Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, the Libertarian Party candidates, say they are running on a platform of fiscal restraint, social freedom and limited involvement overseas.
The two former Republican governors from New Mexico and Massachusetts respectively also favor downsizing government and balancing the budget, but differ from standard GOP policies in that they support legalizing marijuana and abortion rights.
After that, they veer off into the ozone. Their party platform says they would:
-- Eliminate public schools in favor of private education or home schooling.
-- Abolish Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
-- Abolish the Internal Revenue Service and repeal the federal income tax, which would be replaced by some sort of regressive national sales tax or value added tax.
-- Repeal the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 and let corporations offer even lower wages.
-- Eliminate the EPA and virtually all environmental regulations, including those governing air pollution and global warming, and guarding against dangerous chemicals in drinking water.
--Eliminate the Department of Education along with government support for college students.
Johnson also believes that health care should be handled by the private sector, which would mean the elimination, for example, of veterans’ hospitals.
Johnson is a strong supporter of Citizens United and believes corporations should be able to spend unlimited funds to influence elections.
He describes himself as a social liberal, but as governor of New Mexico, he ended collective bargaining for state employees and cut off Medicaid funding for abortions deemed medically necessary.
Gary Johnson said in 2011 that he takes the "long-term view" of climate change. "In billions of years," he said, "the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future."
He has acknowledged that humans are making the world warmer in the near term, but he doesn't think the government should do much about it. He subsequently suggested he might be open to a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which outraged his libertarian base, so that he reversed course on the carbon tax.
It is hard to imagine a platform more favorable to the polluting plutocrats, such as the Koch brothers: no income taxes and no environmental regulations. They would be free to destroy the land, the air, and the water in pursuit of their second hundred-billion dollars.
It’s clear Johnson doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, either. He has been unable to answer simple foreign-policy questions about Syria and foreign leaders during television interviews. Johnson and Weld oppose “entangling alliances” with other countries or attempts to “act as policeman for the world,” which would mean, among other things, pulling back from NATO and other global alliances.
Johnson and Weld also support a balanced budget amendment that would forbid the government from incurring additional debt, a simplistic solution that sounds good to some, but would prevent use of an important counter-cyclical economic tool. Moreover, politicians would find a way around such a prohibition. He also would ban federal bailouts of states, and seek to eliminate the Federal Reserve, a libertarian pipe dream.
The Tax Foundation estimated that Johnson’s tax plan would lower federal revenue by $4.4 trillion to $5.9 trillion over 10 years using "static" scoring, which does not consider macroeconomic effects. It would cost between $2.6 trillion and $3.9 trillion using "dynamic" scoring so beloved by supply-siders who use it to pump up revenue projections from the tax cuts.
In contrast, Trump’s plan, according to the Tax Foundation would lower federal revenue collections by at least 10.9% and deliver the biggest benefits to the highest-income households. Without accounting for economic growth, the top 1% of households would see their after-tax income increase by at least 10.2%, while the bottom 80% of households would get less than a 2% boost. His tax plan would reduce federal taxes by between $4.4 trillion and $5.9 trillion over a decade. ???
Every year from 2006 to 2012, some two-thirds of U.S. corporations did not pay federal income tax, according to a Government Accountability Office study. In 2012 alone, 42.5 percent of businesses that the GAO defines as large did not pay federal taxes, including 19.5 percent of big corporations that posted a profit. Profitable U.S. corporations paid, on average, an effective federal income tax rate of 14 percent over the slightly shorter period from 2008 to 2012, the federal government watchdog found.
Yet Johnson wants to reduce the corporate income tax from 35 percent to zero.
A protest vote for Johnson/Weld is apparently attractive to some voters; they can demonstrate their moral purity at no cost…assuming they think a President Trump might not be very damaging.
They should learn from the 2000 vote. Ralph Nader, the Green party candidate, received nearly 100,000 votes in Florida, a state in which Bush beat Gore by only 537 votes.
It’s not hard to speculate how different our reaction to 9/11 and the decision to invade Iraq might have turned out much differently under a President Al Gore.
Protest votes can have unforeseen consequences.
(A version of this appeared in the Mankato (MN) Free Press.)