I don’t know where I got some of these ideas, but I thought I’d express them and see what some of you might think of them.
BTL (“Bernie-Tulsi-Liz”), my meme for the three leading progressives in the Democratic Party, are touting important issues like Medicare for All, free university tuition and other programs that many of us want. But nothing in life is free. If we are going to start new governmental programs, we’re going to have to raise taxes or cut other programs. But which ones would we cut?
How about military programs? Suppose the air force is going to buy 25 new jet fighters and pay $20 billion. Do we really need 25 new F-35A jets this year? Couldn’t we push it back three years and not spend $20 billion? Or maybe not even buy them at all?
That doesn’t sound too crazy. But suppose we wanted to cut down on the number of federal prisons. There were 102 in 2014. How about cutting down the number to 90? But then what do we do with the prisoners? Well, one thing we might try is putting fewer people into prison. Does putting people in prison sound like such a good idea?
Why do we put people into prison? I took a criminal law class when I went to Harvard Law School, and there I learned that the purpose of prisons are (1) to punish the perpetrator, and (2) to keep the general population safe from the perpetrator, and (3) to prevent the perpetrator from continuing to do criminal acts. Fine. But isn’t there are better way to achieve those ends without the high cost of prisons?
One of the obvious ways of achieving these ends would be to free the prisoners into the outer world, but require them to wear foot cuffs so that they could hardly move. Such a punishment would make it clear that they were being punished (we could force them to wear signs like “I’m A Bad Person” if it weren’t obvious.) The population would be safe from them and they couldn’t commit more crimes while they were being hog-tied. And bingo! We shut down 12 unnecessary prisons, at a saving of $31,000 per inmate per year (if we figure 6000 inmates in those prisons, then we’ve saved $186 million). We could take care of a lot of hospital patients with those savings.
But wait – we could improve on the crazy idea. Instead of foot cuffing prisoners and letting them go, instead we could shackle them to homeless people. We’d be employing the homeless as guards, so they’d have salaries and wouldn’t be dependent on welfare. And since we’d only be paying the homeless a minimum wage, I’ll bet we’d save a few bucks on homeless shelter programs. Meanwhile, the homeless would feel that they were contributing to society by watching the prisoners..
And I’ll bet we could get some political mileage out of this idea, too. We’d tell all the Republicans that we’d figured out way of rewarding them. We’d shut down the prisons in cities that had strong Republican votes – as a reward for voting Republican. Maybe that would encourage Republicans to stay home.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that these are crazy ideas. But certainly no crazier than some I’ve spotted recently. For instance, Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” really isn’t “for all.” If you read the legislative print, you’ll discover that it isn’t for all Americans, but instead it’s for all Americans only if they are resident in the U.S. If you’re an American who resides in Mexico, you can’t get Medicare. There’s no real reason for that. Certainly, if you paid for a Mexican doctor, you could send a copy of your bill and the doctor’s analysis to Medicare for a reimbursement. In fact, if you were born in the U.S. and paid all your life into Social Security, you’d be eligible
to run for President and get Social Security – but even though you’d continue to be taxed by the U.S. you wouldn’t get Medicare. Meanwhile, immigrants who lived in the U.S. could get coverage.
Isn’t that a crazy idea? What’s the purpose? It costs less for a Mexican doctor than a U.S. doctor, too.
I guess I’m not the only one with crazy ideas.
(I’m writing this article in the hopes that Trump reads it. If he does maybe he’ll start shouting, “Bernie wants to give Medicare for All to immigrants but not to native born Americans. This isn’t for all Americans. He just wants immigrants to come to the U.S.!” Maybe Trump will get Bernie to change the text).