New contract with America - 11 things to do to save America

New contract with America - 11 things to do to save America

Rush Limbaugh was right in his Wall Street Journal Opinion article, "We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security. We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism. And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation--the U.S. Constitution. Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people. " 

I think he should add we are strong environmentalist.

As conservatives we must have candidates to run on these issues and here are answers to how and why they should be accomplished.

1.  Aggressively pursue the war on terrorism.

The agenda for such a movement should include the following activities and efforts.

• investigate radical mosques
• support anti-Islamofascist freedom fighters
• thwart attempts to impose Sharia law
• form an anti-Islamofascist publishing network
• create an anti-Islamofascist portal on the Internet
• establish an anti-Islamofascist speakers bureau
• wage an ideological assault on Islamofascism
• support efforts to evangelize Muslims in Europe and the Middle East
• create a global anti-Islamofascist coalition
• reframe the illegal immigration issue as one of national security
• end dependence on foreign oil that's funding the Islamofascists.
 
• We need a serious dialogue -- not knee-jerk hysteria -- about the 1st Amendment, what it protects and what it should not protect. Here are a few baseline principles to consider:

We should be allowed to close down websites that recruit suicide bombers and provide instructions to indiscriminately kill civilians by suicide or other means, or advocate killing people from the West or the destruction of Western civilization;

• We should propose a Geneva-like convention for fighting terrorism that makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous. A subset of this convention should define the international rules of engagement on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims; and
• We need an expeditious review of current domestic law to see what changes can be made within the protections of the 1st Amendment to ensure that free speech protection claims are not used to protect the advocacy of terrorism, violent conduct or the killing of innocents.The most effective form of counterterrorism fights not the terrorists but the ideas that motivate them.
• This strategy involves two main steps. First, defeat the Islamist movement just as the fascist and communist movements were defeated - on every level and in every way, making use of every institution, public and private. This task falls mainly on non-Muslims, Muslim communities being generally incapable or unwilling to purge their own.
  
  In contrast, only Muslims can undertake the second step, the formulation and spread of an Islam that is modern, moderate, democratic, liberal, good-neighborly, humane, and respectful of women. Here, non-Muslims can help by distancing themselves from Islamists and supporting moderate Muslims.

2.  Nominate and confirm judges that will follow the constitution.

The Supreme Court is one of the most important issues of our day.  The courts over the last 60 years have been participating in Judaical activism, making law not found in the Constitution.  The most recent example is the takings law, eating away at the fifth amendment.

Most of all of the great culture war issues of our day can be directly traced to bad decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Consider this: duly elected legislative branches of government are not ultimately responsible for abortion on demand, legalizing same sex marriage, protecting pornography as free speech, removing faith symbols from the public square, and undermining private property rights. Instead, these moral and social ills are the responsibility of unelected, unaccountable members of the federal judiciary who refuse to recognize their limited and restrained role as jurists and insist upon acting as social change agents.

3.  Close the borders and enforce the immigration laws.

The lack of assimilation by immigrants to the United States - both legal and illegal - is culminating in an American identity crisis and poses a serious problem for the future of our country.

This movement toward anti-assimilation stands in stark contrast to the very concept of our nation. E pluribus unum, "out of many, one," is the motto of the United States. This motto, this dedication, was originally selected by the Great Seal Committee in 1776. It acknowledged that the thirteen separately governed British Colonies had banded together to form one inclusive nation, a country that stood independent from the British Crown, the United States.

This problem is best illustrated by two examples; the aggressive Reconquista movement in the Southwestern US and the developing and sometimes violent row with the growing Islamic community in the United States.

The militant Reconquista movement embraces the divisiveness of multiculturalism more fervently than Dr. Leo Buscaglia used to embrace his patients. Their motto, "Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada" - which translated means "For the Race, everything, for those outside the Race, nothing" - encapsulates the dangers multiculturalism poses to a nation's identity.

