Fresh Air in the 4th?
The New Democrat who could even win Kansas’ 4th District to Congress
Governments must understand, then navigate, the tension between capital and labor, between individual rights and collective responsibilities, between justice and mercy. Oftentimes the solution going forward — rewarding individual merit and maintaining communal goodwill — is found in compromise, in taking good from both sides and finding a middle path.
I’m looking for The New Democrats, the rebirth of a party close to the people and willing to embrace the common sense of the common man (male and female) to reclaim the Middle of the political spectrum. I’m a Democrat because I’ve thought since my young adulthood — 50 years ago — that the collective has more responsibility to promote the general welfare than my Republican friends believe it to have. The commonwealth suffers when the common man is reduced to a laborer, to a necessary evil on the road to profit. Furthermore, generally, Democrats walk more easily in more shoes of others. They have more life experience with the population who live in the lower half of the median household income, enabling a deeper sympathy with others’ weaknesses. I’m an old Democrat who rarely votes for a candidate from that party because Democrats have neglected the common sense of the common folk in the middle of it all.
I know many current Republicans whose families once were solidly Democrat. Ron Estes can be beaten in a general election by a Democrat who holds to the below-numbered positions — because many registered Republicans (who cannot vote for a Democrat in Kansas’ closed primaries) will vote Democrat in a general election, if they can find a candidate with common sense.
1. Education
a. School choice
A capable and skilled citizenry is in the interest of the collective, the commonwealth. School choice is the people’s issue. Many of us can’t afford a better education provider than what public tax revenue will pay for; whereas, the wealthy have the discretionary income to send their children off to the better schools.
Competition nearly always improves products and services. A free market enhances quality, minimizes costs, and rewards the best. Every shopper knows the benefits of competition — name the product! Poorly performing teachers and schools who displease their customer base are replaced by models with new claims, approaches, and resources — until the people are satisfied that the school is serving the child well. Sometimes businesses are not able to sufficiently sell their product or service because the demand for that product or service is being better satisfied elsewhere/otherwise. C’est la vie.
What is all the fuss about vouchers? Who has not felt the pressure of a little competition and responded with better performance, sometimes beyond what you thought you had in you? Public school advocates, I know you. You’ll respond. You have lots of ideas of your own about how a school ought to be run — if you only had the freedom and funds to fix it. Let the games begin! Fill the landscape with schools. Let the consumer choose.
The word education comes from the Latin: e + ducere, meaning “to lead out.” Children led out well are those who know themselves and have gained knowledge and honed skills commensurate with their strengths. A lot of new educational models and approaches and distinctions are going to be needed to account for the great diversity — increasingly understood — among the students, our children. Only a spirited competition will risk investing in the new, the potentially better.
What about all of these expensive school campuses? How many schools could exist in the same building — and share cafeterias and gyms and playgrounds and science labs? Count the empty buildings in your downtown. Yes, a lot of old buildings are going to be fixed up — as new schools. Do you really think these great public school buildings are going to lie empty? A voucher-fueled competition would lead to smaller class size, more teachers, a need for more classrooms.
School sports? Some schools in the competitive environment I envision would focus on sports — better coaches, better consequences. But, what’s not right about the European model wherein the towns and neighborhoods form sports teams for numerous levels of ability? Private groups have no trouble developing competitive leagues for youth through grade 6. The athletes will find good places to play ball. Worry not. We love sports too much to let an improvement to education/schooling obstruct athletes at play.
b. College costs:
In 2022, eighteen year olds are frequently not ready for the job competition of the adult world. Their education is not complete. They are not sufficiently trained for the jobs they are competing for. We have to ensure that the young are ready for success and self-sufficiency. A high school diploma is rarely sufficient. We need to stay closely alongside the young adult a few years longer than we are currently.
Why is schooling offered at public expense from ages 5 to 18, but costs so much at age 19? Why are student loans at higher interest rates than your mortgage? The symbiosis between colleges and banks is being lived out on the backs of college students.
The cost of college and trade school must come down. State legislatures must relieve families of the enormous debt that a college diploma places on young adults. Tuition for college or post-secondary job training leading to a bachelor’s or associate’s degree should be paid for from the public treasury.
