The Very BEST Way To FIX The USA

[Tessera]

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with the CNBC news channel,
offered one of the best solutions to the national debt:

     
      "I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just
       pass a law which says that anytime there is a deficit of more        
       than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible
       for re-election."
       
     
So with that idea in mind, here is what I consider to be the best solution
(thus far) to fixing what is fundamentally wrong with the USA:


PROPOSAL: The Congressional Reform Act of 2012              

       1.  No Tenure / No Pension for Congress.

       A Congressman/woman should collect a salary while in office
       and receive no pay when they're out of office.


       2.  Congress (past, present & future) participates
               in Social Security.

       All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the
       Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into
       the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the
       American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.


       3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan,  just as all
             Americans do.


      4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.
            Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.


      5. Congress loses their current health care system and  participates
            in the same health care system as the American people.


       6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the
             American people.


      7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void
             effective 12/1/12.

       The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.
       Congress made all of these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is
       an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators,
       so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

[beetle]

Sounds good to me. How do we get something like this in action?

[Cylnar]

Through mass insurrection. Nothing less will result in the powerful limiting their own power. But we can trust the vast majority of politicians to vote in their own best interests, if nothing else. Lose your perks, or lose your heads. It's really that simple.

[BloodyKidney]

Sorry guys it was the title that made me bite. I have to say this country is not broken not by a long shot. This country is still an infant/child going through its phases but its far ahead of the rest of the toddlers in this crib we call Earth. 236 this July is nowhere near a sign of adulthood for this country. This country has been plagued by corruption since its birth and no where as near as the corruption as the rest of the world. This country was so far off the scale of righteousness back in the 20th century. Now is nothing compared to what it used to be. We may be in a funk but its nothing compared to the many depressions or the PC way to call it recession. Those bits about congress to keep them in check are needed but its up to the people to put them in their place. Thanks to tech more and more are aware of these issues. We will continue to grow and we will continue to make mistakes but its only through those mistakes that we can learn to grow. The gov stopped the monopolies that plagued the early 20th century and now its up to the people to make sure that the gov doesn't get these incentives that they don't deserve. Buffet says threaten the gov then its up to the people to do it. We will grow, we will continue, there is nothing broken here in this country, and the US is the greatest single idea that humanity has ever conceived!

[Schu]

Bloody, I'll give you creds for some of your post, but you need to remember that what you call our government is not accurate, "we the people" of the USA are the government. We elect politicians to serve us, and to do what is best in our interests, not the other way around. The politicians seem to have forgotten that, due mostly to greed and corporate interests, the proposal that Tessera posted would help fix that, and put us back in control.

The USA is a Federation, not a Democratic society, we do not vote our politicians in to office for life, they have set terms to serve as our voices, and to do what the majority of voters dictate.

I have one thing to add to the proposal:
We need to abolish the "Collage Electoral System" and return to the popular vote. The Collage Electoral System is too easy to manipulate to put the wrong person into office, and it very seldom matches the popular vote (if ever).

[Cylnar]

Rah! Rah! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Number One! Number One! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Ooohrah!

Ah, the optimism of youth...

This country is very much broken. It may yet be fixable, but will require much work before it's presentable again. The entire mass of the actual movers and shakers of government (435 federal Representatives, 100 federal Senators, nine Supreme Court justices and one President, and to a lesser extent, their state-level counterparts) are, with a very few, very rare exceptions (perhaps one or two percent of the total at the federal level), partially or completely in the pockets of the super-rich billionaires and mega-corporations. They are no longer a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but a government of sellouts (I won't insult honest prostitutes by calling politicians whores), ignoring the people and for the plutocrats. The entire mechanism of government now exists to service their masters in the .01 percent.

The corporatization/plutocratization process started about 30 years ago under Ronald Reagan (the general lurch to the right started 40-plus years ago under Richard Nixon, and the military-industrial complex was ramping up 60 years ago, as Dwight Eisenhower warned us, but the ball really got rolling under Reagan) and things have been getting steadily worse ever since. Nearly all the jobs created during that time have been low-paying, often part-time and benefit-free service and retail jobs; the better jobs have been going overseas, where they are actually pretty shitty jobs due to the lack of workers' rights they have over there (a condition which has been creeping back into this country due to the deproliferation of labor unions).

And this country has never been "righteous" unless you're talking about the "good old days" of religious domination that are, thankfully and finally, beginning their circling of the drain. Not for one minute has the United States ever lived up to its potential as a free nation or a classless society (though some times have been better, and some worse, than others). Starting from our inception as a "democracy" where only land-owning white males over 21 could vote, women were treated as property and millions of slaves languished in chains as actual property, through the Gilded Age of trust-holding robber barons, the days of Jim Crow, the countless little wars fought since WWII for corporate benefit and our current situation, this nation has always been deeply flawed.