Violence on the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically over the past three years in what U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has called "an unprecedented surge." ICE has established intelligence and investigative operations along the border to combat the increased brutality.
    In a recent report, ICE said the border gangs, which collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in illicit profits, are becoming increasingly ruthless -- against their victims, rivals and federal, state and local police.
    Much of that violence has targeted U.S. Border Patrol agents, who have seen a spike in incidents as the agency continues its efforts to bring larger areas of the border under operational control. Violence directed at agents has included physical and vehicle assaults, and shooting incidents.
    Gunfire has become commonplace along the border, authorities said, particularly in the alien- and drug-smuggling corridors of southern Arizona. They said about 90 percent of the migrants headed north out of Mexico have hired a coyote to guide them into the United States. State and local law-enforcement officials on the border have said they are outgunned and outmanned by drug- and alien-smugglers armed with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, bazookas, improvised explosive devices, and state-of-the-art communications and tracking systems.
    The rising border violence also has been attributed by authorities to efforts by the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, to win control of drug- and alien-smuggling routes into the United States. The Border Patrol's field-intelligence center said MS-13 has aligned with drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia, and seeks unfettered access to smuggling corridors.
    The intelligence center said the MS-13 presence has increased competition between rival gangs that must vie for areas where they can ply their trade. The result, it said, has been an increase in violence as rival gangs struggle for domination.
    MS-13 members also reportedly have accepted contracts to assassinate Border Patrol agents to intimidate and frighten agents away from the border.

• Border control for national security with sufficient intensity and accuracy to ensure that no terrorist and no drug dealer can cross the border."The first piece is that the major part of the fence is to be built between Calexico, California and Douglas, Arizona and that portion, that's 392 miles, that's the area through which most of the people come who have died of dehydration or sunstroke in the desert sun in the summer months.
• Make English the language of government while respecting the language background of all Americans and encouraging younger Americans to learn foreign languages.
• Make passing a test on American history in English and giving up the right to vote in any other country key requirements of U.S. citizenship.
• Since becoming a citizen requires knowing English, have all election ballots in English.
• To insure that only legal citizens vote, require every voter to have a photo ID card.
• Cut off all federal aid to any city or county that declares itself a "sanctuary" and refuses to enforce legal immigration requirements.
• Enforce the laws requiring employers to know that their employees are legal.
• Outsource to Visa, Mastercard or American Express (or a consortium of the three) to have an accurate, real-time computerized system for identifying those participating in a worker visa program and for instantly notifying any employer that the person they are about to hire is illegal.
• Create a systematic worker visa program with a biometric card run by the computer card companies to avoid fraud, a background check to eliminate any criminals and a signed contract to obey the law and pay taxes or else be removed from the U.S. within 48 hours for failure to comply
•  

  What can we do to make English the language of government and civic discourse?  Three action items top the list:

