific proposals in every area of national life, she would get independents, Republicans and libertarians voting for her, the jackass who is her opponent would not carry a single state, and we could all start to breathe again.