CAMPAIGN FINANCE & THE NATIONAL DEBT
This country has two big problems--campaign finance reform and the national debt with its accompanying theft of Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement funds. Unfortunately, these subjects are often buried in a plethora of lesser considerations and events, perhaps deliberately kept out of the limelight. More calamitous is that each of these problems could easily be solved, but it will not happen, not in either case. There is much too much money at stake--money that would be lost to the very people with the responsibility to take corrective action, including current candidates for office.
Campaign finance
Costs of running for office have eaten away at the democratic aspects of our republic until today's elections resemble an oligarchy or banana republic. All that's needed to correct things is to take the money out of politics entirely, all of it. Two steps or laws could do this. The first would cap the amount any candidate could spend campaigning. For instance, it might cap campaign financing at two times the annual salary for the position sought. Of course, that's not enough to pay for hours of advertising, speech writers, organizers, rallies, and so forth. That's the point. The second condition would require the media to offer free and equal time and space to all candidates for national office as part of their licensing by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC assigns and regulates broadcast frequencies and already requires free public service announcements. It would merely be an extension of the same principle. Naturally, we would not get as many announcements, commercials, and rhetoric as we now get, but what we did receive would be more meaningful.
Forgetting that it takes thousands of signatures in each state to get on the ballot, political cultists would scream that such a policy would allow all of the riff-raff to run for office. In reality, it would put these political wannabes out of work or at least limit the amount of time they spend telling you who to vote for, often simply by the preponderance of coverage they give one candidate over another.
The media would scream bloody murder about infringement of their first amendment rights when it would be the millions in lost advertising that truly upsets them. And the candidates themselves would complain about not having campaign kitties to plunder, favors to pass out, and the time spent raising all this money. They might actually have to work for two years instead of traveling the countryside.
Instead, year after year we will continue to have long and expensive campaigns that deal in trivia and sound like the secretarial pool complaining about who curries what favors with the boss, spends too much time at the copy machine, shredder, or water cooler and the difference between hard and soft money. The latter is much like Tammany Hall's distinction between honest and dishonest graft. And don't forget, it's this sort of corrupt democracy that we are insisting other countries adopt. Take a lesson from us.
National debt
Thirty-four percent of the national debt could be eliminated in one day. All it would take is getting rid of the nonmarketable bonds Washington's pirates substitute for the entitlement money they steal-the double taxation under the "Pay-It-Again, Sam" plan.
The same citizens who were robbed of their excess payments to Social Security, Medicare, highway upkeep, and so forth would not have to pay these taxes a second time simply because Congress and the Administration took their first payments and spent them on wars and pork barrel projects, calling it "borrowing" and leaving behind "IOUs" that are really "UOUs."
There is nothing to it. Reducing the national debt by more than $2 trillion overnight requires nothing more than a little honesty. The money is already gone. Why should we, the victims of theft, be expected to replace it from future income taxes? Future taxes could be put to much better use. From that point forward, all it would take is a sensible payback plan to handle the other $3.8 trillion of the national debt. A plan much like your own home mortgage instead of the double-dealing, sleight-of-hand, credit card to credit card crafty tricks of the current Democrats or the return of cab fare after the holdup by Republicans. All current plans are meant to continue the con game and leave the eventual burden of payment on you, your children, and your grandchildren. All brought to you by a government that advertises saving the children.
Probability: It ain't going to happen, folks. Not unless you storm the Bastille instead of playing along with the game like a bunch of sheep led into the run. The powers that be are never going to give up their booty, not when corrective action is up to no one but them. Why should they? Long live the oligarchy.
--Ed Henry, People's Open Opposition Party (POOP), <http://www.poop.org>