   
• End multilingualism in federal documents.  The requirement that federal documents be printed in different languages was created by executive order. Repeal this executive order.
• Make English the language of U.S. citizenship. Return to English language ballots, to a focus on English language literacy as a prerequisite of citizenship, and to an insistence that U.S. dual citizens vote only in the United States and give up voting in their birth nations. These were principles widely understood and accepted for most of American history, and they enabled us to absorb millions of immigrants and assimilate them and their children into an American civilization.
• Replace bilingual education with intensive English instruction. We should have a National Program for Intensive English Instruction that would provide highly intensive English and U.S. history and civics training for new immigrants so that they can have the practical skills to become successful U.S. citizens.                                                                                                                                        
• Ten Simple, Direct Steps to a Legal American Immigration System
•  
• Keep the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli commitment and control the border.  In The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins, May 22, 2007), President Ronald Reagan wrote that he was going to sign the Simpson-Mazzoli bill because "it's high time we regained control of our borders and [this] bill will do this." For national security reasons, it is vital we regain control of our border. Congress should pass a narrowly written emergency border bill to finish the necessary fence in less than a year and to have complete border control within two years.
• Announce an immediate shift of Internal Revenue Service resources to audit companies that are deliberately hiring people illegally. We do not have to focus on deporting those who want to work. We need to focus on the Americans who are getting richer by deliberately breaking our laws, hiring people illegally and failing to pay taxes. These people are cheating their own country. We should focus on fining and making it economically impractical for Americans to deliberately encourage law breaking. Economic penalties for knowingly hiring someone who is illegal should rise dramatically with each employer (including subcontractors) conviction, making it simply too expensive to cheat. This will eliminate the magnet of illegal jobs, will begin to diminish the flow of new illegal workers and will lead some illegal workers to return home voluntarily.
• Outsource to American Express, Visa or MasterCard the job of building a real-time verification system so that honest companies can confirm the legal status of all workers and identify people with forged papers before they hire them as fast as your automatic teller machine identifies you and gives you money in a matter of seconds. We must distinguish between companies that deliberately hire illegal workers and companies that hire people who they believe are legal. It is the government's duty to help this second group of companies by providing a real-time verification system for identifying the legal status of all workers so that it is possible to screen out those with illegal documents. The government should outsource the creation of this system so that it is easy, fast and accurate.
• Focus deportation efforts on criminals. Those who claim that opponents of the Bush-Kennedy-McCain bill support mass deportations are simply wrong. We want a system in which honest work is available for law-abiding workers and in which the natural attrition of declining job availability will reduce illegal behavior. However, there is one group that should be deported immediately, and the law should be modified to make it easy to do so. Criminals have no future in America. In every major city and increasingly in small cities and even small towns, gangs have become a problem and people feel a rising sense of insecurity. There are at least 30,000 illegal gang members now in the United States. The system should focus on deporting criminals so that people who are here illegally understand that breaking the law will get them deported immediately.
• Cut off all federal aid to any city, county or state that refuses to investigate if a criminal is here illegally. These so-called "sanctuary cities" are in effect abetting the violation of American law and increasing the risk to honest, law-abiding Americans. They should be cut off from all federal aid if they refuse to help enforce federal law.
• Offer intensive education in English to anyone who wants to learn English, and make English the official language of government.  This will begin to reassert the commitment to assimilation and Americanization that has historically been part of legal immigration to America.
• Ensure that becoming an American citizen requires passing a test on American history in English and giving up the right to vote in any other country.
• Within the context of these proven changes, establish an economically driven temporary worker program like the Krieble Foundation proposals. Any temporary worker would have to pass a background check to ensure they are not a criminal, would have to give biometric information (retinal scan and thumbprint) for a special card that would be outsourced to American Express, MasterCard or Visa so it would be harder to defraud and counterfeit, and would have to sign a contract committing them to pay taxes and obey the law or be removed from the United States within two weeks without recourse to long court processes.
• Create a special open-ended worker visa for high value workers who bring specialized education, entrepreneurial talent or capital that will grow the American economy and make America a more prosperous country.
• Workers who came here illegally but have a good work relationship and community ties (including family), should have first opportunity to get the new temporary worker visas, but instead of paying penalties, they should be required to go home and get the visa at home. This way they are beginning their new career in America by obeying the law. It is amazing that those who advocate a large fine and the new Z visa, which would be administered in a hopelessly expedited manner, suggest that going home to get a new legal admission to the U.S. is somehow too complicated. If people can break the law by entering the county illegally, they should be able to obey the law and enter America legally.

4.  Repeal Article XVI of the Constitution and implement the Fair Tax.

The FairTax proposal is a comprehensive plan to replace federal income
and payroll taxes, including personal, gift, estate, capital gains,
alternative minimum, Social Security/Medicare, self-employment,
and corporate taxes.  The FairTax proposal integrates such features
as a progressive national retail sales tax, dollar-for-dollar revenue
replacement, and a rebate to ensure that no American pays such
federal taxes up to the poverty level.  Included in the FairTax plan
is the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.  The FairTax
allows Americans to keep 100 percent of their paychecks (minus any
state income taxes), ends corporate taxes and compliance costs
hidden in the retail cost of goods and services, and fully funds the
federal government while fulfilling the promise of Social Security
and Medicare.

An integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a rebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar revenue neutrality, and the repeal of the 16th Amendment.

The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend, not on what we earn. It does not raise any more or less revenue; it is designed to be revenue neutral. So it is also
cost neutral – the final cost for goods and services changes little
under the FairTax. The FairTax is a fair, efficient, transparent,
and intelligent solution to the frustration and inequity of our
current tax system.

The FairTax eliminates the intrusive, inefficient IRS; The FairTax abolishes individual income-tax forms; The FairTax imposes no tax on small businesses or farms,The FairTax untaxes education;  The FairTax replaces all federal income and payroll taxes with a revenue neutral, 23% national sales tax.
5. The FairTax is fair because it:
  a. Has No exceptions, No exclusions = No loopholes
  b. Enables workers and retirees to keep 100% of their paychecks
  c. Encourages greater savings, investment, job creation, productivity, and economic growth
  d. Increases taxpayer compliance while reducing compliance costs

The FairTax removes the cost of corporate taxes and compliance costs from the cost
of U.S. exports, putting U.S. exports on a level playing field with
foreign competitors. Lower prices sharply increase demand for
U.S. exports, thereby increasing job creation in U.S. manufacturing
sectors.