But it didn't happen overnight; like a frog sitting in a pot of water that is slowly heated to a boil, the American people are too anesthetized by their electronic gadgets and reality TV to realize their predicament. The Gilded Age was ended by unionization and actual bloodshed because government was too ineffectual to do anything. The Great Depression was only mitigated by an activist President and willing Congress (though FDR had to make some bad deals to make that happen); it took a bloody war and the postwar recovery to end it. If you think we can fix our current predicament (and it IS a predicament) without pain, you are woefully mistaken.

[BloodyKidney]

Rah! Rah! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Number One! Number One! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Ooohrah!

:laugh:

[Cylnar]

Rah! Rah! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Number One! Number One! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Ooohrah!

:laugh:

A bit on the snarky side, I know. Glad you have a good sense of humor about it. Being unemployed for 4 1/2 months in this broken 1% economy will do that to you.

[Schu]

Rah! Rah! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Number One! Number One! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Ooohrah!

:laugh:

A bit on the snarky side, I know. Glad you have a good sense of humor about it. Being unemployed for 4 1/2 months in this broken 1% economy will do that to you.

LOL, try being unemployed for 3 years.

I'm going fucking stir crazy. aaaaaaaahhhhhhh  :laugh:

[Ratcatcher]

#1- Shoot lawyers
#2- Shoot polititians

Lots of problems solved right there. 

[Tessera]

[Schu]

A Senator with a soul, imagine that.

[perez007usa]

Let's just hope, that there are many more like him around.

[Ratcatcher]

That's... refreshing.
Although the pessimistic in me says he wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Senator was "unfortunately" ran over by a bus...

[perez007usa]

Only the good people die (young and old).

[tymothymichel]

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with the CNBC news channel,
offered one of the best solutions to the national debt:

     
      "I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just
       pass a law which says that anytime there is a deficit of more        
       than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible
       for re-election."
       
     
So with that idea in mind, here is what I consider to be the best solution
(thus far) to fixing what is fundamentally wrong with the USA:


PROPOSAL: The Congressional Reform Act of 2012              

       1.  No Tenure / No Pension for Congress.

       A Congressman/woman should collect a salary while in office
       and receive no pay when they're out of office.


       2.  Congress (past, present & future) participates
               in Social Security.

       All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the
       Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into
       the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the
       American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.


       3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan,  just as all
             Americans do.


      4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.
            Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.


      5. Congress loses their current health care system and  participates
            in the same health care system as the American people.


       6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the
             American people.


      7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void
             effective 12/1/12.

       The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.
       Congress made all of these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is
       an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators,
       so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

Not part of the act, but just my 2 cents worth of amendments, (Ventrue love adding amendments)
add to that.....
No politician may accept ANY campaign money from any lobby/lobbyist or work for the same for 20 years after they leave politics, to include banks.

Any politician caught in an ethics violation will forfeit all assets and personal property (like convicted drug dealers)

All foreign wars should cease, all foreign bases close and all the troops return home to defend our borders. Shut down the empire. Save alot of money.

Return the control of money to congress, end the fed.

Close down the IRS. Flat tax, fair tax, or sales tax. Make it fair and easy to understand. No more loopholes or off shore hidden accounts for fat cats and corps.

Hard money based on gold/silver, stop the printing of fiat currancy.

Break up the big monopolies, especially big oil, big pharma, and monsanto.

Boot the U.N. outta here, we don't need 'em.

End foreign aid. We don't need to buy dictators if we keep out of everyone else's business, and if you want a business overseas you take your chances,
bet it's safer to build your business in Des Moines.

That's a start, but the elites will never let it happen. Unless they are forced to.

[Cylnar]

Close down the IRS. Flat tax, fair tax, or sales tax. Make it fair and easy to understand. No more loopholes or off shore hidden accounts for fat cats and corps.

The rich LOVE the idea of a "flat" tax. Why? Because, realistically, you will never get rid of all their overseas tax havens and all their tax dodges. And if they should get caught doing something of questionable legality to hide from the taxman, well, they'll do what they do now - hire an army of talented lawyers to fend off the charges. They would much rather pay a nominal tax rate of 20%, which I've heard quoted as the level needed to sustain our economy and/or pay down our deficit if other spending (such as military spending) were curtailed, and then hide from that, than hide from a nominal top rate of 35% (40% I think if the Bush tax cuts expire, or is it 30/35%?)

