I have written several articles on postings related to Reform in America. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address additional areas rife for reform.
I want to start this posting, by stating that I love this country. I think this country is the greatest country in the world. However, having said that, nobody is perfect and neither is any country perfect. Every country has had a checkered past. Slavery has been a part of just about every country or culture’s past. As countries and cultures become more advanced and richer, the elite become less able to care for themselves, they rely more and more on other individuals for common tasks. Elite individuals also begin to feel that they are superior to the working masses. When the elite feel that they are better, it is only a short step towards enslavement. This trend has occurred throughout our world’s history. So now that I have shown that just about every culture has had slavery in its history, what does it accomplish to try to hide or destroy our past? The answer is nothing, unless you want to repeat our mistakes. That is why we study our history, so we can learn from it and grow. So what I am trying to show is that cancel culture has no place in a constitutional republic. We need accurate information to allow our people to make informed decisions.
Our country has become more and more and intolerant of alternate views, and debate and intellectual discourse. The liberal left becomes combative and belligerent when their views are questioned. Over the years the press has become more and more liberal in nature. They now control over 95% of the media. There are only a few news services that allow the conservative view to be heard. While big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are now blocking any negative information on the left from being heard and preventing positive information about the right being spread. This growing trend is probably the most dangerous thing that has happened to this country. As a result large portions of our population are getting false information on our government and its leaders.
Restricting information from the people is just one way that the left is changing our country. Over the last 100 years, the teachings of socialism/ communism are becoming more and more common in our schools. While teaching Capitalism and giving an accurate portrayal of our history is becoming less common in our educational systems. Our founding fathers are being vilified and teachers are bringing into question our country’s foundation and constitution as well. Children are being taught to hate our country. This is tendency is being propagated until the final products are young adults that have no skills, have a great hate for this country and expect free handouts. They are violent individuals who participate in groups like Antifa and BLM. These individuals are also going into politics. Politicians Like AOC, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders are the result. These individuals are extremely dangerous. Their hate for this country has made them believe that they have the right to radically change our country. I take umbrage with a minority group that tries to destroy the country that they had no hand in creating and building. If they want to create a socialistic society, let them move to a struggling third world country and ply their trade there.
(Updated 1/17/2021)
After further contemplation, I have decided that The first place for reform is the tax law. I have been thinking about this for a while. There is simply too much corruption in taxes. We also spend too much money collecting taxes. The budget of the IRS is $11.8 Billion a year. This is insane. The tax code is so complicated that a whole industry has arisen to deal with it. There are tax lawyers and accountants whose job is basically do their best to take money away from the government. Of course your average Joe citizen can’t afford their services. There are many millionaires and billionaires that pay less in taxes than I do. We obviously have a problem. Why does the NFL have a tax exempt status? They definitely are not a charity. We should eliminate all tax loopholes and have set tax rates. The taxes also have to be fair and equitable. President Trump put this down as one of his early campaign promises the reform of the tax code, however it disappeared pretty quickly from his campaign. It is simply too unpopular among the wealthy and elite. So the middle class continues to bear the brunt of the tax burden, which is why we have deficit spending every year. If everybody paid their fair share we would have a surplus. I also believe that people should not get back more in taxes than they paid out. I am referring to earned income credits. The government should not be incetivizing the poor to have more children than they can afford to take care of. Which is precisely what the earned income credit does.
So having said all these things, we do have additional problems. We need reform in many places. It first needs to occur in our state and local, governments. prior to the 2020 pandemic this need was not quite so evident. Now it is eminently apparent that there areas for reform in many democratic and in some republican states. we have entirely too many petty tyrants in power. They are putting their greed and need for power before their constituent’s interests. They are abusing emergency powers only intended for limited situations and intervals of time to control their electors, now for indefinite periods of time. These politicians are being sued by private individuals and even their legislatures. They are being over ruled by the courts, and yet many are totally ignoring all of these efforts to curb their power. The bad thing is that they are getting away with it. You want to know why. The media is simply not covering any of it. They are saying that their is nothing to report. Citizens of California are trying to remove Gavin Newsom from his governor position. However, they need 1.5 million signatures and they have only a limited time to get them. There is no guarantee that he will even acknowledge it.