• Abolishes the IRS
• Closes all loopholes and brings fairness to taxation
• Ensures Social Security and Medicare funding
• Brings transparency and accountability to tax policy
• Allows American products to compete fairly
• Reimburses the tax on purchases of basic necessities
• Enables retirees to keep their entire pension
• Enables workers to keep their entire paycheck
  

  The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue replacement, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment. This nonpartisan legislation (HR 25/S 1025) abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax -- administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities. The IRS is disbanded and defunded. The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend on new goods or services, not on what we earn. The FairTax is a fair, efficient, transparent, and intelligent solution to the frustration and inequity of our current tax system.
  
  No tax on used goods.  The amount you pay to fund the government is totally visible.    
  With the FairTax you are only taxed once on any good or service. If you choose to buy used goods − used car, used home, used appliances − you do not pay the FairTax.  If, as a business owner or farmer, you buy something for strictly business purposes (not for personal consumption), you pay no consumption tax.  The FairTax is charged just as state sales taxes are today.  When you decide what to buy and how much to spend, you see exactly how much you are contributing to the government with each purchase. 

  Retail prices no longer hide corporate taxes or their compliance costs, which drive up costs for those who can least afford to pay.   
  Did you know that income taxes and the cost of complying with them currently make up 20 percent or more of all retail prices?  It’s true.  According to Dr. Dale Jorgenson of Harvard University, hidden income taxes are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices for everything you buy.  If competition does not allow prices to rise, corporations lower labor costs, again hurting those who can least afford to lose their jobs.  Finally, if prices are as high as competition allows and labor costs are as low as practical, profits/dividends to shareholders are driven down, thereby hurting retirement savings for moms-and-pops and pension funds invested in Corporate America.  With the FairTax, the sham of corporate taxation ends, competition drives prices down, more people in America have jobs, and retirement/pension funds see improved performance.

  The income tax exports our jobs, rather than our products.  The FairTax brings jobs home.
  Most importantly, the FairTax does not burden U.S. exports the way the current income tax system does.  The FairTax removes the cost of corporate taxes and compliance costs from the cost of U.S. exports, putting U.S. exports on a level playing field with foreign competitors.  Lower prices sharply increase demand for U.S. exports, thereby increasing job creation in U.S. manufacturing sectors.  At home, imports are subject to the same FairTax rate as domestically produced goods.  Not only does the FairTax put U.S. products sold here on the same tax footing as foreign imports, but the dramatic lowering of compliance costs in comparison to other countries’ value-added taxes also gives U.S. products a definitive pricing advantage which foreign tax systems cannot match. 

  5.   Vote for real cuts in spending, eliminate corporate welfare, be  fiscally conservative.    
• 6.  Reform Social Security.Spending restraint and changes in the way future benefits are calculated will also be necessary to truly “fix” Social Security. 
  

• The president’s fiscal year 2008 budget envisions providing resources for voluntary accounts funded by a portion of a worker’s Social Security payroll taxes. Starting in 2012, participants could contribute up to 4 percent of their Social Security-taxable earnings to an individually owned account. In exchange for the opportunity to invest their own money, participants would likely receive less in guaranteed benefits.

 

Personal retirement accounts are seen by many as a way to secure the financial futures of millions of Americans without requiring higher taxes or huge benefit cuts.

Personal Social Security Savings Accounts. Workers should be allowed the freedom to choose to shift some of the taxes they already pay into their own personal savings and investment accounts that over time would take over responsibility for paying some of their future Social Security benefits. This reform would produce an historic breakthrough in the personal prosperity of working people.  An average income family where the husband and wife both work and earn just average incomes would accumulate over their entire careers close to a million dollars in real terms after inflation.  Even lower income families would accumulate several hundred thousand dollars by retirement.  These funds would be personally and directly owned by each family, and can be left to the family at death, greatly strengthening the family structure. Families would continue to be backed up by a Federal guarantee that all workers with personal accounts would receive at least the benefits promised under the current Social Security system.  Because market investment returns are so much higher than what Social Security promises let alone what it can pay, workers with personal accounts would actually receive far higher benefits.  As the accounts take over responsibility for paying future promised benefits, all long term Social Security deficits under the current framework would be eliminated, and Social Security will achieve permanent, full solvency. We should also eliminate the taxation of Social Security benefits, which is an unnecessary, counterproductive burden on our nation’s senior citizens.

Reforming the present Social Security system to create fully funded independently held personal accounts for every American,

A business that isn't ready to adopt a 401(k) or other retirement plan would simply offer its employees the chance to contribute to an IRA every payday by direct deposit, in much the same way millions of us have our paychecks deposited directly into our bank accounts. It's easier to save small amounts on a regular basis. And once payroll deposits begin, they continue automatically and accumulate tax-free,

The first is that the plan would result in little or no cost to employers who would be exempt from costly rules and regulations that govern 401(k)s and other retirement plans. Businesses would be offered a tax credit in the first two years to encourage them to offer such plans and help them adjust to any administrative costs.