We must encourage Industry to design and honor faster tracks to employment than a 120-hour/four-year degree. Industry must more deeply invest in the training of its future employees. To saddle young people with enormous debt so that they can “go to work” is just plain wrong.
We want the young to stay in town as adults and add to the local economy? We should spend like we mean it.
2. Women’s reproductive rights
Abortion is the intentional termination of a developing human being. Intentionally ending an innocent human life ought to never be a granted right. Children, once conceived — in whatever messed-up circumstance — have a right to be born. If the mother does not want to take the baby home, the collective assumes financial responsibility for the birth and adoption of the child — and for the future assurance that the mother does not burden the collective in this manner often. The same means by which people willingly and surgically prevent pregnancy should be applied to those who over-burden the collective.
Legal abortion has had a negative cumulative effect on our national spirit. We are more selfishly ambitious and less communitarian. The effect has been gradual and subtle, but a callus has grown over our collective soul. Our understanding of the value of human life has cheapened. Yes, unwanted pregnancy is highly disruptive, but not enough to warrant killing human life. We must come alongside the unwanted pregnancy and see that the child and mother are healthy and the newborn is adopted, if the parents do not wish or are unable to assume the responsibility of parenting.
Though the inconvenience of unwanted pregnancy and the financial burden of an additional child are the chief causes of abortion, pregnancy suffered via rape and/or incest are the tough cases. The child should not be killed, but the consequences for rape might need significant readjustment.
3. The Economy:
Yes, the American economy is essentially capitalistic. Capitalism is a powerfully productive engine. It incentivizes the individual. It fosters productivity and innovation. We want business owners and entrepreneurs and inventors to make money, good money. But the gap between the top and bottom is growing at an alarming rate. Some are simply making too darned much money, given what they do. And some are simply not making enough, given what they do.
Competition improves productivity, quality, and sets prices, but also fosters inequality. Structured democracies or armed revolts — God forbid — correct excess inequality. However, cooperation has strong social and political value. We could use more of it.
We, the people, have opportunity to tweak the excesses of capitalism, prevent its laissez-faire iterations. The love of money can be so strong that some cannot be trusted to keep the air and water clean, to keep the workplace safe, to produce products that when properly used do not harm the consumer. Where would this nation be without the past efforts of the Democratic Party in correcting the abuses of those who will put money before people?
Globalization of labor markets and technological replacement of human labor stagnate real wages. When economies become less local and more global, the worker more easily becomes a bottom line on stock portfolios, the means to an end — the love of money. There is no virtue in selfishness, Ayn Rand notwithstanding.
If we are to have hope of restoring a national neighborliness, a widespread good feeling about America, then all able-bodied Americans of sound mind must be employed — and at a wage allowing them to raise a family that can meet its needs. When the worker becomes more a production cost than a human being, the community suffers. Hard work done well has but one color — green. Let’s put more of it in the wallets of regular folks than into Wall Street derivatives.
Too many boardrooms in America’s corporate culture disrespect the American worker in search of greater profits and stock dividends. The American civilization is best preserved by hiring American workers and paying them appropriately. Those corporations that shift production to other countries in search of cheaper labor should be subject to organized boycott and public shaming. American-based companies cannot produce their stuff overseas and ship it back here, underselling product made in the USA, without a sharp penalty.
The richest will have to sacrifice profit if we are going to be a nation that holds together. People need to work— and at livable wages. I’m all for corporate jets and luxury automobiles. I just want the little guy to be able to buy a new pickup as well.
As robots and outsourcing take more and more humans’ jobs, we will need each other. We will need to buy from each other. If the oligarchs are planning to appease us with a government check and cheap access to virtual reality, what will be the consequences? How many unproductive, self-absorbed people of working age do we need? When welfare creates a culture of dependency, what happens to the minds and hearts of the dependents? Discouragement, despondency, disability.
To what degree will artificial intelligence and advanced technologies replace workers, eliminate jobs? The thought of several hundred thousand truckers no longer needed in the cab because an automaton is driving should be cause for pause.