There has been a growing trend to defund the police. This is an effort to protect our citizens from cops. Many misguided individuals believe that we would be safer without the police. However, there is an alternate reason. The police enforce laws for all citizens. By eliminating them, who is there to remove corrupt politicians from office? Unfortunately the corruption is not limited to just the leaders and politicians, it turns out that many district attorneys and even judges and even supreme court justices are corrupt. So, now where we begin in reforming our governments. There is no doubt that a good place to begin is to make our government more responsive to its citizens. To stop corruption we need to first reduce campaign contributions to our politicians. I think $500.00 would be an absolute top figure, no questions or loop holes. Term limits is another area ripe for reform. Governors should only serve 1 four year term. Senators and congressman should all serve four year terms and be limited to no more than 4 terms. Supreme court justices should have a limit of no more than 16 years for their time in office. There needs to be an age limit for all offices. 80 years of age equals mandatory retirement. Lobbying opens up lots of areas for corruption. So no more freebies from lobbyists. Also no more mega laws with hundreds of add-ons, which are commonly written by lobbyists. One idea-one law. Laws need to be written in a language that doesn’t require a lawyer to interpret. I also firmly believe that half this country’s problem is that we have more lawyers than any other country in the world. I think we should set a limit to law schools and how many lawyers that are allowed to graduate from law school each year. Personal injury lawyers are a major contributor to medical expenses. This year in the effort to protect our voters many illegal and unconstitutional laws were passed in the states. These laws basically allowed any mail in ballot to be accepted, even if it was completed by a dead person. I believe that federal elections should be controlled federally and not be controlled by state governments. We also need voting machines to be made in the U.S. only and the whole counting and tabulation process be completed on computers in the U.S.
Another problem we have in this country is that there is an inordinate number of individuals hooked on legal pain killers and illegal drugs. I think the biggest cause of the abuse of legal pain killers is the introduction of a new medical specialty, pain management specialists, which was introduced in 1978. There livelihood basically hinges on getting people addicted to pain meds. This specialty should never have been created. What we need is more psychiatrists and psychologists to treat people, so that they won’t be addicted to drugs. We also need to teach our children to be more self reliant. We are giving participation awards to every child now, despite how they did in competitions. So they are expecting prizes for doing nothing, instead of promoting hard work. Another thing that needs to stop is having both parents work. Child raising has become the responsibility of schools, day care centers and relatives. Parents are not raising their own children anymore. There are entirely too many single parent families as well. Divorces are too easy, cheaply provided by overly abundant lawyers. Again more and cheaper marriage counselors might an answer. We need to reduce our infatuation with materialism. Every child needs a Iphone, a Ipad and so on. What most children want is a parent that is there for them. Latch key kids are not the answer to strong and healthy country.
I mentioned earlier that there is a trend towards defunding the police. However, the answer lies in the education and training of police. Another way to make the police more responsive to the people is to eliminate police unions. They offer too protection to corrupt police. I have already written an article on police reform, a link will be provided at the end of this article, along with the rest of my reform articles.
When social media companies first came about, it was felt that to allow them a chance to grow, they needed protection from law suits. It was believed that these sites would help foster communication among the peoples of our country and eventually the world. It worked and these companies became the bastions of free speech. The law was called the Communications Decency Act, or simply known as Act 230. However, these companies have become too powerful and are now biased towards one party. It has become a major problem for a free and unfettered country. These companies, for the first time have actually affected the outcome of a presidential election. They prevented negative information from being published about the Biden family and prevented positive information for the Republican party being published. It is estimated that several million votes were affected by this selective censorship. President Trump has been trying valiantly for over a year to get this law repealed, but to no avail. They are simply too powerful. Now that it looks like Biden will be our next president, their continued power is ensured.
With Biden as president our chance for any meaningful reform happening in this country is unlikely. It is my hope that had the end of his 4 years, that there will still be country left to save.
Articles on Reform
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/12/11/to-make-our-country-great-again-we-will-have-to-start-by-reforming-our-educational-system/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/14/police-reform-three-pronged-approach-legislative-reform-and-training-at-federal-and-state-level/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/05/government-reform-proposal-february-17-1999/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/20/government-reform-revisited/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/12/postal-service-reform/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/12/15/reform-in-our-licensing-and-regulations-and-miscellaneous-areas-for-good-measure/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/01/05/reform-in-our-country/