The 99% (most of us, anyway) should HATE the idea of a flat tax. Why? Flat taxes, such as sales taxes, are inherently regressive. The poorer you are, the more of your income you MUST spend just to stay afloat, on necessities such as food, rent/house payments, etc. Thus, the less money you have left over from your paycheck to save, invest or pass on to your children as inheritance. Millions of people, such as myself, live basically paycheck to paycheck, due to the high cost of being poor.

I invite everyone reading this to compare their income last year to the amount of federal taxes they paid (after refunds). For most people, a 20% flat tax would represent a significant increase in their tax burden. I believe I ended up paying about 3.3%. That doesn't count state taxes and sales tax paid at a rate of nearly 9% (I miss living in the great sales-tax-free state of Oregon) on much of my spending (and many people have to pay local taxes as well, like property taxes). For people who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit, they may actually have a negative tax rate (like GE, Exxon-Mobil and other fat-cat corporations which get billions in federal subsidies). Having to pay 20% of my income to Uncle Sam would put me on the street.

Elsewhere on this board, I discussed the idea of what I called a progressive flat tax, where people would pay an increasing percentage of their income based on how much money they made. Zero percent on the first $10,000, 1% on the second $10,000 and so on, up to 99% on the one hundredth $10,000, so someone making a salary of $25,000 annually would pay only $200 (less than 1%) in taxes and someone making a salary of one million dollars annually would pay $495,000 in taxes (just under 50%). Please keep in mind that during the postwar period of the late 1940s through the early 1960s, arguably the time of America's greatest prosperity (at least for white people) the top nominal tax rate was 91%(!) though few people earned enough money to be taxed that much, and tax shelters brought the actual rate paid by America's richest one percent down to about 50% on average. Still much more than they actually pay now. These numbers are subject to revision, as inflation decreases the value of the dollar, or if competent economists decided the increments should be $20,000 or something. Speaking of which...

Hard money based on gold/silver, stop the printing of fiat currancy.

No competent economist thinks we can actually return to the gold standard, or even a bimetallic one. Our economy is vastly larger than the amount of precious metals we have stockpiled. Our current dollar is based on a notion...the strength of our nation and our economy, itself. But the value of precious metals is mostly notional, anyway. You can't build anything with them, after all; their "value" is mostly to be worn by women (and some men) as jewelry, or has been throughout history. We can use gold as a conductor in electronics, but the days of silicon-based computing are numbered. We're already pioneering the use of circuit wiring one atom in width...and you can't get any finer than that, except by using smaller atoms, or supercooling the system to make the atoms smaller, which is energy-intensive to shed hundreds of degrees of ambient heat. So that's probably a non-starter.

Boot the U.N. outta here, we don't need 'em.

Are you one of those people who think the big, bad UN is going to usurp and destroy U.S. sovereignty, when it routinely accepts the self-declared authority of groups of armed thugs and fails to deliver basic humanitarian aid, rather than using U.N. forces to squash them like bugs? That the UN is part of some Zionist plot to impose one-world government and turn the planet over to Satan? Or just that it's...kinda useless? Which I could understand. Especially if we returned to isolationism. But some sort of international mediating body is necessary; the UN has prevented or mitigated many wars.

if you want a business overseas you take your chances, bet it's safer to build your business in Des Moines.

Eliminating the current tax credit for offshoring (yes, there really is one, and it is significant) would be a big and ridiculously common-sense step toward this state of affairs. Then inflict a big tax penalty on offshoring...make it more profitable for business to pay Americans a decent wage with decent benefits, than to pay Chinese workers a bowl of rice per day.

[tymothymichel]

The u.n. has a big agenda on killing off a bunch of folks to make the rest of us more biddable...hence why I want em gone...bill gates too. gold and silver...we have too much currancy in circulation..yes we dont have enough gold to cover hence itll hurt but... look toward mises and rothbard, austrian economics works...flat tax is better than what we have now, I favor the fair tax as it taxes the folks that spend the most on new stuff...us poor ppl dont get taxed on stuff that was taxed before...under the current tax code the elites dont get taxed bugger all..remove the loop holes and at least they get taxed somewhere...and under the fair tax you  get a rebate on the important stuff...read  fairtax.com. If you look at the global plan, they hate gold which makes one go hmmmmm. check out the dailybell.com. you can't print all you want if you are limited by how much hard money you have...why do you think they got rid of it? really limits wars...which was why fdr want to do away with it...this is the roman empire all over again, save rome just put less gold in the soldius...and claudius paid for it.