Yes, “the poor we will always have with us.” More and more spending will not prevent poverty. Some will remain poor regardless. Laziness will impoverish some. Drugs will ruin others. Criminal mischief will imprison too many. Mental deficits challenge indiscriminately. The DNA lottery can be terribly ruthless. Every species of the animal kingdom has the poor. But those who will work, those who will give their best effort regardless of the challenges — they should have a job and a living wage. If you will not work, you should not eat at public expense; but if you will work, you and yours should eat — well!
The welfare state can alienate workers from work. A check for work not performed is subtly damaging to individual esteem. The loss of human initiative is tragic. Dependency on government is not good for self-concept. However, for those who can work but can also be easily replaced by a better worker: we must subsidize the wage of that person so that they can continue working and avoid complete dependency on public welfare.
Massive increases in public funding of the unemployed create budgets that cannot be balanced. The safety net must be lowered for adults. The spring board must be lengthened and strengthened for the children. Spend more on the first quarter of life and less on the other three.
Corporate America has created an economy wherein many families require both parents to work in order to sustain a middle-class lifestyle. It’s time the capitalists pay for the consequences of that creation. Industry will help pay for day-care at licensed providers through a tax on employers who have workers with children in day-care..
The government should fund, in partnership with Industry, life-long learning/re-training opportunities for those who whose jobs have been replaced by machines/new methods or who have become unemployed due to an industry whose “time has passed.”
We must intentionally, conscientiously, inconveniently at times, and probably more expensively, sow into local economies. Buy local. Buy from start-ups around you.
Cheaper foreign labor has endangered national security. Computer chips and pharmaceuticals should be sufficiently produced in the USA. If the Chinese don’t make our semiconductors — and they should no longer — we’ll have the Taiwanese do it? Sure, and have to defend that island from the Chinese, who want it back more than any other piece of real estate? Sounds akin to Europe creating a dependency on Russia for natural gas.
The oligarchic plutocracy has little use for nationalism. Why has no one organized an economic boycott of Chinese products? Buy American. Buy Western Hemisphere.
When big corporations borrow cheap money to buy back their stock so that the stock options of executives soar is the height of elitism.
Minimum wage: Eight dollars an hour? Seriously. One can’t live even out of mother’s basement on that wage.
Restaurants are everywhere. The service industries are growing as American manufacturing wanes. Pay these people! Help them unionize. If a restaurant can’t afford to pay a decent wage — and you don’t have enough family to staff it — sorry. Find something else to do. If we’re always looking for the cheapest worker — and that often means someone who can sort of do the job, most of the time — the result is a loveless economy.
Unions are essential to balance the clash of capital and labor. Laborers need power. Outsourcing and open borders pressure wages downward.
4. Immigration and borders
The Southern border is open for one reason — reducing the cost of labor. However, a shortage of labor is very good for the laborer.
We need tightly controlled borders because Americans need to work — first. Illegal immigrants are here because American businesses want them here, yet we have many people, especially in our inner cities, who are not working.
The illegal immigrant community has done quite well — survived and prospered, raised their next generation — without government welfare, without top wages, with language barriers. They’ve done so by hard work, healthy extended families, grit. Let their example be a lesson. And has their journey been any different than the English, Irish, Germans, Poles, and so forth who preceded them? No, except for its illegality.
Immigration policy should strive to receive the best and the brightest through legal and careful screening. Take our time and get it right. Reward the immigrant spirit, but profile radicalism and criminality, please.
A loose immigration policy can be like helping load up the Trojan Horse. Does having a pluralistic society mean you allow cultural enemies into your midst?
A nation without borders ceases to be a nation. We must amend the Constitution to change the provision that a child born on American soil is automatically an American citizen. We must end American citizenship for children born in America to non-citizens. What other nations have that policy?
5. The Police
Be grateful that some people among us want to be police officers. Even those who shout otherwise call the police first when danger looms, unless the ambulance or fire truck are more necessary. As for who becomes and stays a cop, we just need more of the good ones and fewer of the bad ones. George Floyd crying for his mother? Heartbreaking. We all get that.
But arresting a lawbreaker can be a delicate violence, requiring keen sensitivity and careful maneuvering. Rare skills can be expensive. We need to spend a lot more on local police — and less on subsidizing wealthy real estate developers. The better the pay, the better the cop. With a surplus, we can weed out the bad ones.
