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Patrick's Platform


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2017 Feb 19, 6:18am   258,903 views  271 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

Copyright
Limit copyright to 20 years like patents, with no renewals, because renewals just protect the profits of Disney and other wealthy lobbyists.
Make DMCA takedown abuse a felony because it is used to stifle free speech.

Corruption
Issue massive cash rewards for exposing illegal or unethical behavior by government officials. Turn the rats against each other.
Government officials must be held personally financially responsible for illegal or unethical behavior, such as passing the PREP Act.
Ban congressmen and their family members from owning individual stocks, to stop flagrant insider trading like that by Nancy and Paul Pelosi.
Ban all levels of government from attempting to influence public opinion; government should respect and reflect the will of the people.
Make it a felony for any elected official or government employee to knowingly lie to the public, or to materially misrepresent facts to the public.
Require all laws — like vaccine mandates and insider trading bans — to also apply to members of Congress without any exemptions.
End corruption in DC by aggressively rotating out politicians before they can develop their corrupt networks.
Make a point of bringing in total political outsiders as often as possible.
Forbid everyone at the FDA from ever working at any pharma company, and forbid all pharma employees from ever working for the FDA.

Crime and Prisons
Openly address the extremely disproportionate violent crime rate by black men relative to all others, instead of hiding it.
Abolish all "hate crime" laws because they inevitably result in unequal application of the law, favoring some groups over others. We already have laws against crime.
Implement public honors and a large cash reward for anyone who captures and flogs a looter or shoplifter or a protester blocking the road.
Require all police to wear functioning bodycams at all times when interacting with public or prisoners, all video to be used as evidence.
End civil forfeiture because it is theft by government.
Ban private prisons because they bribe judges to feed them more prisoners.
Legalize marijuana at the federal level because it is less harmful than alcohol.
Allow free speech for all prisoners so that we can learn about injustice.
Segregate prisons by biological sex. In particular, no men should ever be imprisoned among women.
Define "right to a speedy trial" to mean that a verdict must be reached within one year of imprisonment, defaulting to innocent.
Compensate those found innocent for their unjust time in jail. The money should come from the budget of the agency which imprisoned them.
End selective enforcement of laws by DAs. We should have minimal laws, but they should be enforced 100% of the time to avoid cases like Hunter Biden never being charged.

Discrimination
Forbid government from counting or classifying citizens by race because that is racist.
End racism by refusing to talk about it, as Morgan Freeman suggested in his famous interview with Mike Wallace.
Prohibit any special access to government services regardless of a person's status, wealth, or payment.
Eliminate all government favoritism or exclusion of citizen by race; therefore no Affirmative Action, nor exclusion of whites or Asians from any programs.

Education
Offer a basic citizenship, numeracy, and literacy test for a high school diploma by each state, administered by the Department of Weights and Measures, with objective answers.
Fund college with temporary income share agreements, not loans to give colleges a true motive to help students.
Let middle school and high school students test out of any subject so they don't waste their time.
Require any university which gets government funding to award class credits and degrees purely for passing anonymously graded objective tests, no classes required.
Require simple clear elementary, middle, and high school classes on how to avoid getting trapped in debt.
Create state-level virtual universities of the very best teachers and classes, free for all students of any age.
Allow school choice, where parents can take their tax money to any school in the state, public or private.
Define the promotion of homosexuality or trans ideology to children, especially sodomy or trans flags in classrooms, as child abuse, because it is.
Ban homosexual men from being alone with boys, ever, because most gays were created through pedophilia.
Promote practical education, such as plumbing and HVAC, but also promote reading the traditional Latin and Greek classics, especially in the original languages.
Require middle school and high school courses in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and how to sue for them.

Food
Make is a serious crime to introduce any insect-based food for humans without prominent warnings on the food that it includes insects.
Ban all seed oils as not appropriate for human consumption, because they are poisonous.

Foreign Policy
Put compensating tariffs on foreign goods from countries with lower wages or lower environmental standards, and to protect the US manufacturing base.
Seek national economic self-sufficiency in all necessary goods like oil and medicines so that the US may never be extorted by a foreign country.
Impose an absolute ban on dual citizenship, because it always creates conflicting loyalties. China prohibits dual citizenship for this reason.

