Preface

I intend to focus on what kind of country the United States will be over 5, 10, 25, and 50-yer perspectives. and what the world will become over those same periods of time.  I have formed my issues positions by that standard and I invite you to judge me by it.

All of this is offered as a perspective only; the only specific promises I make are to be faithful to my oath of office use common sense and good judgment in the decisions I make.

I.  AMERICA IN THE WORLD

Basic goals:  First, to promote national and international security.  Second, to promote democracy and human rights.  Third, to the extent that it is not included in the other two, to promote international economic prosperity and opportunity.

A.  Worldwide concerns

Organize the democratic countries in the world to assign rotating responsibilities for maintaining minimal standards of peace, human rights, and security in various regions of the world (currently, for example, the Darfur region of Sudan). 

Revise our food aid policy to avoid lowering the overall price that local producers receive.  Channel normal (non-famine) food aid to the third world market in the form of bonus bushels to small and moderate-sized successful food producers. 

Encourage international debtors and creditors (including our government) to agree on setasides or interim arrangements involving partial debt forgiveness.  Based upon a country’s ability to pay, match a dollar of debt paid with a certain bonus amount of debt forgiveness at the time of payment.

Support free trade but require maintenance of minimal environmental, agricultural, and labor standards in all international trade agreements. 

Establish and maintain significant trade preferences for developing democracies.

Expand nonproliferation efforts to include an international effort to account for every gram of potential nuclear weapons material.

Do not lightly abandon the traditional institutions and paradigms (protections for prisoners of war and use of civilian courts to prosecute non-uniformed lawbreakers) in fight against terrorism.

B.  Regional concerns

Maintain strong and friendly relations with Canada and Mexico.  Support a united Canada.  Insist on continued political and economic reforms in Mexico.

Encourage economic development, democracy, and free trade subject to high environmental and labor standards in the Western Hemisphere.  Continue uncompromising opposition to Cuban communism.  Oppose illegal immigration to the United States but provide guest worker opportunities at wages at least 10 percent higher than applicable minimum or prevailing wages.

Continue and expand the historic cooperation between Europe and the United States to assure the economic well-being of all persons on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Support Russia’s continued economic and political development, while demanding its adherence to democratic principles.

Support Israel’s right to a secure existence including its military efforts outside of its borders to counter threats to its security.  Hold it to a high level of stewardship in territories it has occupied since June 4, 1967.  Encourage peace discussions among all countries and interests in the region.  Oppose terrorist movements. 

Despite our initial error in going to war in Iraq, we need to patiently persevere in supporting the new government there and opposing an insurrection that promises only oppression and murder.  I oppose rigid exit timetables.  As the saying goes, we broke it, so we bought it.  However, our goal is to provide not an ironclad guaranty of peace and democracy, but a reasonable opportunity for the Iraqis to achieve these goals.  However, we should not stay in Iraq for one more minute unless we are willing to pay current costs of the war, and some significant payment of previous years’ costs, from our current income (no deficit spending on this war).

Firmly oppose nuclear arms trade and development in Iran and North Korea.

Be prepared for aggressive multinational intervention in Africa to prevent genocide.  Provide substantial assistance with public health crises involving AIDS and other epidemics.  Direct food aid commodities to local producers as an incentive to increase production – instead of giving it directly to consumers and thereby destroying local markets.

Cultivate special friendship with India.  Encourage nuclear disarmament in India and Pakistan.  Pursue normal (neither extraordinarily bad nor extraordinarily good) economic relations with Vietnam and Laos.  Encourage continuing democratic and economic reforms in Indonesia.

Continue normal trade relations with China.  Continue to encourage democracy there.  Support eventual unification of China but oppose any effort to forcibly unite Taiwan with mainland China.  Support human rights in, and the cultural autonomy of, Tibet.

Stand ready to assist North Korea in case of famine while insisting on openness, peaceful conduct, and cooperation with arms inspections.  Stand by our defense commitments to South Korea and stay prepared to fulfill them.

Support Japan in its economic recovery.  Stop pressuring Japan to put its domestic agriculture at risk.

Continue good relations with Australia and New Zealand.  Encourage democracy and economic development in Pacific nations that have become independent since World War II.

C.  OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE

Assure that our national defense is sufficient beyond doubt to defend our country against potential adversaries, fulfill our treaty obligations, and provide a generously proportional contribution to international peacekeeping efforts.

Consider programs and institutions that encourage all of our citizens to make a direct contribution to our national defense.

Respect the roles of both the President and the Congress in deciding when and where in the world to deploy our armed forces.

Make our armed forces one of the most advanced and prestigious institution of higher education.  The time an individual spends in the service awaiting the contingency of war should be a time of disciplined preparation for civilian life.  Our best educators should be recruited to serve as civilian faculty in these institutions.

