5 Thoughts on How To Jump-Start the Economy:

1: The Big 3's designs to make cars that require less oil are short-sighted. Just make flying cars the goal, and you bypass the need to rethink the entire Industrial Revolution altogether - nobody is going to object to having a diesel engine if their car can fly. Plus, considering how inefficient a flying car that runs on diesel would be, it'd take at least a million engineers to figure out how to make it work. Can you say "job creation?"
2: Speaking of creating jobs, hurry up and legalize drugs. Not only the ones that don't cause any more harm than cigarettes or alcohol. All of them. People who use don't do it because it's illegal, and they will continue to use if the drugs are legalized. But they will have to pay taxes. Taxes for meth = serious money. And people who don't use because certain drugs are illegal also probably have better reasons than lawfulness (empirical evidence comes to mind). If it's good enough for Michael Phelps, it's good enough for America. Plus, it'll help cull the rich.
3: Stop deporting international students who graduate from the American higher education system. I'm actually serious about this one.
4: America needs a high-speed MagLev train. China has one. America doesn't. What. NY to LA. 3 hours. Also, Manhattan needs a monorail system. At once. Get on that Gotham City prontosaurus. Minus the explosions.
5: Next time we feel like declaring war, do it on Canada. Much easier to bring troops home after that's over. They can just walk back. Read more!

What are the candidates doing to fight poverty? (Blog Action Day)

So, if you didn't already know, today is Blog Action Day, where bloggers around the world are rallying together to write about poverty from thousands of different perspectives. Every post today will focus on issues related to poverty and anti-poverty initiatives in the US and abroad.

I've got a lot to say on the issue, but first let's talk about what our presidential candidates are saying about it.

As I'm sure you know, the easiest way to find out what a candidate officially affirms on an issue is to go to their website and click on their "Issues" tab. So I perused the John McCain website for about 25 minutes last night, hoping to find something on his stance on poverty. 25 minutes. Far longer than I thought it would take to eventually find NOTHING on the subject. No subheading under issues, no blurb about it somewhere else (that I could find), nothing. That makes for a pretty unfairly biased argument against John McCain's poverty plan, because he doesn't have a publicly stated one. Maybe he is opening up his 11 other homes as soup kitchens and shelters? Probably not. It blows my mind that you could run a campaign without a poverty stance! Stunning, really. So, to give him the benefit of the doubt, that maybe I was just overlooking it, I googled "McCain poverty plan" only to find the first two hits reading something along the lines of "No Poverty Plan for McCain." Ouch. While I highly doubt that any of this will come up in the debate, I hope that it gets some air time before the election.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a comprehensive plan to combat poverty that has measures that include ensuring the well-being of our nation's veterans as well. His plan details the routes he would take to expand the EITC, to create Promise Neighborhoods in locations with extreme poverty, create jobs in new sectors in rural and urban locales, and to make a concerted effort to revitalize and rehabilitate Urban America in particular as it has been so dearly neglected in the past 8 years. Now, I thought I was going to be able to have a comparative discussion on the issue when I started out writing this post, but the fact of the matter is, a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President seem to be the only way to make any sort of inroads in fighting poverty in the USA. This is the kind of economic policy we need; we need a plan that grows the overall pie of the economy and ensures fair(-er, everything in time) distribution of resources to our neglected underclass.

While the nuts and bolts of Obama's Economic plan (reducing taxes for 95% of working families) may not be 100% accurate, I feel that the larger picture of helping to redistribute wealth and easing the average citizen's burden can really help protect our image as a nation as well as protect the poorest among us. In the end, however, with a country with such great privilege, we should be doing more for each other to ensure equality (lofty, i know, but still true).

...But that's just my two cents. And you already know I'm all about change.




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