The second is that it would principally benefit moderate- to lower-income workers -- the 58 percent of the workforce that does not participate in any retirement plan, people who tend to have less education, do not save on a regular basis and usually work for small businesses.

7.  Reform Medicare and Medicaid.

Move to an electronic health record for every person. That health record will start with prenatal care and end with analytics after you pass away.

The National Institutes of Health ought to create an institute of epidemiology based on the kind of electronic health records that exist for over 30 million people who have electronic health records already.

[Electronic health records offer] a major goldmine of information on how to treat people – what works best, what doesn’t work quite as well, what medicine you should use and what protocols really have the right outcome.

It could be organized into a totally HIPAA-compliant, anonymous database that gives us the chance to have an epidemiology kind of study. So it’d be breathtaking [and] ongoing.

The Institute of Medicine reports that it currently takes up to 17 years for a best practice to reach the average doctor. What you want to have in the future is an online 24/7, full-forward, on-demand, continuous medical learning system available to the doctor, the patient and their family.

So that when you have a problem that’s particularly difficult, you’re getting this week’s breakthrough and you’re keeping the pace of intelligence up to the highest possible level.

So, think of intelligence as moving knowledge from the laboratory to taking care of you in the shortest time as possible and think of intelligence in the sense that we efficiently and accurately track, for your entire lifetime, your health status so that you have the optimum ability to have the right prevention, the right testing and the right self-management.

This means you have a real-line payment system. But [this idea is similar to] the Georgia project with diabetes where we’re now prepaying doctors for every diabetic in order to get them educated well enough that we don’t pay for the emergency room.

We really have to [begin viewing] every hospital as a component of a health system.

Because if hospitals move from acute care to early detection and early prevention and continue the care of chronic illnesses – and if we gradually continue to defeat cancer and cancer becomes a chronic illness rather than a terminal event – you’re going to have the entire process of managing chronic behaviors.

And you want [this process as] deinstitutionalized as possible. The more you can do that on an ambulatory basis, [by] training the patients to take care of themselves, the less you have to do.
And again, we [came to this conclusion by studying] diabetes, because it is technically impossible for nurses and doctors to manage diabetics.

The most they can do is monitor them and educate them, reward them and encourage them. But it is impossible for a doctor to say, “I will take care of your diabetes.” In the end, you’re going to have to learn how to take care of yourself to be well.

You can apply that also to a whole range of things. You can apply it to asthma. People who are trained well [to manage their asthma] almost never go to emergency rooms, and people who are not trained well go to emergency rooms a lot.

You can apply it to rheumatoid arthritis: where people with the right training and the right medication lead full lives and are very active; and people without the right training and the right medication could end up in the wheelchair within three to five years.

Allow a standard income and payroll tax deduction of $15,000 to every family ($7,500 for an individual with no dependents) for health insurance. Since the average family policy costs about $11,500, this would benefit most people who receive insurance through work (everyone would get the same standard deduction, regardless of the cost of their insurance).

But the real winners would be the uninsured and those who choose insurance policies with lower premiums but higher deductibles. The uninsured would now be able to use the money they would have paid Uncle Sam to put toward purchasing health insurance. For someone in the 30 percent tax bracket, that would be $4,500 they could use to pay for health premiums. The working poor, who pay little or no income tax, would still receive a break on their payroll taxes, though not enough to pay for most current insurance policies.

Potentially, even those who have employer-provided policies might have an incentive to push for lower-cost plans, since they will be taxed on the value of the premiums. If they're relatively healthy, they might prefer higher deductibles for routine care, or they might want only catastrophic insurance to pay for some unexpected illness, injury or hospital stay.

We need to put the consumer at the center of the health-care system, just as we do in every other market. And the surest way to do this is by creating a national market to purchase health insurance.

Current state and federal laws permit consumers to buy only those health-insurance plans that have been approved in their own state, meaning it is illegal for a citizen of one state to buy insurance in another. These government barriers to free trade stifle competition, producing disastrous results: The absence of robust competition artificially inflates the cost of insurance, preventing millions of citizens from purchasing affordable coverage, and thus shifting the burden of care to those who do pay for insurance and into government programs.

