Enough with the Palin focus, already! I know she’s a woman and all that, but get your minds out of the gutter and back up on the curb with the rest of us!
There is no serious information here. She was designed strictly as a distraction to end any discussion of the Democratic National Convention, the wonderful addresses by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and others, and whatever bounce they might have gotten. That’s it. That’s the whole story. It’s completely a Republican ruse. They are hoping that everyone who isn’t a religious fanatic forgets about her now that she’s served her purpose or misunderestimates her (someone made that a word) and jokes about her being on the ticket.
DON’T! You have the power to make this story go away by concentrating on the issues. The Republican duo doesn’t have an ounce of sense between them when it comes to dealing with the serious issues that face the country. You want to stomp on Palin? Okay. Ask her some of the following questions:
BTW, I got questions, but I’d like to hear yours. What do you think we should be asking? See the bottom of this entry for more. In the meantime, here you go:
One measure of the value of the dollar is the price of gold. SPDR gold shares have about doubled in price since 2004, indicating that the dollar has lost about half its value in that time. Other indices, such as the price of euros, indicate a similar decline. If China were not indexing their currency to the dollar, the slide would probably be worse. Sarah Palin, if you should happen to become President, what policies would you pursue to stabilize the dollar? Or, would you let it continue to decline? The decline in the dollar is heavily dependent on government borrowing, which continues to be at a very high level because of the war in Iraq. Since it’s clear you wouldn’t pull out of Iraq, would you raise taxes to balance the budget? Or, would you cut spending? If you are going to cut spending, would you cut spending for the regular military budget or for other government programs? Which programs would you be willing to cut, if any, to strengthen the dollar?
The U.S. military has a budget of about $489 billion a year. War appropriations on top of that are about $120 billion a year. The federal budget is about $2.7 trillion, making raw military spending about 18% of our federal budget, and with war operations in Iraq about 22%. Continued military spending is a drag on the economy, probably preventing the domestic sector from recovering. How are we going to get this number down? Or, do you plan to continue with this spending, risking a real recession? Would you be willing to stop outsourcing government services to cut spending, since some slice of every outsourced contract goes to private profits at taxpayer expense?
Indications are that the American consumer is tapped out on spending. Disposable income went up during the Clinton Administration. The stock market bubbled, increasing the real money supply by several trillion dollars. However, the dot com bust took about 4 trillion dollars out of the stock market. Some of that money went in to real estate. However, that bubble has also burst. In the meantime, consumers borrowed against the inflated value of their homes and added credit card debt to allow them to purchase big-ticket items, increasingly from China. At the same time, wealth-creating jobs in the U.S. (such as manufacturing jobs) have steadily declined. This leaves U.S. consumers with huge debt and no opportunities for substantial jobs with which to pay off that debt. As a result, there is practically no source of money in the middle class and practically no way to generate additional sources. Since the Republican ideology has prevented any sensible reform of the tax system, there is no way to get money into the middle class. What policies would you pursue to revive the economy? Would you break from Republican ideology and rebalance the tax code so that more money was freed up to generate spending? Would you renegotiate the international trade agreements, especially with China, so that more wealth-creating jobs would come back to the U.S.? Would you let the economy slide further into recession or perhaps a 1930s-style depression, hoping that market forces would eventually take care of the problem? What do you think is the best option?
One real source of wealth is technology. That technology currently comes from a combination of public and private spending on research and development, with the U.S. government seriously involved in sourcing pure research both in its own departments and through channeling money to universities. It also supports private spending on R&D through tax breaks. While this is a longer-term source of stimulating the economy, what would you do to increase R&D, thus increasing the productivity of workers and therefore our standard of living in the long term?
Naturally, technology is worthless if it can’t be deployed. The bedrock of our ability to successfully deploy technology is our public education system. This system is not only vital to move technology from theory to practice, but also to help everyone in the country come to a common understanding about our how our society works, including how to build capital, make contracts and generally how to operate in a society of laws. Republicans have attempted to undermine the system of public education by moving people outside that system as much as possible. Would you continue this trend? If not, where do you draw the line? In any case, the public system of education needs to be strengthened. How would you go about doing that? Do you believe that any American should be disadvantaged in their education based on the state they live in? If not, then how do you ensure uniform funding and access to resources across the country?
Equally, we can’t be competitive on the world stage if our healthcare system isn’t competitive. Most countries spend less than we do, but guarantee healthcare for everyone. We spend about 16% of our GDP, but we still have tens of millions of people without coverage. The only competitive system is national healthcare system that provides all basic healthcare free to the recipients and uses the economic muscle of the federal government to keep costs down and levels of service up. This needs to be backed up with private systems that take up where a public system can’t perform. The Republicans have been complete stick-in-the-muds about moving forward on modernizing our system and making it competitive with countries such as China, France and Britain. Will you buck Republican group-think and fight for a competitive, national system? Will you support a system that guarantees health care to all citizens? Will you support a single-payor plan? If not, what is your alternative and what health care are you willing to give up if you don’t support universal healthcare? How would you implement and pay for your proposed changes? Or, do you think it’s acceptable for over 40 million Americans to fend for themselves, often on minimum wage, in a system dominated by multi-state healthcare monster corporations?
