I am a registered Dem who voted that way this election.
Hugs and kisses to my dear friend Alfie - who continues to soar to new obnoxious heights
with personal attacks for all - sounds like an Alfie Christmas wish.
I put those two bits together because, well, Alfie kept saying YOU had "lost" this election. You'd think he'd know who's on "his" team, if he's this great leader people swoon over -- no?
Some of the good I think Congress can do would be:
1 - Making college educations more affordable. Private schools are $40K+ a year and rising. While some states have terrific public universities, just not enough. Too much of an advantage for the rich and the poor (they get assistance). The middle class gets wiped out. I like the idea of tax deductible college tuition. It truly is an invst in the future
They could start by undoing some of the stupid things that were snuck into Reagan's tax "reform", like stop calling scholarships "income" (or have they fixed that yet?). I'd also recommend not counting work-study jobs as income, since they're provided as part of an educational aid package.
One thing that would help a lot would be ditching 90% of federal meddling in the colleges. One of my professors when I was at OSU spent a day's lecture on the costs of higher education; one of his big points was that when he had begun as a professor, there was a president of the school, and a vice president. That number had risen to one president with a special assistant and fourteen vice presidents with assistants... and secretaries, and office space. At $80,000-plus each, plus $60,000+ per assistant nd $40,000+ per secretary, just the personnel cost increase was over $2 million. I forget his office space figures, but they weren't small. He graphed that growth against tuition increases -- then added expense after expense in personnel and office space just for complying with federal requirements, and it came to roughly half the tuition increases over time.
2 - I support increasing the minimum wage - that appears like it will happen
And as always, people will lose jobs. Oregon's minimum wage has been climbing incrementally for some time, and every time an increase kicks in, people lose jobs -- this isn't theory; I know some of those people, and their bosses made it quite plain: "We can't afford to pay this many of you at the new minimum, so some of you have to go."
If we as a society think we have to have a wage scale, there should be a scale -- a beginning wage, before the minimum, for starters. When I manned the Libertarian booth at the county fair a few years back, I talked to quite a few high school kids who were bitter about minimum wage increases, because they regularly lost their jobs. I also heard from business owners who would have gladly paid a kid $5/hr to sweep the sidewalk and street out front, or haul the recycling out, etc. -- but since they couldn't afford to pay the minimum wage, those things didn't get done. A barber I used to go to (his shop has since closed; he had a stroke) observed that the more the minimum wage goes up, the dirtier the town got. My dad agreed; it's a little town he grew up in, and he remembers when several businesses went together to hire a kid who would chase the smallest piece of trash that appeared -- the job was to sit and watch the main street, and keep it clean. Now, no one can afford to pay someone for that, so the streets are filthy.
I know the theory behind a minimum wage, that the increased purchasing power at the bottom rises faster than the resultant inflation, but it also totally removes purchasing power from some, and eliminates some jobs from getting done at all. And it has another, more sinister result: many, many senior citizens in this country are on fixed incomes. When that wage goes up, prices go up -- that's an inevitable consequence. And when prices go up, the purchasing power of all those seniors falls... and too many are living on the edge now.
If they raise it the way a spokesperson for Pelosi said on the news tonight, jumping it right up to over $7, all those negative effects will hit hard. If they somehow are convinced it MUST be that high, at least they should follow Oregon's route, and do it incrementally -- no more than 50 cents a year, for however many years it takes to reach, oh, $7.50.
3 - I think there needs to be a bipartisan commission on the the Iraq situation where outsiders (elder statesmen, retired military +) plus key member of Congress - discuss HOW TO WIN. If the discussion is on HOW TO GET OUT, everyone loses.
Creative -- and very true. I'd suggest putting the War College to playing versions of it, and feeding their results to the commission as they play out scenarios, to give the civilians a feel for how liquid both situations and results always are. Personally, I'd exclude anyone without military service -- but not worry about rank. Sergeants have a view of war that officers rarely "get".
4 - I hope they can devise a plan to improve the health care system - costs are rising at alarming rates - something needs to be done there
The Cato Institute devised a very nice one that uses the tax code and a version of negative income tax. It avoids any new bureaucracy, which is a HUGE bonus.
I didn't expect to write that much; sorry for any eye strain.