Pay fair and living wages to our armed forces personnel.

Continue to weed out unnecessary components of our defense effort, and make decisions regarding defense investments based as much as possible on legitimate defense needs.

II.  OUR ECONOMIC PRIORITIES

General budget issues.  Encourage Americans to become producers and savers and to decrease consumption of consumer goods.

Continue to maintain an economic system that provides both a good aggregate and a good distribution of wealth and opportunity.  Treat the laws of markets as architects would the law of gravity:  respect them and take them into account, but do not erect shrines to them.  Recognize that large and complex government is unavoidable in a large and complex world economy, but insist that it be controlled by democratic processes and not by private economic interest groups or bureaucratic inertia.

Budget and account for the Social Security and other trust funds (currently in surplus) separately from the general fund (currently in deficit).

Raise taxes on upper incomes to close the general fund deficit and pay off the national debt, particularly the 80 percent of it that we ran up in the last 25-30 years.  Allow middle and lower income taxpayers to keep tax cuts that were bundled with tax cuts for upper income taxpayers.  Raise and index the exemption from the estate tax but do not repeal it. 

Impose consumption taxes:

$2.00 per gallon tax on refined gasoline, with a 10 gallon ($20.00) per month tax rebate to all licensed drivers who own or co-own a vehicle, and a five gallon ($10.00) tax rebate to everyone else.  It is better to pay the high prices to ourselves than to pay them to oil companies and exporters.

A sales tax on all consumer goods and services to fund health care (details under Health Care, below). 

Provide an exemption from tax for the first $200 in savings and investment income.

Use indexing to mitigate taxable gains (but not to increase tax losses), and abolish the step-up of basis on death.

Index the threshold for the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to equal in real dollars the originally enacted threshold

Raise the Estate and Gift Tax threshold to $4 million.

Generally, index all tax brackets, thresholds, exemptions, etc.

Environment.  Maintain strong environmental protections.  Continue to privatize (send back to the polluter) the costs of preventing and cleaning up pollution and the waste products of our economy.  Adopt the policy that all unused items (or their disposal costs) go back up the stream of commerce from which they came.

Welfare.  Do not apply the 60-month TANF/MFIP lifetime eligibility limit to months (or in months) in which the unemployment rate is above five percent.  Apply minimum federal welfare benefit standards, and federalize at least 85 percent of the costs of income and medical assistance based on need. 

Encourage local community sponsorship for individual welfare recipients.

Make work incentive percentages (the amount of earned income not deducted from welfare benefits) comparable to similar incentives in programs not commonly thought of as welfare programs.

Structure benefits to support intact families.  Do not condition eligibility for welfare assistance on the absence of a parent.

Social Security and Retirement.  Encourage private savings, but do not carve those savings out of the existing Social Security program.  Automatically adjust Social Security benefits to insure solvency at existing tax rates based on sound actuarial estimates, for 40 years (begin at 25 years and increase the standard each year until the rolling solvency standard is 40 years).  This may result in a gradual and moderate reduction of benefits particularly for persons (like myself) in the baby boom generation.  Require federal and federally insured retirement programs to satisfy reasonable funding standards as a precondition to additional individual vesting of rights in them.

Health Care.  Continue the Medicare and Medicaid programs through their existing funding mechanisms (the Medicare tax and general tax revenues).

Impose a seven (7) percent federal sales tax on all consumer (personal, family, household) purchases of goods and services (except education, child care, non-elective medical care, and a $1,000 monthly housing allowance) to establish a trust fund to pay an estimated 50 percent of all health care costs other than those covered by Medicare and Medicaid.  This would subsidize employer-provided or self-employment insurance costs and provide the beginning of coverage for the uninsured.  Use market leverage to increase the value we receive for our public, insurance, and self-paid health insurance dollars.  Pay a $10.00 rebate, per person per month, to convert the tax into a progressive tax.  This would exempt approximately $142.86 in monthly purchases from the tax ($571.43 for a family of four).  Allow states to preempt the tax in order to run state or regionally controlled health care plans.

Require producers of items that result in health hazards to reimburse society (sick persons, their families and survivors, and government) for the proportion of the costs of the illness resulting from their product.  Apply this rule retroactively (Superfund style) to the tobacco and alcohol industries – through legislation rather than litigation – and apply it to all companies that historically have profited from the manufacture and distribution of tobacco products.  Apply it prospectively to the firearms industry excepting arms production for the military and public law enforcement agencies.

