Five Papers
During the first three months of FDR’s presidency, he made so many sweeping changes, so quickly, that the period has been memorialized in capitalization as ‘The Hundred Days’. Books are written, lectures given, arguments had about this brief [but fecund] legislative period 70 years ago focused policy and action on the people of the country, the ‘Forgotten Men’.
That time period looked like this one- there is political will for change, and a leader who’s [stated] mission is to challenge the status quo and wage a class war for redistribution along more equitable lines.
My contention has always been that there are 5 pieces of paper, which if signed into law with a framework around them, could better the world the same ways creating the minimum wage, establishing the FDIC, generating public works programs, and removing the rampant speculation from commercial banking [Glass-Steigal]. In no particular order…
- 1- Take the cap off of social security
- 2- Shift agricultural subsidies
- 3- Enact a windfall profits tax on oil and gas
- 4- Moratorium on home foreclosure
- 5- Increase protectionist duties
1- Right now, a person making $105,000 a year pays the same amount into Social Security as someone who makes $15,000,000 a year. If you were to remove that cap, and replace is with a regressive tax rate from $105k upwards, you could create a Social Security surplus with ease.
2- Our agricultural subsidy policy goes something like this “hey farmer, we’re going to pay you to grow corn. No matter what the market price is, we’re going to pay you money on top of it— that action is going to continue to push down prices ad infinitum [which will slowly bankrupt you, because we’re going to set a lower target price every year.] Also, it’ll function as a subsidy for High Fructose Corn Syrup, which has been definitively linked to Type2 Diabetes and obesity.” Instead, I think we should establish a subsidy for ‘organic’ farmers, for farmers growing multiple simultaneous crops [active polyculture], and an additional subsidy for crops which get to the consumer within 200 miles of the farm [those would probably go to distributors, and not farmers]
3- The primary reason that gas is so expensive is because speculators have taken the energy market over. Every month for the last 7, the secretary general of OPEC has said that production is more than enough to meet demand, and that market prices are being driven skyward by greedy speculators on the mercantile exchange. Also, while your gas tank sits empty and your local stores prices for freight increase to the point that you can no longer afford the goods, Exxon Mobile has made the largest corporate profits every quarter for several years running. Let’s enact a Windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industries- we can use the money to fund alternative energy development, and it’ll scare those speculators out of the game, reducing the gas at the pump back down to market levels.
4- The financial crisis we’re in has been jump started by the bursting of a housing bubble, and subsequent foreclosure rate increases- I’ve written about this previously—and now we’re in the beginnings of a serious recession. Let’s put a moratorium on home foreclosure- it’ll heal the banks balance sheets and give them an income stream [which will be good for us taxpayers, considering we’re about to buy 700billion in stock in those companies]. It’ll keep people in their houses and off of social welfare programs, and it’ll instill confidence in the country that the govt is going to step in an *help people* in that ways that it can.
5- We continue to see that good jobs get shipped overseas, and industries in America become fewer each year. Let’s enact some protectionist duties to help keep our industry where it is- having too great a distance between the market and the means of production has never made good business sense. With only slight increases to our national duty rates on frozen food, textiles, and machine goods, etc. we could be competitive with the rest of the world again. The product is only cheap because the labor is cheap, so if we use our duty rates to make it so that at the same price as its being manufactured in Pakistan and shipped to Los Angeles, it could be manufactured in South Carolina, then business will adapt to that model.
All of these kinds of solution are based on historical precedent and current need. The country is faced with an enormous number of challenges, and our next political leader will have a widespread mandate to ‘provide the change we need’, and we need to make sure that these are the kinds of changes that occur.
Reed Mollins
reedmollins@gmail.com
