After the crash

After the election, there's a few things that need to be done.

Tax the rich more. Even Warren Buffet says he's undertaxed. People who can afford to be taxed and have benefited these last few decades should be a bit more. They're benefiting from the bailout more than the average person so there's no reason they can't pay a little more.

Increase the gas tax. Now that gas prices have come down, we should push the prices back up so we don't go back to our energy consuming ways. We could afford $4 gas and now it's back to $2.50. Throw another 25 cents of taxes on it and use that to pay for alternatives. Better to pay Joe the solar panel guy or Joe the windmill repair guy than pay Putin for oil. Keep the money at home where it belongs. This would create jobs.

Lend money to the car companies for a cost. The cost is a significant increase in the CAFE standards and elimination of many of the loopholes for trucks. Kill the Hummer loophole that has people like real estate agents buying hummers because they can write it off because it exceeds the weight limit put forth by the IRS meant to be used by construction companies.

Regulate the market and the insurance industry. If you're selling something that looks like insurance, you should have reserves for it instead of spending the money on bonuses. (Think AIG's.) Don't allow private unregulated exchanges. This seems to lead companies (ENRON) into manipulation. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Keep things open.

Don't bail out mortgages. If you try to waste money to help people to stay in their homes, you will artificially inflate the value of the homes. Let them deflate to the point where they're affordable again. Sure, some people will lose value, but many more will be able to afford homes again. The sooner this imbalance is corrected, the sooner we can move past this.

Bring the troops home. That's a big waste of money. I'd rather spend the billions of dollars becoming energy independent than securing foreign sources of oil and losing lives.

Need to have some stronger independent oversight in congress. The Republicans and Democrats have made sure that no ethics investigations can go forward. This is a real shame. I have no doubt that many member of congress in both parties are corrupt. We need sunshine here too.

Stop subsidizing ethanol. It drives up the price of food and costs as much in fuel to produce as it generates.

Stop restricting imports on sugar. So much of our food is laced with corn syrup because the price of sugar is artificially high. Let the price of sugar come down so we can all be healthier. If that means imports, so be it. We can't let some sugar companies benefit from the high price of sugar while consumers pay.

Tackle the Social Security time bomb. Right now, the more you pay in, the more you get. This should be a safety net. We should reduce the gap between the minimum and maxinum Social Security payments for the health of the system. This should be a safety net, not something you can live on your yacht with. If you want a yacht with Social Security, save for it.

Health care is a mess, but I don't know what can be done with that. Between insurers, providers, consumers, and drug companies, there's so much opposition to anything. The only thing that can be done is to allow the government negociate drug prices downward. If insurance companies can do it, so should the largest insurance company (US Govt) be allowed to do it. If the drug companies spent as much on creating drugs as they do on marketing, perhaps they've had some blockbusters lined up to keep themselves more profitable. Not our fault their drugs are losing patent protection.