Agriculture.  Support the family farm system both as an important part of our cultural bedrock, and as the basis for a wider world of opportunity for small towns and businesses.  Recognize that an indispensable companion to sustainable agriculture is sustainable agricultural policy.  Avoid policy zig-zags driven by extremes of ideology or interest group pressure.  Uphold the rights of the states to limit or prohibit corporate ownership of farm land.

Define “family farmers” by the volume of farm products they market each year, not by the nominal size of the farm.  For example, a farm family that markets 30,000 bushels of corn (the product of about a half-section of land in southern Minnesota) should be recognized as a family farmer based on modern standards.  Similarly, an operation marketing 750,000 pounds of milk (efficient production with a 50-cow herd without aggressive culling and hormone practices – but the size limitation may have to be increased given changes in the dairy industry in the last decade) is family-sized.  Define similar equivalents for other commodities.  Encourage a “mixed and matched" diverse operation (e.g., 15,000 bushels of corn and 375,000 pounds of milk marketed), probably with additional corn used for feed on the farm, with slightly larger marketing limits to reward diversified operations.

Provide a family farmer with fair ability (say, the 40th percentile farmer on a hypothetical scale of efficiency) with an average annual family income level, varying according to weather and fortune, of approximately three times the poverty level for a family of four.  Price supports should be uniform nationwide for each commodity, to encourage production where the commodity is best suited to climate and topography.

Phase out price supports, as a farm gets larger than the defined family farm level.  Reduce price supports by 50 percent of the amount (above $100,000) of nonfarm income or other self-subsidy in the support year.

Expand price support eligibility when we impose an agricultural embargo against a foreign country that contracts international demand for American products.  The expansion of eligibility should be proportional to the embargo’s effect on the market.

Aggressively oppose evasion of price support limits.  Promise to preserve any “acreage base” allotments of price supports if future programs use them.  Eliminate federal government commodity purchases solely designed to support markets.

Limit our supply management goal to matching domestically marketed production (the amount of crops grown and sold for U.S. consumption) to estimated domestic demand.  Encourage those who do not wish to be in a supported but regulated system, to produce commodities for export, and allow export-bound livestock producers to purchase feed at (lower) international prices.

Continue to maintain agricultural reserves to meet food crises here and elsewhere in the world.

Insist on sound environmental practices, and factor their cost into price support calculations.

Labor.  Continue to pursue full employment monetary and fiscal policies, in exchange for voluntary restraint of wage demands by higher-paid workers.

Aggressively hold labor unions to a “squeaky-clean” standard of democracy and integrity as affects their members.

Streamline National Labor Relations Board procedures to provide for quick, certain, and inexpensive determination of labor disputes and enforcement of labor laws.

Continue to enforce work safety standards and establish minimum federal standards of compensation for injured workers.

Extend general labor protections to farm workers, and factor the cost into farm price supports.

Tie the minimum wage rate to the poverty level a family of four persons.  When overall unemployment is under four percent, allow youth or trainee minimum wage of 125 percent of poverty level for a single individual, phase that minimum upward as unemployment varies between 4 and 5 percent, and index that also.  Maintain minimum wage levels for foreign guest workers at least 10 percent above applicable minimum or prevailing wage levels.

Support the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain.  This includes the right of a majority of the workers in a democratic, non-corrupt bargaining unit to decide they want, and to negotiate with the employer for, an all-union work force within their bargaining unit.

Limit automatic COLA or other automatic wage indexing for the highest paid workers.

Education.  Recognize general K-12 education as the responsibility of state government, and federalize the costs of other programs where appropriate (such as welfare) in order to free up state funds for education.  Continue federal assistance for special needs programs, and maintain an active federal involvement in preschool and post-secondary education.  Make Head Start available to all eligible children and families.  Permit qualified students to obtain post-secondary education with reasonable self-help efforts but without taking on decades of debt payments.

Consumer issues.  Recognize first and foremost that consumers are also income earners and create a healthy employment environment for them.

Uphold consumer disclosure laws such as truth in lending.  Strengthen the law to require accurate disclosures of such things as the true APR for credit card advances.

End federal preemption of state and local regulation of interest rates and other lending practices.

Establish due process procedures for customers of large businesses.

Discourage home equity lending that impairs homes that otherwise are legally protected from debt collection procedures.

Repeal changes in the bankruptcy laws that strengthen the position of professional lenders against individual borrowers.

Business.  In general, rather than define an array of governmental programs for business, determine what is needed of them in accommodations to other interests (discussed elsewhere in these materials), and then leave them alone to do what they do best.

Allow businesses to defer taxable income to save for future operating and “rainy day” needs.  Increase the option to “expense” (immediately deduct) purchases of business capital goods.  Assure that tax collections come from the first proceeds of any business liquidation.