Freedom of Speech
Prohibit discrimination in hiring and firing based on political activities outside of work.
Revoke all laws against "hate speech" because it directly violates the First Amendment.

Homelessness
Require mandatory prison time for hard drug use, because most homeless are addicts, and former addicts testify that enforced sobriety in prison saved them.

Immigration
Issue permanent shoot-to-kill orders along both the northern and southern borders.
Make everyone who enters the US illegally permanently ineligible for citizenship, green cards, employment, and welfare.
Establish strong borders to prevent illegal immigration, including a wall along the southern US border, to protect low-wage American workers from illegal competition.
Grant US citizenship to any illegal alien who gets his employer convicted of employing him. This would be more effective than a wall.
Require mandatory federal prison time for all employers of illegal aliens.
Eliminate all H1B and similar visas unless the incoming worker is paid at least twice as much as an American would be for that job, to prevent, eg, Facebook's abuse of H1B.

Infrastructure
Give official federal priority to fast, safe, cheap rail transit to city centers as in Europe, in place of subsidies and favoritism for cars and highways.
Attempt to re-achieve US energy independence to help keep us out of foreign wars and to improve our balance of trade.
Officially disparage and refuse to grant permits to modern architecture because it is cheap shit. Return to classical architecture.
Return to classical public art, perhaps with subtle new touches. Refuse to spend money on cheap gimmicky public "art".
Create pedestrian-friendly and completely safe town squares in every town, with a particular emphasis on introducing young people to each other.

Leaf Blowers
Ban all gasoline powered leaf blowers. They pollute with dirty engines, blow dust around, and make a lot of noise. In some areas the noise and pollution is continuous all week, every week, as one house after another gets gardening service from illegals.

Legislation
Require lesser authorities to defy unconstitutional laws and orders coming from above
Prohibit all "states of emergency" because they are used to subvert the Constitution, as was done in the Wuhan Virus scamdemic.
Create a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that no part of the Constitution may be suspended ever, for any reason, for any amount of time.
Require all federal laws to be read in their entirety by all legislators before they may vote on them, to discourage lobbyist-written bills.
Require all federal laws to be clear enough that a 12th-grade education is sufficient to understand them perfectly, for more public participation.
Limit bill length to 30 normal-sized pages of normal sized font, for more clarity about what is in the bill, and more public participation.
Promote the principle of very few laws, very well enforced "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -Tacitus.
Guarantee the right of the president to fire anyone within executive branch at any time, especially long-time "civil servants" like Fauci.
Eliminate anti-competitive imposition of "safety" costs on small businesses because those laws are almost all written to benefit large businesses.
Require sunset provisions for all federal laws, requiring a new vote on whether the law is to be continued.
Publicly post all bills two weeks in advance of Congressional vote, to give the public a chance to read them.

Medical Care
Establish a Constitutional ban on lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. They must never be allowed under any circumstance.
Prosecute everyone involved with the creation of Wuhan Virus, especially the mass murderers Fauci, Collins, and Daszak.
Prosecute everyone who abused his or her power to mandate the dangerous and ineffective gene injection, whether in government, schools, or workplaces.
Require short clear written presentation of all non-emergency medical costs before treatment for market discipline of medical costs.
Absolve all patients from legal liability for medical care bills they did not agree to in writing in advance of treatment, aside from emergency care.
Require all emergency medical charges to be limited to fixed prices by law, because there to can be no market in emergencies.
Require medical insurers to give a coverage response to a proposed non-emergency medical bill within one day, again to control medical costs.
Allow import of prescription drugs from Canada.
Make it a felony to offer doctors or other providers payments to administer any drug or treatment.
Ban the practice of charging higher prices for the same medicine or treatment when the patient is uninsured. See image below.
Establish a Constitutional right to visit in person and hug any relative who wants visitors in a hospital or nursing home with no exceptions for any disease on either side. It must be their choice alone, not an administrator's.

Mens Rights
Ban kangaroo courts in corporate HR and University Title IX departments to protect men's rights.
Mandate paternity testing at birth. Eliminate all child support obligation for a non-biological father unless he legally adopts the child.
Require courts to assume that a woman of age, voluntarily alone in a bedroom with a man, has consented to sex.
Grant equal post-conception rights to men.

