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Old 09-24-2003, 09:27 AM   #8 (permalink)
Macheath
Junkie
 
Location: Sydney, Australia
Economy: Reduce subsidies for uncompetitive industries. Reinvigorate Anti-trust legislation whilst investing in stimulating competition and infrastructure development, particularly for high tech industries. Balance the damn budget. Move away from aggressive monetarism and focus on job creation.

National Defense: Fund the military industrial complex on the basis of need, not on the basis of profits. Guarantee benefits and post military career prospects for serving personnel; a military is only as good as its soldiers. Focus on high concept and high tech. Oppose the privatization of peace-keeping. Improve human intelligence capabilities.

Social Security: Raise retirement age slightly based on increasing advances in life expectancy and health. Restore solvency by raising rates of return. Firstly by advance-funding Social Security through allocating money for a Social Security Trust Fund; funds accumulated in advance will earn compound interest over time. Secondly by investing a portion of the assets accumulated through advance funding in equities, since equity investments are likely to yield higher average rates of return over time than the Treasury bonds in which Social Security's assets currently are fully invested.

Foreign Policy: Asia - Promote a balance of power in Asia that would help Japan, China and Russia contain North Korea. America must be highly influential but subtle and cannot be seen to be taking an aggressive front seat role in Asian affairs. Ensure that any Korean reunification would not precipitate an economic meltdown in Seoul. Middle East - Put the Iraqi Army to work rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq. Propose a clear exit strategy and a clear path towards self-governance. Reduce reliance on a compromising relationship with Saudi Arabia. Focus on interim plans for extended periods of coexistence between Israel and Palestine with eventual refinement of the terms rather than a single ambitious "all or nothing" push for peace. At the same time recognize that both Israel and Palestine will one day exist as contiguous states that will both need viable borders and sustainable internal infrastructure. Intransigence on either side is not acceptable in the long term.

Immigration: Investigate the domestic economies that are based on the labor of illegal immmigrants. Accept the need for carefully applied amnesty programs while creating incentives for alternative economies based on a legal labor force.

Education: Increase funding for public education. Reduce administrative costs of state departments by encouraging states to share their administrative infrastructure; either through a state-to-state based program of cooperation or relenting to some Federal Education Department control.

Domestic Issues: Comprehensive public health insurance system. Improve job search program for welfare recipients. Do not crush genuine job seekers under reams of punitive paperwork. Campaign finance reform. Do not allow the further introduction of non-auditable electronic voting technology.

Space Program: Investigate the failures of NASA's internal bureaucratic culture. Focus on the development of new launch vehicles and terraforming technologies. Aggressively apply newly aquired knowledge in non-space related fields such as agriculture or energy policy.
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