[Common Dreams]: Some Bold Proposals - Perfect for Either Party - Could create Genuine Change
Ted Halstead of the New America Foundation, writing in the LA Times, offers these:
Universal coverage for universal responsibility.
Tax consumption, not work.
End all farm subsidies.
Family-friendly workplaces.
A race to energy independence.
Building a global middle class.
A presidential election, he says, offers candidates to our highest office a rare chance to step back and think big. By championing bold ideas, they could reframe the national debate, rally undecided voters and, if elected, create a mandate for genuine change.
It is not too late for Bush or Kerry to seize this opportunity.
What I wonder is: why only cut farm subsidies? What about oil and gas, and the nuclear industry? And since, as Robert Kennedy has wisely observed, pollution is a grand societal subsidy to those who dump their non-product in the commons:
In a true free-market system you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, and without enriching your community. But polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. You show me pollution and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you somebody who's cheating in the free market; somebody who's devised a way, usually using political clout, to force the public to pay the costs of production.
Where's the political leadership courageous enough to take on pollution subsidies in general?
11:16:11 AM 
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