Military
Eliminate the US Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force, replacing them with the National Guard, Coast Guard, and Air National Guard only.
Implement a mandatory death penalty for anyone who deliberately attempts to send US troops off of US soil, especially anyone in US government.
Create a constitutional amendment prohibiting interventionism; American soldiers must never fight except against invasion of America, per George Washington's advice.
Eliminate NATO, because Europe is not America.
Eliminate all US military bases in foreign countries.

Money
Define the dollar as one ounce of 0.999 pure silver. Silver by weight worked well for thousands of years.
Require every business to accept silver metal cash by weight.
Ban all taxes on buying or selling silver. Such taxes are punishment of those who try to avoid being cheated by the Federal Reserve.
Forbid businesses from requiring payment in any form which can be blocked by government, as Canada did against legitimate protestors.
Create a Constitutional prohibition on political discrimination as a reason to deny banking or payment system access.
Require classification and prominent marking of all non-metal payment instruments as "Not money, only a debt, MAY DEFAULT", because they are merely debts.
Establish a Constitutional right to pay all debts and taxes with physical silver by weight, so that everyone can preserve savings as silver metal.
Eliminate the requirement for anyone to accept paper money because all paper money eventually becomes worthless.
Legally define all banking as either storage of silver for a fee, or participation in the bank's lending risk and bank run risk for an interest payment.
Eliminate the Federal Reserve entirely. Let the open market set interest rates at all times.
Limit the annual federal budget by Constitutional amendment to 1% of GDP with no exceptions, especially not for "emergencies".
Completely and permanently eliminate the national debt. Require the federal budget to be paid out of current revenue, similar to the "Swiss brake".

Privacy
Prohibit all levels of government from collecting or holding information on any citizen except as absolutely necessary for census, taxation, or criminal investigation.
Prohibit the government from monitoring the activities of anyone not currently accused of a specific crime. So no mass license plate reading or cell phone tracking.
Require all private people and companies which collect or distribute home addresses and phone numbers to prominently display all of the owners' home addresses and phone numbers, and all similar information they collect. Demand equality of exposure.
Prohibit airlines and other transportation from demanding identity papers. Everyone should be able to travel anonymously, as we did before.

Real Estate
Require notarization and publication of all bids on real estate to slow down the routine fraudulent bidding by realtors.
Require a publicly advertised price for a house to be a legally binding offer to sell at that price.
Prohibit government loan guarantees of all kinds, particularly housing or education loan guarantees, because they simply raise the cost of housing and of college.

Regulation and States Rights
Eliminate all federal government agencies outside of the military and commerce; everything else belongs to the states, as is written in the Constitution.
Eliminate the FBI, CIA, NSA, NIH, FDA, and CDC in particular, with their functions transferred to the states, as is written in the Constitution.
Allow girl scouts to bake their own cookies at home.

Sex
Strictly separate multiple-person bathrooms for men and women, whether a person is mentally ill with the fashionable "trans" disease or not.
Ban gay men from adopting, since the majority are gay because they were molested as boys, and then frequently go on to become molesters themselves.
Ban the sodomy or trans flag from any property funded by tax money however indirectly, especially schools. Only official government flags may be displayed.
Classify homosexuality and transsexuality as the mental illnesses which they are.

Schools
Ban the rainbow sodomy/pedo flag from all schools which receive government money.
Require middle and high school courses in taxes, personal finance, insurance, coding, cooking, home repair, car repair, self-defense, survival skills, etiquette, public speaking, and stress management.
Require daily weight lifting and running in PE classes at every level including publicly funded universities.

Taxes
Eliminate all state and federal income and sales taxes, to be replaced with Georgist land value taxes and import tariffs.
Swap the current maximum tax rates on income from work vs capital gains until Georgism is implemented and income tax eliminated.
End Prop 13 in California, to be replaced with a land value tax, with zero taxes on buildings.
Prohibit sales tax on used property which was already taxed per the full retail price when first sold. Ultimately eliminate sales tax in favor of a land value tax.
Prohibit all public sector unions, especially teachers unions and prison guard unions. Government workers may not unionize against the people they serve.