6. Second Amendment and our guns:
Americans are safer when they have the freedom and means to protect their own. An armed citizenry discourages the emergence of autocrats and demagogues. Guns in the homes of the people keep the government from stepping outside the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights is quite clear on the right of Americans to protect and defend themselves, their family and their property.
Yes, background checks. Yes, a month-long wait before carrying a gun purchase home.
We should not be opposed to identifying and restricting those whose weapon cabinets should not include much more than a flyswatter. Some people’s mental state makes them a community health risk. A local, state, and national registry of those individuals should be required at every gun show and checked before purchases.
Parents who have aided the gun acquisition of a young killer should face severe consequences.
7. Identity Politics – BIPOC and LGBQT
Race and ethnicity and sexual orientation are largely categories of Nature’s workings, not essentially constructs of man. Each of us has strengths and weaknesses that are functions of our personal genetic codes. We each have linkage to larger gene pools, pools which themselves are subsets of more general genetic similarities. Who isn’t fascinated by the growing database of Ancestry.com? We should all, as individuals, love the race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in which we find ourselves.
Equality is relative to all Americans having an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The DNA lottery and differing levels of nurture and support will lead to vastly unequal results.
No two people are alike. No two people are equal — in any manner of accounting/measurement I can think of. Different is not equal. We are each a little different. So, to demand groups to be equal is to move further away from solutions. Every person must be treated as an individual. Measure strengths and weaknesses and help the individual identify career/vocational paths. School choice will be very helpful in creating sufficient avenues “to lead out” a growing diversity of students.
The greatest intellectual mistake the American professoriate and their journalism department graduates have made in my lifetime is to proffer the notion that all cultures and people groups are essentially equal. That falsehood promotes unrealistic expectations that more funding/money/government oversight will not fix.
8. Health Care
In our global economy, many businesses cannot compete and provide health care for employees. So who will? Those employees for whom Industry pays their medical costs are highly privileged and decreasing in number. We all know that to get better from a serious illness, most of us will pay most anything. The free market does not work in medical care. The opportunity to gouge the public, bolstered by the ever-present love of money, is too great. In those cases, the government has to control prices and profits. Yes, research and development require industry to make significant profits, but profits tightly overseen by government regulators.
Increased government oversight will bring down costs. Merit pay for doctors will be based on success rates. Reward the doctors and innovators, not stockholders.
We need more doctors. The supply thereof is too low, therefore the cost for their services is too high — and demand will always be high. Medical school should be for the gifted and desirous, not only the gifted and desirous rich or those willing to accumulate huge debt. The federal and state governments should pay for qualified students to successfully complete medical school. Students whose medical school is paid for by government will spend the first 5 years of employment after residencies in locale decided by a placement agency, created legislatively in each state. Students may pay for their own schooling costs and avoid government placement, of course.
Americans have considerable compassion. We wish the best for everyone. So, let’s recognize the inequalities in our current system of medical insurance: some employers pay for it; some don’t; some folks’ genes are better than others; some make too much money to qualify for ACA coverage, but pay terrible monthly fees for plans with very large deductibles.
Single-payer is coming if we don’t reduce current costs. Single-payer universal insurance coverage reduces the inequalities; an independent commission administers the claims and payments; the administrators are rewarded for uncovering fraud; medical services are charged at rates determined by the commissioners (rates vary according to local prices). But when costs have to be controlled, some unpopular decisions will be made. Do we spend $35,000 per month from public funds for a 90-year old’s leukemia medicine? Probably not.
Consumers need to be able to easily identify prices charged by various health providers.
9. Homelessness
Homelessness is largely a function of severe drug addiction or debilitating mental illness.
Do you want workers with good jobs living downtown — think Cargill on E. Douglas – while drug-abusers and the desperate camp on our streets, begging, even threatening?
The significantly mental ill (and we all have our challenges/”demons”) have been released from institutional care and find themselves in a fast-moving, highly competitive, draining world and end up roaming the street, cursing at whatever perceived injustices, tending for themselves. This is not working.
