Idea stolen from von. I had a hard time limiting it to 20, so I decided to just put in the extras. I think I may have too many opinions.
These are not in any sort of order.
1. Free trade is good. I’m married to an economist, so this is in my unwritten pre-nuptial agreement (along with voting Democratic and rooting against the Yankees.)
2. The United States has a moral obligation to intervene to stop an imminent genocide. There will be times when our own national security makes this impossible, but those times are rarer than we’ve told ourselves. Even when military action is not possible, there is probably something we can do.
3. The Bush Doctrine of “pre-emption” is wrong, contrary to our history and ideals, and bad for our national interests in the long run. 9/11 should change our thinking about self-defense, but what it changes is when a threat is imminent, not whether it’s justified to unilaterally invade when there is no imminent threat.
4. In foreign policy, it is sometimes necessary to make a deal with the deal with the devil to keep yourself alive–but more often it is not necessary, and will come back to bite you.
5. Gay marriage is a civil rights issue, and as such it is perfectly appropriate for the courts to intervene.
6. I don’t know exactly what a “living Constitution” is, but it’s certainly preferable to a dead or frozen one. You have to be faithful to the text in a real way, but there’s no reason to lock in what the meaning was in 1787 (or 1871 or whenever an amendment passed.) If “equal protection of the law” means anything, it includes women, and yet they did not see this at the time.
7. There are two big structural problems with the federal government. One, it underrepresents the larger states more than it should. The President should never be free to disregard as many people as live in New York and California without political consequences, and the structure of the Senate really skews things. As the Senate can’t be changed and the electoral college won’t be changed, I’m not quite sure what can be done about this. Two, the House should not be as uncompetitive as it is. It’s supposed to be the free wheeling popular branch. Four incumbents lost elections in 2002–four! We need to change our redistricting process so that the voters choose their Congressmen instead of vice versa.
8. SUVs are bad. I can’t see over them, they take up more space on the road, they’re dangerous, and their mileage is terrible. If people want to drive around in giant oafish things instead I suppose it’s their business, but there is no good reason to exempt them from the fuel efficiency requirements–unless the drivers would prefer to follow the same rules as trucks about not driving in parkways or the left lane, and pay truck tolls. Also, their insurance should reflect the damage they do in two car collisions (or automakers should make them less dangerous, better still.)
9. The minimum wage and the capital gains tax cut should both be adjusted for inflation.
10. Our tax code should be much simpler and less riddled with loopholes than it is, but progressive taxation of income should be the major way the government raises money.
11. We need an estate tax, though we can exempt small businesses and farms. If I were queen of the tax code I would use the proceeds to make it financially possible for every kid who qualified to go to a good public university–education, not a big chunk of inheritance at age 40-55, is how we pass down wealth to our children.
12. Every child should have an equal opportunity for a good elementary and high school education. If I thought vouchers would bring that, I might be willing to overlook the real First Amendment problems. I don’t think they will. I do support public school choice.
13. The biggest public policy problem that gets the least attention in the U.S. is the lack of affordable housing. Rent control is not the answer, though (it’s in the unwritten economist pre-nup).
14. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. To prove we mean it about the rare, pro-choice groups should work to make sure that the morning after pill is well known and widely available, as well as increasing quality and use of birth control. So should pro-life groups, but that’s not going to happen so we might as well get started.
15. The death penalty is wrong.
16. Even if it weren’t, the way we administer it would be wrong. If we haven’t killed an innocent person, it’s sheer luck and we probably will soon. We’ve certainly sent innocent people to prison. The state of legal defense for poor people in this country is a national disgrace.
17. Marijuana should be legalized. Failing that, the penalties should be reduced and they should concentrate anti-drug education on the really harmful drugs. The scare tactics on pot lose them a lot of needed credibility.
18. I’m very pro-immigration. Obviously, as much of it as possible should be legal. But there are steps I’m not willing to take to reduce the amount of illegal immigration.