Voting
Free all of the imprisoned Jan 6th protestors and give them each the Congressional Medal of Honor for protesting the fraudulent 2020 election.
Arrest Ray Epps and the other FBI goons for conspiracy and incitement.
Eliminate all voting machines in favor of paper ballots alone because it is insane to give centralized control of the totals to Dominion and similar companies.
Eliminate ail mail-in voting or drop boxes; have only paper ballots with photo ID in person at a local school on that one day only, counted by each party; Israeli style.
Require proof of US citizenship to vote.
Establish the inalienability of the right to vote for all US citizens, whether in prison or not.
Publicly fund all congressional and presidential campaigns.
Set term limits for Congress: 6x for the House, and twice for the Senate, so 12 years each, maximum.
Require a roll call vote in both houses of Congress on the verbatim topic of any petition with more than 10% popular support, without amendments.

#politics

All of this could be classified as paleoconservatism



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« First        Comments 158 - 197 of 271       Last »     Search these comments

158   krc   2017 Feb 24, 10:56am  

Patrick - What about in the Men's Rights:
Marriage implies both parties agreement for procreation. Unmarried status: men should have equal post-conception rights and the ability to refuse financial obligation for a child where the woman unilaterally decides to continue the pregnancy.
I think there was a recent thread that discussed this in detail...

159   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 11:04am  

krc says

Unmarried status: men should have equal post-conception rights and the ability to refuse financial obligation for a child where the woman unilaterally decides to continue the pregnancy.

Yes, that's a favorite issue of mine, and I'd like to get there, but I think it feels like it would be hard to get enough support and I've already get 3 men's rights issues that seem more likely to get support:

Ban corporate HR department and university Title IX kangaroo courts.
Mandate paternity testing at birth. Eliminate all child support obligation for non-biological fathers.
Require courts to assume that a woman of age, voluntarily alone in a bedroom with a man, has consented to sex.

160   krc   2017 Feb 24, 11:51am  

Establish the inalienability of the right to vote for all US citizens, whether in prison "or" not.

161   krc   2017 Feb 24, 11:53am  

BTW - I think that your third point (assumption of sexual consent if in a bedroom) is more controversial than my point. But I understand...

162   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 12:17pm  

@krc you know what, you are right. I should add post-conception rights for men, because it is an injustice that they just don't have any.

I'll find a space.

163   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 12:18pm  

krc says

Establish the inalienability of the right to vote for all US citizens, whether in prison "or" not.

Thanks for pointing out the error! Fixed now.

164   BayArea   2017 Feb 24, 4:25pm  

I'm interested in hearing more about banning corporate HR.

Patrick, would you please explain your logic/reasoning ?

165   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 4:40pm  

BayArea says

I'm interested in hearing more about banning corporate HR.

Patrick, would you please explain your logic/reasoning ?

@BayArea thanks for the push. I expanded on the idea here:

https://patrick.net/1303363/2017-02-25-ban-kangaroo-courts-in-corporate-hr-and-university-title-ix-departments

166   BayArea   2017 Feb 24, 7:37pm  

Patrick thanks for sharing.

Regarding the Kangaroo courts, this is a topic that I don't think many people are very familiar with unless they've been through that system for some offense.

Thanks for bringing it to light.

167   MisdemeanorRebel   2017 Mar 10, 4:21pm  

Confine Colleges and Universities to plagarism and other scholastic offenses.

Educational Institutions that receive $1 of Federal (or State) Funding cannot expel or discipline students over suspected acts that would be considered Felonies. They must wait until a conviction is reached by a proper court.

Women's Studies Professors and Sociology Majors are not qualified to run a court judging Felonies, and since many allow the accuser not to testify...

168   Patrick   2017 Mar 10, 4:40pm  

Yes, good way to put it! I added your comment to my original post about kangaroo courts:

https://patrick.net/1303363/2017-02-25-ban-kangaroo-courts-in-corporate-hr-and-university-title-ix-departments

169   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 21, 5:36pm  

I'm on board, as long as the first $1000 of monthly salary, wages, independent contractors, or any contracts must be paid with physical metal silver, not paper from ANY bank, public or private. Perhaps people can be given the right to voluntarily accept it, but if in any month they choose not to, they must be paid within 48 hours in the physical metal.

and no employer or government can require somebody to accept paper banknotes that aren't 100% insured by a third party for 100% payment in physical upon demand.