To reverse this, government must allow competition to flourish. More competition among insurers in a national market will encourage more creative products, better services and lower prices — just as it always does wherever competition thrives — and every American will be able to find affordable coverage. The Health Choice Act, which was introduced by Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, will go a long way toward creating a rational, working market in health care.

A vital part of this rational market is the availability of information. Information on performance, cost, and quality allows consumers to make informed decisions, but health care is perhaps the only market in which consumers have virtually no access to this information.

Americans have a right to know this information, and the data that can best inform us is Medicare-claims history. Medicare has detailed information on nearly every doctor and hospital in the country, which can be analyzed to identify the most efficient hospitals, best doctors and most effective treatments. The federal government also has information on disciplinary action and lawsuits filed against doctors, collected for the National Practitioner Data Bank. Inexplicably and inexcusably, the federal government will not release this data, despite growing demand from many health plans, employers, consumers, and researchers. This information will save lives and save money now. Americans have a right to know this information, and taxpayers must continue to demand its release.

Romney’s plan harnessed free-market principles to create an “insurance exchange” that provided citizens with a one stop-shop to purchase health insurance. According to Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier, one of the architects of the plan, the exchange works like a “stock or commodity exchange” and serves as a “clearinghouse” (but never a “product regulator”) from which individuals can choose affordable healthcare plans.

When Governor Romney decided to tackle the double-digit annual increases in health insurance costs, the average uninsured resident in Massachusetts had to pay $335 a month for private health insurance, which did not include coverage for prescription drugs and featured a $5,000 deductible. Moreover, the state was spending over $1.3 billion a year on "free care" for the uninsured.

Governor Romney actually got the Democrat-controlled legislature to enact a plan that addressed these problems. He took the time to understand what makes private health insurance markets work and transformed the market in his state from one that was government-controlled to one that allows competition to flourish.

Governor Romney's health care plan featured a number of reforms. First, his plan deregulated the overburdened Massachusetts insurance market to reduce the cost of private insurance, while giving consumers more choice from a broader range of plans. Second, the plan addressed the problems caused by the fact that many people could not get healthcare through their employers and could not afford it on the individual market. Third, he redirected the millions of dollars that were being spent on free emergency room care and used it instead to help those who truly were not able to afford private health insurance.

Finally, Governor Romney recognized that competition is the key to the success of any market – so doing what no one had ever done before, he created a new market where consumers can go to pick the health care plan that suits them best. Called the "Connector," this marketplace is not a new regulatory agency or insurance purchasing pool. It is a place that gives people access to more choices, better information, and lower costs in selecting a private health insurance plan. The Connector also provides a way for individuals to purchase insurance with the same pre-tax advantage given to those buying insurance through their employers. Even better, the Connector gives people the chance to buy private insurance independent of their jobs, so that they don't have to worry about losing their coverage when they change employers.

But Governor Romney's reforms did not stop at reducing the cost of insurance today. He also tackled a number of reforms that will help reduce the rise in health care costs over the long-term. His plan included medical transparency provisions that allow consumers to compare the quality of hospitals and providers, while tracking and recording the costs associated with the care they provide. The reforms also instituted measures to encourage the use of electronic health records, which will reduce medical errors and lower costs.

What's been the result of all these reforms? Although the reforms were signed into law just over a year ago, the changes are dramatic. The same uninsured individual whose choice was formerly limited to a policy with a $335 a month insurance premium with no drug benefits and a $5,000 deductible now can purchase quality private insurance, which includes coverage for prescription drugs, office and emergency room visits, and a $2,000 deductible, for $175 per month. Between July 1, 2006 and May 1, 2007, nearly 125,000 previously uninsured residents of Massachusetts got health insurance coverage.

Taxpayer-funded "free care" is falling at double-digit rates, because the Romney reforms no longer allow people to let others pay for their health care if they can afford their own health insurance. Those who previously couldn't afford health insurance now have the help they need to get access to affordable, quality, portable private coverage. And, as he promised, Governor Romney did all this without raising taxes and without a government take-over of health care.

The plan requires all Massachusetts citizens to purchase health insurance from this marketplace of private insurers or from another source. Employers must provide employees with the option to purchase healthcare plans with pre-tax dollars. Those who can afford to but elect not to purchase health insurance face wage withholdings and the loss of tax exemptions. Those unable to afford insurance premiums receive government assistance to purchase insurance; the assistance is made possible thanks to Romney’s plan to redirect funds earmarked for hospitals to cover uninsured patients to help individuals purchase their own insurance.

