Steps toward economic sanity:

[Jackpine Radical]

End the war & bring home the troops and cut Defense by 60%. There is no good reason to be spending more than the rest of the world combined on defense.

Disband the DEA.


Eliminate the tax breaks for the rich.

Increase the estate tax on estates over 10 million.

Make any corporation doing business with the US government pay federal income tax.


Legalize & tax pot.

Decriminalize other drugs & start closing prisons.

Use treatment & alternative sentencing to cut the prison population in half. (2 million prisoners costing about 25k apiece per year behind bars)

No cuts would be necessary for social spending (health, education, social services, etc.)

[acmejack]

1. "No cuts would be necessary for social spending"

That is the entire point of this little exercise. You have great ideas, but the RW only cares about scrapping the new deal.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. The Right Wing is now shrinking so fast

they stand a good chance of disappearing up their own asshole.

To put it in Lakoff language, the "Strict father" paradigm just got blown to smithereens in the winds of two hurricanes, and people are ready for a "Nurturant Parent" type of government to shelter and comfort them.

Thanks for your comment, by the way. It pushed me into this line of Lakoff-inspired thought just now. I don't yet know if it's useful, but I think it's one worth exploring.

[acmejack]

3. Lakoff is really good

He has written several books other than "Don't Think of an Elephant", "Moral Politics" is another. I was getting the impression that morality & politics are mutually exclusive.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. Yep.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. I think the RW has gotten away with maintaining

their heartless philosophy by a continual game of blaming the victim, and they certainly tried to continue that through the Katrina mess. At some point, however, people are going to understand that hundreds f thousands of their peers lost everything through no particular fault of their own, that in many cases they had no good choices. When people come to this realization, they are likely to see themselves as vulnerable too, and they may quite suddenly shift into the liberal "We're all in this together" mode, with a corresponding rejection of right-wing me-firstism.

There was a parallel in the Great Depression. In the 20's there was a lot of selfishness and greed. The hard times hit an awful lot of people (not the super-rich, of course), and the people responded by bonding, banding together, and finding ways to take care of each other, just as so many did in NO. Great good may yet come from these great tragedies.