This insures: Cash is permanently King, and no institution can control all the physical while doling out notes. This was a huge and forgotten problem in the late metallic era.

There's plenty of silver to do this.

I would also prefer that no foreign transactions can be paid with US minted coins, foreigners can only receive paper bank notes for the silver. Including repatriating profits from DeutscheTelekom (aka T Mobile), TikTok, etc.
170   Undoctored   2022 Oct 21, 6:14pm  

Patrick says

all federal laws must be read in their entirety by all legislators before they may vote on them
all federal laws must be clear enough that a 12-grade education is sufficient to understand them perfectly


I like these but how would they be enforced? Would we have to establish an independent Department to test the bills for readability, and the legislators for comprehension thereof?

Turns out something along these lines already exists for other governmental documents, thanks to the Plain Writing Act of 2010, so this idea isn’t too far fetched!

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/law/
171   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 7:30pm  

AmericanKulak says

no employer or government can require somebody to accept paper banknotes that aren't 100% insured by a third party for 100% payment in physical upon demand


Motion accepted!

I think a requirement to pay first $1000 in metal would be met with resistance because of the shipping.

AmericanKulak says

I would also prefer that no foreign transactions can be paid with US minted coins, foreigners can only receive paper bank notes for the silver.


Why though? To keep silver in the US?
172   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 7:31pm  

Undoctored says

I like these but how would they be enforced? Would we have to establish an independent Department to test the bills for readability, and the legislators for comprehension thereof?


The various reading levels are well-established. It would not be hard to test the bills for reading level.

And maybe legislators should indeed have to pass a comprehension test before they can vote on the bill!
173   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 21, 7:33pm  

Patrick says


Why though? To keep silver in the US?

Yeah. The Opium War wasn't just fought because of Opium, but because the trade imbalance was sucking China dry of metal currency to the point it was strangling the economy.

I'm happy with Siemens and Mercedes having to leave the silver in the US but can take the paper/digital notes back to Europe ;)

It also encourages those companies to invest the money back into the States in the form of expanded production (jobs, property taxes, etc.) rather than spend it back in Europe.
174   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 21, 7:37pm  

Oh, one other idea Patrick:

80% Reserve banks, that only can issue 20% more silver NOTES than the metal silver they take in, though they'd probably charge you more to bank with them and/or offer lower interest rates.

Two reasons for my restriction of banknotes, is that we remember fractional reserve banking issues more paper money than silver it takes in: It was no different with the Medicis, or 19th Century banks with metal, than it was with paper money. 1 oz. of deposit silver = 10-12oz. of banknotes, allegedly redeemable in silver. By forcing employers to pay a part of the wages in physical silver insures that people get physical money, and that it isn't all locked up in institutions that only give people paper representations of silver.
175   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 7:46pm  

I don't know enough about the implications of those to have an opinion.

Mercantilism was the attempt to increase the amount of silver and gold in a country, and I think that policy was a failure in the long term, distracting from actual production of good and services.

As for reserve levels, there should be some risk to depositors who put money in a bank to be lent out if they want to share in the bank profits, ie getting interest on their deposit. After all, as soon as the currency is physical metal silver coins by weight, there would be only two reasons to deposit with banks:

1. secure storage
2. participation in the profits from bank lending

Inflation would not longer be much of a concern. So maybe you should either pay for storage, or pay nothing and get interest - but also take the risk of loss because of bank runs or defaulting borrowers.

How about this, which I just added:

banking as either storage of silver for a fee, or participation in the bank's lending risk and the bank's run risk for an interest payment
176   stereotomy   2022 Oct 21, 8:10pm  

AmericanKulak says

Patrick says



Why though? To keep silver in the US?

Yeah. The Opium War wasn't just fought because of Opium, but because the trade imbalance was sucking China dry of metal currency to the point it was strangling the economy.

