Republicans took the House. Its gone. Thats not good because Republicans favor nuclear proliferation. Gingrich and Romney have said that the START Treaty sucks. They favor missile defense and its going to make the world a more dangerous place. Its going to provoke Russia. We need to move toward a verifiable FISSBAN to ban the production of fissile material. Cut down collaboration with the NPT non-signatory states of Israel, India and Pakistan (the "world's most dangerous country" as Newsweek said) until they agree to disband their nuclear weapons.
But the truth is that the Democratic philosophy is bankrupt. It revolves around thinking of the whole country as one. Education, health care, unemployment. "We" are supposed to tackle these goals. But there is no "we." Everyone is different. Citizens vary from productive to unproductive. A productive citizen in one country has more in common with a similar citizen in another country than they do with loafers and dullards in their own. It does not matter if loafers don't have the standard of living they want. Let them work for it. Averaging hard working citizens and loafers together gives you statistics that mean nothing.
There is the old saying of no taxation without representation. It's true. But the reverse should also be true. No representation without taxation. We need to bring back the taxpaying requirements that existed in this country in the early 1800s. People who do not contribute a decent amount of wealth to the government treasury should not be directly influencing its decisions. I would say that $15k is the line. If your taxes are not equivalent to those of the average person who makes $15k per year then you really need to leave the direct decision-making up to others.
I wouldn't be able to vote under this proposal because I got fired and am going back to school in the spring. But I can wait to vote until I have a real job and am contributing to the economy. Let me also state a few caveats to this proposal, which is that all veterans should be able to vote because if you have bled for your country you have without a doubt contributed. Also if you own at least $50k of your house then that should be accepted also, since many states in the early 1800s allowed a person to meet either a taxpaying or property requirement. Investing in a house implies some lasting involvement in the community. You can read some other rationales from John Adams and James Madison in the previous link.
In the health care debate the leftists are always talking about how we need a single payer system. They say its necessary to cut costs. Not true. I am not one of these free market ideologues who really puts his faith in private corporations for health care. I agree that government intervention is required. But what kind? Just have the government set the fees for medical services. Push down the prices by fiat without socializing anything. To stop spending 17% of GDP on health care just pass a law saying in effect that we are only going to spend 12%. The medical industry will whine and howl but it will get over it.
People say our system is unfair because of catastrophic accidents. They say its only fair that people who have worked hard for their money have to give it up because some manual laborer got hit by a car. Why not make the guy who hit the laborer pay for it, if its his fault? And even if nobody is really at fault, why is it anyone else's responsibility to pay for what they have absolutely nothing to do with?
Social Security needs to be phased out. Its time to stop forcing the middle class to foot the bill both for generous retirements of unskilled laborers who did not earn enough to finance it and also for the retirements of the rich who were not taxed on their income above $100,000. Stop screwing the middle class to feed the pockets of both the poor and the rich. People should depend on themselves and on their children to help them retire securely. What happened to the responsibility of children to help support their elderly parents? I think China has some ideas here that we ought to take a look at.
Gay marriage is a ridiculous issue. Who has time for it? Nobody for most of the 20th century would have even conceived of this nonsense. I think whatever kind of sex people want to have behind closed doors is their own business. Nobody ought to care about who you boinked when recruiting you into the military either. But marriage is simply not about every sexual relationship you might have or even about emotionally meaningful relationships. There are certain gender roles that society has decided are norms that can only be maintained if marriage is between a man and a woman. And marriage is actually NOT most stable when every task is divided equally between partners. That fact is thought to contribute to the shorter average time to breakups of gay partners. We also know that children of gay partners are more likely to flout traditional gender roles and to experiment with gay sex. Finally, only heterosexual relationships can lead to procreation. "So what," say the liberals, "since we let old people get married who can't procreate either." But the difference is that old people can fit into a set of social norms that are oriented around having children, because they're of the opposite sex. More often it will still be the man who is involved in business or financial planning and the grandma who stays home and socializes or helps out with the grandkids. Plus when you see older people on the street you don't know whether they have kids or not from when they were younger, so it's not such an obvious message. And older people don't have a choice about having biological children. Everyone else does, no matter whether they identify as gay or not. Just ask Jim McGreevy.
The conclusion is that gay relationships should in no way be given special recognition by the government. Civil unions are almost as bad as gay marriage.
If you want a social issue to talk about then how about prostitution. Yes thats right, hos. Almost every Western country has legalized prostitution except for the United States and the uber-socialist states of Norway and Sweden. In fact its been legal in many European countries for centuries, unlike gay marriage which is basically a bizarre modern construction aside from some very isolated exceptions. I'm not for ANY kind of criminal restrictions on the behavior of consenting adults, whether they be gays, hos or anybody else. Government intervention in the bedroom is bad and I follow that idea consistently. Lets legalize prostitution.
I voted Democrat in Ohio at the national level, for Lee Fisher and Steve Driehaus, who have now both lost miserably, because I refuse to vote for the Republicans extremely dangerous nuclear weapons policy. What use is voting for how you want the world to be if soon there might not be a world at all? Of course, since nuclear weapons issues do not exist at the state and local level I joined my natural friends the Republicans there.
Despite my views on other issues, I refuse to take chances with the existence of humanity.