Universal deductibility of health insurance premiums by employers, employees, the unemployed, individuals and business owners would connect the consumer to health care costs. When people spend their own money, they spend it more wisely. Most people will purchase health plans they can afford, instead of expecting more benefits from their employer or the government.

Laws should be changed to allow health insurance entrepreneurs greater freedom to experiment more with the types of coverage they offer, such as offering coverages like bare bones, full, or any combination in between. Changing the tax treatment of individually purchased insurance policies could help limit the problem of the temporarily uninsured. For the few who still couldn’t afford insurance, medical charities should be encouraged to step in and help. The American health care industry suffers from government regulations that limit entry through occupational licensure, and interferes with drug adoption and many other aspects of health care in addition to the health insurance market. Increasing reliance on markets in insurance will help to bring health care costs under control.

8.  Reform the education system with vouchers.

Take a look at our public-education system. Nearly a quarter-century ago, the Reagan administration warned America that our failure in education was becoming a major threat to our national security. The report A Nation at Risk noted that “[o]ur once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” It went on to soberly conclude that “what was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur — others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” Unfortunately, since that report was issued in 1983, public education has continued to deteriorate.

School administrators, government officials, and teachers’ unions profess to want real change. Their calls ring hollow, considering that student performance has not improved in a generation. After all, public education is a monopoly run by city, county, and state governments, with a growing federal role in oversight. Bureaucratic intransigence and vested union interests consistently block transformational solutions that will bring about real change.

The status quo is failing our students, and to truly see real change, we need to enact real change. The simplest and surest way to transform education is to give students and parents the freedom to choose where they will go to school. This means eliminating restrictive zoning laws that force kids into schools simply because they live nearby. This means introducing free-market forces into education, encouraging schools to compete for students, much like businesses compete for customers. This means that schools that do not perform will either improve or close their doors — which is as it should be. There is no middle ground.

Vouchers, which will bring choice and competition to education, so that the dollars can follow the kids.  That way parents can send their kids to the school of their choice public or private.

Studies show that charter schools routinely out perform traditional public schools.  Charters are providing a fast growing option to under privileged children.  This irks teachers unions, school boards and administrators with a vested interest in a public school monopoly that is failing to educate millions of kids.

When you take a look at the battle that ensues when a failing public school is analyzed and a proposal to close that school is made, you get a sense of how the bureaucracy circles the wagons and defense its vested interest.  One of the virtues of charter schools is that some of them are allowed to fail.  They fail when their customers, the parents, don't think they are doing a good job.  Charter schools are suppose to improve or fail.  The continued failure of so many government schools, in perpetuity, in spite of the fact that they are failing - because they have a captive audience -because the parent and the kids aren't free to go to a different school, is the best argument I can think of for the virtue of choice and competition funded by vouchers.

The success of school choice, when properly administered, is indisputable — proven by hoards of academic studies and thousands of personal experiences. School choice attracts better teachers, encourages creative curriculum, and improves student achievement.  By applying market principles to education, you empower students and parents at the expense of bureaucratic government control. This combination, of limited government and a vibrant market, never fails to deliver better outcomes — even in public education.

Parents were heavily levied with property taxes, the vast portion of which was then given to the local school system to pay teachers and administrators salaries, along with all the other costs of operation.

The Department of Education says on its website the TIF "supports efforts to develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools" through student academic achievement and regular in-class evaluations of the teachers.

Early in his first term, President Bush embraced the “No Child Left Behind” legislation that has since been found wanting for its one-size-fits-all approach to education, its over-emphasis on testing, and its punishment of “under-performing” schools. The result has been to expose most schools as inadequate and to encourage every form of administrative cheating necessary for a school to meet the standards set by the law.

The idea was to force some improvement on a system everyone already knew was failing students. Laws, however, do not educate students. Teachers are expected to do that and it is no surprise that the National Education Association—a union—hated the idea of improvement. Indeed, from the 1960s to the present day, the NEA has done its best to undermine, if not destroy, a system of education that served previous generations of Americans quite well.

Competition and incentives for the better schools would raise the standards for all schools.Audit your teacher’s classrooms for activity, progress, and efficiency…more can be learned if the teachers simply focused on getting the material across.

Hire leaders as principles, not school administrators…you can have as many curriculum advisors as you want, but districts rarely make good leadership decisions…you don’t need a link here, wait a day, an example will show up in the paper.

Hire business managers as Superintendents

Focus on the education of children…the problems within your districts will then become self-evident.