I'm happy with Siemens and Mercedes having to leave the silver in the US but can take the paper/digital notes back to Europe ;)

It also encourages those companies to invest the money back into the States in the form of expanded production (jobs, property taxes, etc.) rather than spend it back in Europe.

I thought it was the other way around - the English so loved their tea (produced by China) that the tea trade was depleting English silver. This was because the Chinese would only accept silver as payment. The English were frantic to find a commodity that the Chinese would buy (because they weren't buying anything else from England but their silver in exchange for tea). They used the East India Company to cultivate vast poppy plantations in India - this was a two-fer for the English: Addict the Chinese on opium and take enough Indian land out of food cultivation to create epic famines that killed millions of "wogs."

The English subsidized a fleet of privateers to smuggle opium into China. At it's height, about 25% of the entire Chinese population was addicted. This destroyed the Chinese civilization.

Why do you think the Chinese are smuggling all that fentanyl into the west? It's revenge for what was done to them almost 200 years ago.
177   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:12pm  

Maybe tea brought silver into China and opium took silver out of China.
178   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:13pm  

stereotomy says

The English subsidized a fleet of privateers to smuggle opium into China. At it's height, about 25% of the entire Chinese population was addicted. This destroyed the Chinese civilization.


Yes, and I've read that opium was the downfall of the Ottoman Empire as well.

I finally came across a negative about the Parsis of India: they first got rich in the opium trade with China.
179   stereotomy   2022 Oct 21, 8:18pm  

Patrick says

Maybe tea brought silver into China and opium took silver out of China.

That was probably the quid pro quo - subsidize the privateers, then get a cut of their black market silver haul.
180   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:20pm  

stereotomy says


and take enough Indian land out of food cultivation to create epic famines that killed millions of "wogs."


But why would the British actually want to kill Indians in a famine?

Even in Ireland, I don't think it was the deliberate policy to kill the Irish through famine. It was only that the "rights of (English) landords" were to be protected and Britain provided with beef from Ireland. The British didn't really care how many Irish died.
181   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:34pm  

Here's where I got the idea of limiting "safety" regulations:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/why-you-should-be-a-one-issue-voter


let me tell you a story:
the wife of one of my closest friends had a business making baby clothes. she was a graphic designer and was doing fairly well creating fun images to put on all cotton onesies made by manufacturers and selling them. there was a rapidly booming business segment of others like her. it turns out parents like unique, local, interesting baby gear.

now, who did NOT like this gear were the big companies in the space. it took customers. it took revenues. and there was no way they could compete because their cycle times for small batch production were seasons vs weeks. these little companies could have ten new products in the time it took gap kids to release one.

so the “industry” collaborated with “the regulators” and decided that new “safety rules” were needed. suddenly, you just could not trust a cotton onesie that 10’s of thousands of kids had worn or the silk screen paints used for a generation. every single SKU had to be individually tested for safety because “hey, you never know, maybe the exact same footie pajamas with the exact same paints is now deadly dangerous because the picture on it is a sailboat and not a bunny!”

this destroyed an entire cottage industry at a stroke. the cost to test was on the order of $25k per SKU; no big deal for gap, far in excess of SKU revenue for all the small players who, in aggregate, were cutting into profits but who, alone, could never afford this. it was custom crafted to look like safety while actually being a precise tactical strike against innovation and competition. there was never a safety issue, only a set of vested interests in oligopoly and anti-consumer behavior.

it was easy to blow this ball by an unsuspecting public. almost no one outside industry even noticed it and those that did saw tepid media stories about “new safety rules protect toddlers! even industry giants support this common sense legislation!” and so 1000 small businesses died and a few big companies retained a hammerlock on kiddie clothes.

and once you start digging into regulation, how it is made, and what it is for, you realize that this story is EVERYWHERE.
182   Patrick   2022 Oct 22, 10:34pm  

https://www.hennessysview.com/p/a-constitutional-amendment-to-control


A Constitutional Amendment to Control the Administrative State
The greatest threat to freedom is the federal bureaucracy. We must attack it from every angle. ...

While my proposal will not kill the beast, it will cripple and slow the bureaucracy, making it an easy target for the kill shot.

