When deficit spending is appropriate

If you're familiar with my campaign at all, you know that I hate deficit spending, and you know why. I suspect most of you agree with me. But one question I've been asked is, what about the Great Depression? Some theories say that the Depression was exacerbated by the government's attempt to balance the budget by cutting spending and raising taxes. People ask, am I really advocating similar policies?

I'm not. I'm not saying that the government should never run a deficit. During a major war, or during a serious economic crisis, deficit spending is the lesser evil. The problem is not that the government has been running deficits the last couple years; we've been fighting two wars and hit a serious economic crisis, and deficit spending is not an unreasonable short-term response to those conditions. The problem is that we've already been running deficits constantly for decades!

Now, we can argue about whether we should have been fighting two wars, or whether the recession could have been avoided entirely. But that's a different topic. My point is that the time came that we needed to go into debt to deal with these problems, but thanks to Congress's irresponsibility, we'd already maxed out our credit cards!

Deficit spending is not evil. Deficit spending is a tool. That tool has been abused, and that abuse is the cause of the significant inflation we're going to see over the next few years. The recession is over, at least for now. We're withdrawing from Iraq. We've been in Afghanistan for nearly eight years; that's not a short-term issue any more. Congress is out of excuses. Don't vote for anyone who won't work to eliminate the deficit.

Thirty Senators

Senate Amendment 2588 to HR 3326 was proposed a few days ago. Thirty Senators, including Corker and Alexander, voted against it. We, as Tennesseans, all need to ask ourselves, "Why?"

Actually, better yet, we need to ask our Senators "Why?" Every Tennessean reading this, click that link, call or write your Senators, and demand an explanation. If they won't answer, they need to be removed from office.

These thirty Senators voted against an amendment which proposed a new rule for US military contractors: they must not have binding arbitration clauses in their employment contracts which forbid employees from taking cases of sexual assault or racial discrimination to court. In simpler terms, it means that if someone is raped, that person must be allowed to take the case to court.

How is this something you vote against!? Having your day in court is a fundamental right of all people. Without that, every law protecting you is meaningless, because it can never be enforced.

Unfortunately for all of us, these Senators won't be up for re-election until 2012 and 2014, respectively. This is yet another good reason why we need a much easier process to recall congressmen who do not do their job.

This vote does not serve the people, any people, anywhere. Corker and Alexander need to answer for their actions, or be removed.

Issue page updates

I've updated the Issues page to better reflect the priorities I place on various issues and concepts. Immigration, Gun Control, and Education have been updated to make my positions clearer. Several other issues have been modified slightly, but no changes of substance were made in them.

Two significant additions have been made. First, I am now calling for the immediate definition of a victory scenario in Afghanistan. If there is no clear objective, then the lives of our servicemen and women are being wasted to achieve nothing. Second, as I have explored the issue further, I am now firmly opposed to a national sales tax. The administrative overhead of such a tax would not be significantly less than our present tax system, and the overall financial impact of the usual proposals would be severely detrimental to people unable to afford it.

Watch soon for more details about my health care reform proposals.

Public option compromise

I've made my position on health care reform clear. Unfortunately it there's nobody presently in Congress advocating my common sense solutions, so there's not much chance they're going to be included in this round of health care reform. Given that, I'd like to comment on the various ideas floating around regarding health care reform.

1) Do nothing. It's clear to anyone following the state of health care in the US that this is totally unacceptable. One out of six people has no health insurance, in large part because of the skyrocketing cost of health care. This is not going to fix itself; it's just going to get worse and worse.

2) Single-payer. This is not on the table, and never has been. However, a lot of people still think it is, and it does have supporters, so I'll address it here. A single-payer health care system would be equivalent to the government taking over the entire health care sector. This system is common in other developed countries, and the problems those countries have are arguably not worse than the problems we have under our current system. There are potential benefits, such as reduced administrative overhead. However, I do not believe in the case of the United States that these benefits outweigh the costs, especially given the existence of superior options.

3) Public option. This would be equivalent to the government running an insurance company, which competes with other, private insurance companies. There are significant issues with this, especially in that it makes the crippling administrative costs of the US health system even worse than they already are. Further, the details of the implementation would determine whether this would become an inevitable slide towards the majority of people being on the public option, which would be equivalent to single-payer.

4) Insurance exchanges. This idea has not been clearly explained by those advocating it, which is a massive failure of leadership on their part. I do not here propose to rectify their mistake; that would be an entirely different post. However, I will say that I am entirely opposed to the idea of forcing people, by law, to do business with private entities. I would consider even single-payer to be preferable. The entire concept was clearly created for the benefit of the insurance companies, who would by law have fifty million new customers.

Each one has its supporters. I'm not a supporter of any of them. Out of the four, I consider a public option to be the least bad, but still worse than simply fixing a truly market-based system. However, this article from the Washington Post illustrates how health care reform should have been handled from the beginning. If one state wants to have a public option, and another state doesn't, why shouldn't that be possible? Why not have a national public option that each state can elect to participate in or opt out of? There is no reason at all that a single solution needs to be forced on everyone.

A system that improves your ability to choose between different options is usually going to be preferable to one that doesn't. A system that allows different states to choose what works for them on what is basically a local issue is better than a system that doesn't. And with this system, we can see what really works and what doesn't, instead of just arguing about ideas that haven't been tried. The same can be said for the minimum wage, or some kinds of pollution controls. This is the kind of reasoning that should have been used at the beginning of this debate.

It's about time.