Skip to main content

"Ideas" Primary survey

I just checked the mail and behold I just got a survey from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  They really want my input on the survey to help guide policy in the coming election season.  The trouble is that when it comes to politics every word in a statement needs to be given scrutiny five times over to make sure you know the meaning before you agree to it.  As such this "survey" is mostly a questionnaire on "How much do you agree with the policy positions we have already decided on?"

Noticeably absent from the survey is any mention of a Green New Deal, reforms to student loan programs and higher education to make it all more affordable, or even the medicare for all program that Bernie Sanders championed and some of the other prospective candidates for the 2020 Presidential election have supported.  This survey is more of a confirmation letter that the Democratic Party still isn't listening.

I can appreciate that the Trump administration has rallied the base and caused moderates to swing more towards the Democratic Party but making half of the "survey" questions about how much do you hate Trump's policies it makes the whole thing feel negative.  Hillary ran her campaign on a tactic of negativity towards Trump and how scary his Presidency would be and she lost.  (Trump sort of did the same thing keeping it negative against Hillary but Republicans respond to fear and hatred more than Democrats do.)

In the mean time I want to talk about what each candidate has in mind for a Green New Deal and how they would get it past and implement it.  (I tend to think that most of a Green New Deal should be done at the State level and all the Federal Government should do is change how their energy subsidy programs work, right now they favor fossil fuels and tilt the market in favor of coal, gas and oil.)

I want to hear what ideas there are for improving the Affordable Care Act.  I want to know what medicare for all would do because the financial structure of our healthcare system would change drastically if that happened and the short term transition would likely be a mess.

I want information on what they plan to do about the Dreamers act.  It seems like it should be as simple as saying, "If you can prove that you have lived continuously in the United States since Primary School and have a clean arrest record you are eligible for Amnesty, if you have an arrest record you can file an appeal for review.

Something that is a little more important to me than other people but which I would really like to know about...  I want to hear what the position is on funding science, engineering, and technology research in this country.  When I was a teenager we lead the world in funding science research but since Bush's cutting of funding for environmental research and pushing a more faith based approach and now Trump's attacks on science....  We should all be concerned about this.

Image result for global science funding by country

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

American Pride, The Memoir of a Future President, Part 2 Go Planet!

 It's no surprise that I came to the book "50 Things Kids Can Do To Save The World".  The world decided for me that I was going to be an environmentalist.  Some of my first and most indelible memories are images of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.  The dead birds, fish, ect... covered in oil all from ONE  accident.   Like many young Michiganders I grew up spending many a hot summer day on the beaches of Lake Michigan.  Too see an area similar to one of my happy places turned to ruin in days... leaves a mark on your brain similar to the first time your family pet dies.  I love this and something terrible has happened to it. You have to treasure the good things in your life while you have them, and that includes the natural beauty around you.  That was something I learned early. It is also true that kids latch on to things and don't let them go.  I got in to recycling, big time.  The local community waste transfer center started...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ideas primary

There is only 18 months to the next US presidential election so naturally the campaigning is already in full swing.  😒 The Democrats are doing something right now called an Ideas Primary, which I kind of love the idea of.  One of the things that America as a whole needs is a an open stage to throw out ideas and have a robust conversation about the direction of the country. The trouble is that a lot of the new progressives that have been elected back in the midterm election last November are being treated as fringe candidates with fringe ideas and those ideas are not getting talked about in this ideas primary.  If it wasn't for Bernie Sanders we probably wouldn't even be talking about Medicare For All, and it is troubling for me that there isn't much talk about a Green New Deal. I think what I would really like to see in an ideas primary is a town hall where organizers from the Black Lives Matter, The Parkland Students, Greta Thunberg or someone like her, someone th...
Post a Comment
Read more

American League Division Series, Detroit vs Cleveland

 You know what's great about this series?  Two teams from two cities in an area the coastal folks call "the rust belt" but should be better known as the Great Lakes Watershed. Detroit has been through some really tough times in the last 30 years, you'll have that when all of your economic base leaves for cheaper labor markets. Cleveland has been through some really tough times in the last 30 years, you'll have that when your economic base pollutes the land and waterways so badly the river catches on fire regularly. These are major American cities, both of them degraded by decades of corporations chasing cheap labor,  lacks environmental protections, pre-1970s, that left a scarred landscape that 50 years of the clean water, clear air, RCRA, and Superfund sites has only recently started to show real improvement.  And lets not forget the trade deals that hollowed out Detroit and Cleveland for imports from China and Mexico. Detroit and Cleveland... I think you mean th...
Post a Comment
Read more