I began these posts almost ten years ago in August, 2010. For the first several months I offered one or two policy recommendations under the title of 2020 Vision: How To Fix The Next Ten Years in Ten Steps. With 2020 almost upon us, I thought it would be useful and...
Deficit
What Wrestling History Can Teach Us
I’ve just finished Taylor Branch’s book The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with The President. Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the King Years Trilogy, finished the book in 2009. It contains 667 pages of intimate details taken from seventy-nine secret,...
Starve The Federal Beast
The Federal Government is way too big, it doesn’t always work well, it impacts us far too much, and yet it continues to grow and to get worse. Our Christian faith and our nation’s founding principles focus on individual freedoms and decisions—to choose Christ or not,...
I Hear Flapping
By definition, we are not supposed to be able to predict Black Swan events before they occur, but I hear a lot of flapping, and it’s getting louder. If you’re interested in the future of our economy, please read Mervyn King’s new book The End of Alchemy. Lord King was...
Will We Follow Europe Into the Abyss or Pull Back?
If you were in a line of fast moving cars running in and out of fog and suddenly the fog parted and you could see that the bridge ahead had just collapsed, and that cars were falling into the deep canyon, would you continue to speed forward because you enjoy how your...
Bond Servants
In The President, which I wrote eighteen years ago, there is an African-American pastor who laments how the federal government has become the world’s largest plantation, keeping Black Americans down. Now, sadly, all Americans of every color are being driven to lives...
How To Stop Our Runaway Spending
Conservatives from key states recently voted for subsidies to sugar farmers. Realtors demand mortgage subsidies despite the disaster of the housing finance bubble. Food Stamps are advertised on TV as a “benefit” that you don’t want to miss, and now an astounding one...
The Greecehopper and the Ants
For those of a certain age, this Disney video will be familiar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1DgihKHVI. Please give it a watch. For an individual, household, city, or sovereign nation, it really is not much more complicated than this. With so much practical good...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Six
6. Increase retirement ages and contributions for Social Security over the next five years so that the program is “fixed” for the foreseeable future, and no longer a source for political debate.
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Five
5. Instead of “Cap and Trade”, in 2011 add a ten cent federal tax to each gallon of refined gasoline, and then increase that tax by five cents every year for the next twenty years. Use the funds to do energy research, to provide seed capital for viable alternatives,...
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