Ten good things I don't think the Democrats should do.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

:-Introduce a federal National Health service, providing free-at-point-of-use health care to everyone, paid for out of general taxation.

:-Slash the Pentagon's budget, especially its spending on nuclear weapons.

:-Raise the higher levels of income & inheritance tax dramatically.

:-Multiply the amount spent on aid to the third world by 10.

:-Repeal the 2nd amendment, and introduce roughly UK-level gun control.

:-Threaten Israel with an immediate and total cessation of all aid and support unless it offers the Palestinians a just peace settlement, including a withdrawal to the Green Line.

:-Weight voting in the senate proportional to state size, reapportion congressional seats likewise, assign representation to Washington DC and have the president elected by popular vote rather than state-by-state.

:-Investigate, and probably prosecute or extradite, Bush and Cheney.

:-Remove all elections for officials (DAs, judges etc) from the justice system and replace them with appointments by a commission. People who make the law should be answerable to the electorate; people who enforce it should not be. Likewise, electoral district boundaries should be determined by an independent body of civil servants, not by partisan politicians, and elections should not be run by people who are also running the campaign of one of the candidates.

:-Legalise cannabis.


I think that each of these measures would significantly benefit America. However, I think that each of them would cost the Democrats more political capital than they're worth, and some are simply infeasible or suicidal (they'd never get the votes for constitutional amendments, for example), and so I think they ought to adopt a bad policy on each of these issues, for political advantage.

But if they were possible, I think they'd all be good things.


What good things do you think the Democrats shouldn't do?

[T Wolf]

1. Great list! Unfortunately, you are right. The corporatists who run both

parties will never allow any one of these things to happen.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. The electorate will never allow them to happen.

It would be lovely if everything wrong with America were the fault of a few powerful corporations, but actually the problem is that most Americans would disapprove of and vote against all of these, which is a much more difficult thing to fix.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. And some more:

:-Make legal immigration to America much easier.

:-Give those people currently resident in America illegally a chance to apply for legal status without prejudice, accept most of them, and actively deport the remainder.

:-Introduce federal legislation to protect the teaching of evolution in schools (actually, this one might conceivably be politically viable).

:-Cut America's tarrif barriers. Protecting American labour at the expense of American employers may well be a good thing; protecting American labour at the expense of still poorer labourers in other countries is unjustifiable (ditto)