We need better staffed and more accommodating homes for those who cannot care for themselves. Everyone should have a home, a shelter, but not necessarily their own house. If you can’t pay for your own shelter and food, you accept some loss of freedom. I’m going to say: We need to re-institutionalize many of the homeless, but in a manner that a contemporary Ken Kesey will not be prompted to write about.
10. Marijuana and Illegal drugs
Liberty champions the freedom to chart your own course. Yes, even the freedom to chart poorly and fail. Failure is frequently no one else’s fault but our own. Drug abuse is a lifestyle failure. We are becoming a larger culture having difficulty declaring some misbehaviors to be personal. If the family cannot/will not care for the failed, and care becomes the collective’s responsibility, allowing the failed to continue in their failure at public expense while living on the public streets is not helping our downtown development.
Drugs on the street are too cheap. Too much supply. The War on Drugs was never more than a mild skirmish. We can get rid of meth and fentanyl and heroin on the streets, but not without some ugly arrests and much more vigilance, including of our national borders.
Marijuana should be legalized and taxed. Methamphetamines, never. Have you not watched the devolution of a meth addict?
Employers must be free to test their employees and require certain levels of sobriety and readiness to work.
11. Taxes
The common good can be quite expensive. And we must admit that some problems money will not fix, but also that taxation is a form of communal sacrifice, investing in the commonwealth. Disdain for taxation increases as affection for community decreases. Great wealth comes with obligation, if you want to live in a happy community.
Why should income from investment be taxed at a lower rate than wages and tips? Because the investor is sweating more? Because they’re smarter? Because they should be rewarded for encouraging boards to cut jobs, downsize, outsource in order to enhance profits and pay better dividends? Tax capital gains more highly, especially short carries; however, eliminate the tax on capital gains, interest, and dividends for taxpayers with AGIs below $200,000. Raise the capital gains tax progressively and steeply thereafter.
12. National security and American foreign policy
“Walk softly and carry a big stick.”
Are you comfortable with the American President having the power to decide — or feeling the pressure from treaties that decide for him/her — when to send American troops? Shouldn’t we stay disengaged unless Congress declares war, as the Constitution prescribes? Armies do not keep the peace. They wage war — until the enemy sues for peace. It has been a long run as the world’s policeman, but probably time to let other alliances work out their own regional issues.
We need to build a defense shield, a Reagan-esque “Star Wars,” with the same diligence and urgency by which we sent people to the moon. This will allow us to stay out of many conflicts.
Some nations have such instability and history of turmoil that they cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. The prevention of their acquiring those weapons raises very difficult issues. Does anyone want to see the Nuclear Club grow in membership? North Korea and Pakistan are substantial members already — and their instability is profound. Will China stop flexing its muscles in the Far East? Japan needs to be free to work that out. South Korea is going to have to talk it over with the North. They may have to fight it out, but I don’t want my grandchildren doing it.
The Asian hegemony might gain by appreciating Mutually Assured Destruction within their region. I’m sure the Chinese would treat a threat from Japan far more seriously than they would a threat from the USA. They have a little more history with each other. China needs to deal with serious negotiators from their own neighborhood. Let Japan and S. Korea and Taiwan arm themselves. We’ll see a more responsive China.
We have punished Germany and Japan long enough. Let them manage their own defense.
Do not try and resolve the animosity of Sunnis and Shi’ites. No amount of American firepower or military pressure is going to make them like each other. The loss of American life trying to get them to do so has been a tragically wasteful expenditure. To neglect the historical and religious contexts of their dispute is to conduct foreign policy by emotion.
We ended our dependence on foreign oil and must never go back to dependency.
13. Electoral reform: until there’s a complete accounting of Zuckerberg’s 400 million dollar insertion into the grassroots of the November 2020 election, no one should say anything about the ethics of it. Get Big Money out of our elections!
My fellow Old Democrats, if you can help me identify and recruit young, clear-minded (Trump and Biden are septuagenarian marvels, if you’ll stop to find a little grace), charismatic, energetic (campaigns must be exhausting), and, above all, common-sensical New Democrats, we have a political party to refashion. Our democracy needs the wisdom that the Middle provides. To the helm!