The crux of the problem of education in America. The teachers. Thanks to the unions, it is virtually impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. Merit has nothing to do with teaching. Longevity is the name of the game. And the multitudinous layers of "administrators", the top among whom receive salaries that rival and surpass those employed in private industry, are part of problem too.

America needs another Revolution, an Education Revolution. Parents must rally, school by school, to wrest back control over their local schools from the teacher’s unions. They must find a way to hire people who are actually competent in their subject areas. States must demand real standards for graduation from their colleges of education.

9. Continue to reform the welfare system to really help.  Move away from having the law benefit single parent families, single mothers.  To two parent families mother and father.  Encourage marriage before having babies.

 

10. Reform the drug laws.  By legalizing, taxing and regulating we will take revenue out of the hands of terrorist.

For years the government fought the war on drugs.  What is the war on drugs?  An instrument to take away our freedoms.  The police forces around the country started taking money at airports if it was over ten thousand dollars.  The ticket agent that turned you in go a cut, the cops got a cut. 

The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs. The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs badly enough, they'll stop doing what they're doing. But instead, the trade goes underground, which means that the state's only contact with it is through law enforcement, i.e. busting those involved, whether producers, distributors or users. But so vast is the demand for drugs in the United States, the European Union and the Far East that nobody has anything approaching the ability to police the trade.

Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once traffickers get around the business risks -- getting busted or being shot by competitors -- they stand to make vast profits.

In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its inauguration. It's obvious why -- telling people that their kids can do drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box. But that was before 9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western security throughout the world.

The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

While the United States constitutes 5% of the world's population, this “land of the free” holds 25% of the world's prisoners – a third to a half are there for drug offenses .  The drug war produces the largest industry in this country the penal system.

There are 500,000 people in prison that would become tax payers if drugs were legal.  The savings in court cost , incarceration, would be 2.5 billion dollars a year!  1.8 million people are arrested each year for possision.

According to the April 17, 2001 Wall Street Journal, the administration is bucking for an 8.3 percent hike in federal funds for the Bureau of Prisons. Such an increase would bring the allocation for federal pens to $4.66 billion, making it the biggest pig in the Justice Department sty."

Federal prison sentences for possessing or selling crack have far exceeded those for powder cocaine for two decades. House crime subcommittee Chairman Robert Scott, D-Va., a longtime critic of such sentencing policies, plans to hold hearings on crack sentences this year. In the Senate, Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama is drawing bipartisan support for his proposal to ease crack sentences.

"I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy that crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," Sessions says. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."

The mandatory federal sentencing guidelines passed by Congress in 1986 require a judge to impose the same sentence for possession of 5 grams of crack as for 500 grams of powder cocaine: five years in prison.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror.". . .

Plant some poppy, in Afganistan,  the pods are ready in six months. It's their living. The War on Drugs is, I think, the single   most insane policy that the United States has ever pursued.

We burn the only crop these people have, and tell them we're trying to win their hearts and minds. We should instead be paying them to grow it, as we do pay the Turks now to grow this stuff. Painkillers have to come from opiate.   Opiate has to be produced. If you legalize it, refine it, purify it, tax it, then the revenue does not go to narco-crime families, it goes to the coffers of those who grow it and those who consume it.

The War on Drugs. What a waste of resources and of people.

De-criminalize drug use. There's no any advantage in keeping drugs illegal. That only serves to make them seem romantic and dangerous to young people and other dunderheads. It also keeps them far more expensive than they would otherwise be. Why should I care if someone uses cocaine or heroin? So long as the junk is cheap enough so that users don't have to resort to criminal activity to finance their habit, how is it my business if other people choose to mess up their brains?

How is it my business what people smoke, snort or inject into themselves?  However, if they cause mischief while stoned out of their skulls, I'd treat them as criminals, not victims.

11.  Eliminate earmarks.  These appropriations are a version of what used to be known as "pork" and a way for a House Member to "bring home the bacon" to his or her constituents. Now days these programs are called "earmarks." They are discretionary appropriations directed at a specific program or a specific group of people.

Earmarks can be found almost everywhere in the federal budget and for almost any project that someone or some interest group wants the Federal Government to pay for. Earmark appropriations may range from several thousand to more than a billion dollars per item. On Sept. 20 2005  there was a vote in the Senate to take money out of the transportation bill, earmarked to Alaska, to help with the Katrina Hurricane and it was voted down 82 to 15.

Comments

[Addiction]

Here's a website you may find useful. http://www.addicted.com is a site for friends, families, and those who suffer from various addictions.