Oct 08
15
If McCain Wants to Win
McCain is now way back in the polls. Unless something drastic happens, Obama is going to be our next president. If McCain wants to win, he needs to stand up and give us policies that are new, innovative, and will truly set him apart from Obama and give us a real choice. I don’t know if it will lead him to a win, but what he’s currently doing surely won’t and it will at least give him a fighting chance.
McCain is good on foreign policy so I wouldn’t change much there. He’s got the experience and the background to give him credibility in this area. McCain needs to focus on sweeping changes here at home because that is what people are worrying about.
First, he needs to support a completely restructuring of the tax system. The biggest issue we have right now is that congress is monkeying with our tax system every year. The biggest benefit to the economy is stability and being able to count on how much your tax expense is going to be. McCain needs to support a drastic simplification of the tax code. I very much support the Fair Tax and would love to see him support something like it.
Next he needs to champion a balanced budget. If we, the people, are expected to live within our means, than so is the federal government. He should say that any budget that crosses his desk, whether put there by a Democratic or Republican congress, that the expenses are more than the revenues, he will veto. If he wants to soften it, he can give them a 3 year window to get in line. The first year needs to be within 25%, the next 15%, then 5% and then from then on it must balance or revenues must surpass expenses. He’ll have to take a stance that the people are going to have to sacrifice and people will be receptive to this in this climate of fiscal insanity.
Lastly he needs to reject all of this foolishness with dumping money that the government doesn’t even have to buy up mortgages. The problem with the market is that banks won’t lend to each other. Come up with an insurance situation so that banks will again have confidence to lend to each other. He needs to suspend the mark to market rules put in place after the Enron scandal so that banks can establish a value of these securities that contain the bad mortgages. The government has no business giving money away tax payer money in order to reward bad behavior. They can do something very similar simply by insuring the securities.
Anyway, there are more sweeping changes he can support but those are big ones in my book. With policies like these, who could truly be that candidate of “Change”?