And, just as well, dividing up resources among increasing numbers of people cuts the standard of living. The population of the U.S. is projected to increase about 50% in the next fifty years, primarily through immigration. That immigration is fueled in large part by unrestrained population growth in other countries, especially those with poor societal organization and poor family planning. How would you deal with the exploding population problem? Would you support increased U.S. spending on family planning, especially in other countries which are either too poor or for other reasons don’t have good family planning on their own? Would you channel development money into poor regions so that they can develop their own economies, thus relieving population pressure that helps fuel illegal immigration into the U.S.?
When John Kennedy was elected President (1960, for those not around and too lazy to Google it), the world population was about 3 billion people. Since then, it has ballooned to more than twice that (around 6.7 billion today). With each person in the world wanting to reach a modern lifestyle, how do we provide for their energy needs as the population is projected to bloom to more than 10 billion in the next few decades? People in the U.S. consume about five times the average amount of energy as people do worldwide. Do you think that U.S. consumers can cut their energy consumption to about 20% of its current value by conservation? Or, do you think the rest of the world can reach parity by increasing worldwide energy production by about 4 times current amounts and then doubling it all again worldwide to take into account the added population growth? What’s your solution—do you suggest that each person use less energy or that we cut population growth (or both)? How would you suggest that your chosen policy be pursued?
The Arctic icecap is melting. While this may be some cause for celebration in Alaska, people in the western U.S., which is already critically short of water, are facing real climate catastrophe. The Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies most of the Great Plains, is rapidly drying up. This aquifer was created from glacial melt about 10,000 years ago and it cannot be replenished from rainwater or other sources. The complete depletion of this could lead to another dust bowl, like the one in the 1930s. How would you deal with this continental-scale disaster? If the Arctic icecap melts within the next eight years (a distinct possibility if we don’t take drastic action to stop global warming), then the Atlantic Ocean could perhaps see a rise of up to 30 feet. This would, of course, drown Manhattan. How do you plan to deal with this problem? Do you plan to work on it proactively, by attempting to mitigate global warming (whatever its source) or do you plan to deal with the disaster after the fact?
At our current rate of oil production, the current known stocks of oil in the U.S. will be depleted in about 10 years. If we drill in ANWR and on the OCS, this will extend stocks for perhaps another three years. That means that by the end of the current presidential cycle in eight years we will functionally be out of domestic oil to pump out of the ground. If we don’t have a stolid alternative strategy for basic energy production by that time, we will have to import most, if not all, of our oil. At that point, we will not be able to run our military (which gets the majority of its power to operate from oil derivatives) or run our manufacturing and agricultural industries, without importing all of it from other countries. We will be functionally dependent on overseas suppliers, who will be free to dictate U.S. foreign policy. This emergency calls for clear strategic planning and execution over the next decade. What is your energy strategy for dealing with this problem? What targets would you set for reducing our dependence on oil? What leverage would you use with the oil industry to implement the necessary changes?
The war in Iraq has grabbed everyone’s attention, but there are other areas that may be just as important. We have largely ignored wars, famine and other problems in Africa. This could be the next tinderbox for a terrorist attack. Our weakened economic position and the preoccupation of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan mean that countries like Russia see the opportunity to expand their empires without any meaningful response from the U.S. What are the unexpected problems we will see in the next four years? What are the hot spots that we should be proactively addressing? How do we free up resources to be able to address those other areas?
The Bush Administration took the attitude that the U.S. was so strong that it could do anything it wanted without the cooperation or the approval of the rest of the world. This isn’t a policy founded in reality. Would you continue this policy or would you re-engage with the rest of the world? Who would you select for Secretary of State? Where would you send them? What would their message be to the rest of the world? Would you try to work multilaterally to address issues? Would you put more effort into making friends at the U.N. and working with that body to accomplish U.S. goals? What about other organizations?
The U.S. and the Russians each have enough nuclear warheads that if either country launched all of them it would cause a nuclear winter that would wipe out life on earth. (I call this SAD, for "Self-Assured Nuclear" destruction.) This could accidentally be triggered at any time before these countries reach agreement and deactivate most of their nuclear stockpiles. In addition, it is estimated that it will still be some years before all the weapons in the former Soviet Union are safely secured, making them prime targets for terrorists. How would you revive relations with Russia and cooperate on necessary issues, such as securing nuclear stockpiles and safely deactivating weapons that are no longer needed?
Enough!
These are the questions we should be asking of anyone who is running for executive office this year. These are the questions that both the presidential and the vice presidential candidates should be able to answer convincingly in order to assure us that they have the chops to be a leader of the country. I’m pretty confident that I’d get reasonable answers from Barack Obama and Joe Biden on these issues. I’m not so sure about the other side. What brave member of the media is going to step up to the plate and ask these questions of all the candidates?
If I got the answers to my questions, it would go a long way toward demonstrating which team is the best to lead the country.
Now it’s your turn. What questions do you think we should be asking these candidates? If you had a chance to sit down with any of the four major candidates for an hour and grill them, what questions would be on your list? Please add your questions to the comments section. I’ve only touched on the areas that need to be addressed. I think we should be ready for the debates with our set of president-qualifying questions.
Help pull the discussion back to the issues. Obama’s acceptance speech was a masterpiece and we ought to be talking it up. Please see my last previous diary, Obama’s Masterpiece: Acceptance in Denver for analysis and talking points off the speech.