I propose a Constitutional amendment talked about since the Reagan administration: a cap on the growth of federal outlays. ...

The amendment would simply fix (or cap) the federal budget at a certain percentage of US GDP. The budget could exceed GDP only by a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress and only for the current fiscal year.

Further, if a decline in GDP during a fiscal puts the federal budget over the ceiling, the following year’s budget must “pay back” the excess in nominal dollars. (If FY1’s spending exceeded the revised GDP cap by $600 billion, FY2’s budget must be $600 billion below its expected limit.) In short, Congress must return to the taxpayers excess spending, even if spent by accident.

The amendment might read something like this:

The sum of appropriations of the United States government shall not exceed [number] percent of gross domestic product in any fiscal year, except by a vote of two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate. Nor shall actual outlays by the Executive exceed [number] percent of gross domestic product in any fiscal year. Outlays in excess of this limit in any fiscal year shall be returned to the Treasury in the following fiscal year.

I’ll leave it to the lawyers to re-write until it actually works. I’m just getting things started for you.


I like it.
184   Patrick   2022 Oct 29, 11:23am  

This is why federal revenue also has to be limited by ending the federal income tax.
185   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 29, 7:50pm  

stereotomy says

I thought it was the other way around - the English so loved their tea (produced by China) that the tea trade was depleting English silver. This was because the Chinese would only accept silver as payment. The English were frantic to find a commodity that the Chinese would buy (because they weren't buying anything else from England but their silver in exchange for tea). They used the East India Company to cultivate vast poppy plantations in India - this was a two-fer for the English: Addict the Chinese on opium and take enough Indian land out of food cultivation to create epic famines that killed millions of "wogs."

It was... but once opium took off in China, the imbalance went the other way and the Chinese had no silver taels for their own internal economy.
186   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 29, 7:51pm  

Patrick says

But why would the British actually want to kill Indians in a famine?

They didn't. And there were regular famines in India not more than a decade apart going back 1000s of years.

In fact, I think in the 1700s before the British began puppeting huge swaths of India in earnest, there was a massive famine that had nothing to do with Bengal Opium or anything else, just a bad mansoon destroying crops.
187   Patrick   2022 Oct 30, 7:01pm  




OK, Ted is with me on this!
188   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2022 Oct 30, 7:13pm  

abolish all taxation and spending, fuck this government
189   NuttBoxer   2022 Oct 31, 10:18am  

I wish I could find a place that would pay me in metals. It's the next level up from changing dollars to pesos. I'd actually take a pay cut as long as they paid based a fixed weight.
190   Patrick   2022 Oct 31, 11:00am  

Patrick says

constitutional amendment prohibiting interventionism; American soldiers must never fight except against invasion of America, per George Washington's advice




192   AmericanKulak   2022 Nov 3, 2:10pm  

Replace the income tax with a 10% baseline tariff on imports. Including Canada and Mexico.
193   Misc   2022 Nov 3, 2:23pm  

AmericanKulak says

Replace the income tax with a 10% baseline tariff on imports. Including Canada and Mexico.


Comes nowhere even close to the amount raised by the income tax. We have about $3.5 trillion in imports.

Income taxes are about $2 trillion.
194   Patrick   2022 Nov 3, 2:45pm  

Misc says

Comes nowhere even close to the amount raised by the income tax.


Exactly!

Starve the beast.

Limit the amount of money flowing to the Federal government to 1% of GDP maximum.
195   Misc   2022 Nov 3, 2:49pm  

Patrick says


Misc says


Comes nowhere even close to the amount raised by the income tax.


Exactly!

Starve the beast.

Limit the amount of money flowing to the Federal government to 1% of GDP maximum.



If you limit the powers on Nation States to that degree, then the world ends up under the ownership of corporations, or more probably the US ends up under the ownership of China.
196   Patrick   2022 Nov 3, 3:02pm  

I don't see how that follows.

The nation would still be responsible for defense and trade with other countries.

The corporations would still be subject to US laws.
197   Misc   2022 Nov 3, 3:09pm  

The US GDP is about $23 trillion. 1% of that would be about $230 billion.

We spend more than that on pensions alone.

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