Relax the antitrust laws to permit small business owners to collectively negotiate with or cooperatively buy from or sell to, larger business entities.

Give priority to streamlining bureaucratic processes that affect small business.

Limit corporate tax deductions for management salary and benefits to ten times the national median income, with a moderately higher allowance for performance-based bonuses.

Limit corporate tax deductions for general image advertising and eliminate them for advertising that, reasonably interpreted, is intended to affect public opinion on policy issues.

Bankruptcy and Debtor Relief.  Limit the creditor benefits in the 2005 bankruptcy amendments to unsophisticated or involuntary (for example, personal injury) creditors.  Use previous debt discharge standards for other creditors.  Repeal the 2005 additional regulation of debtor’s attorneys. 

Allow homeowners in crisis to gradually write down their mortgage debt to the value of the home, by giving them a proportional bonus credit for each payment they make.  If a home is worth $300,000 but has total mortgages of $400,000, and the homeowner makes a $300 payment, give the homeowner an additional $100 credit against the mortgage account.  Review the valuations periodically, perhaps every five years, and adjust the bonus credit accordingly.

III.  SOCIAL ISSUES

Race.  Set a national goal of a completely colorblind society by the year 2058.

Aggressively combat race discrimination as a barrier to persons who, historically, have been the victims of discrimination.  Institute affirmative action in recruitment of applicants and candidates (e.g. for jobs and college openings).  Base any preferences to “disadvantaged” persons on actual disadvantages, such as poverty, family breakup, or lack of educational achievement in one’s family background, and not on race.

Maintain voting rights legislation until it is clear beyond doubt that racial and similar barriers to voting and fair representation will not recur.

Insist on self-help efforts of individuals and communities to overcome the effects of slavery and other histories of oppression.

Require persons claiming a “suspect classification” to demonstrate that they are members of an historically oppressed group.

Religion.  Reaffirm our commitment to religious tolerance and diversity.  Have faith that religious and spiritual growth is best nurtured when it is not entangled with government.  Beware of those who would use the powers of government to “bind up heavy loads, hard to carry, to lay on other men's shoulders, while they themselves will not lift a finger to budge them.”  Challenge ourselves, individually, to define our own spiritual and moral beliefs, and act upon them.  Acknowledge that, although our government promotes no particular creed, our collective moral sense is the wellspring of our political life.  In politics, weigh and evaluate a moral principle based on a test of universality: would the moral principle urged on us protect our life, freedom, and dignity if we were randomly placed anywhere else in the human race?

Gender.  Work to achieve the best practical implementation of the principle that equality of rights under the law should not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.  Expect that there will be continuing gender differences in preferences and social roles, but assure that this is based on individual choice and not on legal or social coercion.

Support and enforce the right of all persons, regardless of affectional preference, to participate in the social and economic life of our country.  However, recognize that there is a huge difference between respecting the privacy of the bedroom and institutionalizing anything or everything that may occur there, and leave the institutional question almost completely to state legislatures and not to the courts.

Abortion.  Try to avoid writing the topic of abortion into the text of the Constitution, and minimize its presence in federal statutes.  Beyond protecting the constititutional due process “life” interest of an expectant mother, and the same “liberty” interest for victims of rape and incest, the 50 state legislatures and their voting constituents provide the best arena for weighing the competing values involved in the abortion question.

Recognize that life does not “begin” but is part of a continuous cycle.  In considering legislation at any level, consider when the fetus or embryo has developed enough to take on some or all of the legal criteria for personhood.  This is likely to occur well after conception or implantation but long before it meets the archaic definition of “viability.”

Support continued access to voluntary contraception in federal programs for adults, and for minors with parental consent.

Crime and Social Order.  Continue to recognize the security of one’s person and property as a fundamental right and justified expectation in the United States, for everyone.

Require the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms industries to reimburse society (individuals and government) for all costs resulting from the misuse of their products.  In the case of tobacco, consider all use to be misuse.

Continue uncompromising opposition to the production, importation, and use of illegal drugs, giving first priority to ending consumption of illegal drugs.

Continuously improve law enforcement techniques and methods.

Respect the rights of individuals as recognized in cases such as Miranda v. Arizona and Mapp v. Ohio, and the rights of accused persons as provided in the Constitution and in court decisions implementing those rights.

Require prisoners to meet individually tailored educational and other rehabilitation goals in order to proceed from more restrictive to less restrictive forms of confinement.  Remember that the overwhelming majority of prisoners will one day be released and therefore a prison regime of pure brutality will prove costly in the long term.

Eliminate proprietary rights, such as copyrights, for pornographers.  Pass the following amendment:  “Nothing in the First Amendment to this Constitution protects commercial activity that exploits the human sexual response.”