19. Our local government law, and our state and federal law about local governments, is terrible. It encourages inequality and suburban sprawl. This is an overlooked environmental isssue but it is also about a sense of place and community. I was born in New York City; I do not want to accept that we cannot build any more great cities. I lived two years in Maine near Acadia national park; I do not want our parks and open spaces to disappear. I lived most of my life on Long Island; I find it profoundly depressing that the whole country is starting to look like that. I feel very strongly about this even when I do not have an exam on the subject this Friday.
20. Environmental regulations are a good thing but should be done in the most efficient way possible–so like von said, tradeable pollution permits that slowly decrease in number.
21. The best thing President Bush has done is increase our commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa, but we can still do a lot more.
22. We need to give real attention to protecting nuclear weapons, nuclear materials, and chemical and biological weapons in the former USSR and elsewhere. Whatever you think about Iraq, this will do more to protect us in the short run and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.
oh, and 23:
Cats. And I’m not saying that just to appease our gun-toting logo.
Katherine,
You do realize the contradiction inherent in 2 and 3 right? Wouldn’t you call what Saddam did to the Kurds genocide?
On the whole, you’re hopeless…oh wait!
You root against the Yankees? All is forgiven, you are an exemplary human being 🙂
Hi Katherine,
For what it’s worth, the US has been spending tens of millions (maybe even close to $100M) each year for most of the last decade doing positive things about ABC weapons in the ex-USSR. Stuff like paying nuclear scientists’ salaries, helping them engage in non-defense research, strengthening physical security at storage sites, transporting stuff away from insecure sites and so on. This was a bipartisan initiative known as Nunn-Lugar, and the program is called Cooperative Threat Reduction. So far, so good.
In the last budget, President Bush wanted to stop funding this program. (Or at the very least, drastically cut it back; I don’t have the figures in front of me.)
This was either stupid and dangerous, or extremely cynical. If he really wanted to stop spending money on prevention, it’s one of the worst penny-wise and pound-foolish moves I can think of in all of our national security choices. If he was just pretending to want a stupid and dangerous policy, knowing that someone in Congress would reinstate the funding, then he is playing a cynical game of chicken with a program that protects all Americans from loose nukes. Either way it’s near-criminal negligence.
spc67–No, no contradiction, and not because I deny Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds. Intervene to prevent an imminent genocide, not to punish a genocide 10 years previous. And I had plenty of doubts about whether to oppose the Iraq war, but the Bush Doctrine is a separate thing, which I oppose unequivocally. It’s possible to support the war and oppose the doctrine–as do Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, John Edwards, and many others.
Intervene to prevent an imminent genocide, not to punish a genocide 10 years previous.
So there is a statute of limitations? Or once it starts it’s too late to intervene? Aren’t you concerned he’d do it again…say with the Marsh Arabs? Once he’s done it twice, isn’t it time to act before he does it again?
The key word imminent. There’s too many homicidal dictators in the world to take out all of them after the fact. If you’re going in on humanitarian grounds you go where you can save the most lives. You also go in multilaterally if at all possible. If the dictator of God-knows-where decides to commit genocide tomorrow, we won’t be able to do much about it; we’re stretched thin and our alliances are in big trouble.
Samantha Power said the war in Iraq would probably make Iraq a safer place and the world a more dangerous place. I’m inclined to agree.
K, a world without Saddam in charge of an army and petrodollars is inherently safer.
well, we disagree. (Saddam not in charge, all other things equal is safer, but all things are not equal.) after a certain point there’s not much more to be said. But I don’t think there’s an inherent contradiction between 2 and 3.
ok, off I go to further indoctrinate myself on point 19.
Mostly agreement here, Katherine. Except I think there’s a world of potential screwups between the hope for these things and actually getting them.
The death penalty…my position is, not necessarily wrong, but not right. It’s wrong to spend more money trying to kill someone than you’d have spent on life imprisonment. That’s even assuming you’ve established beyond all doubt that they committed the crime.
As for SUVs, you make some good points and some not-so-good points. Perhaps they ought to be classified as trucks, but their primary use as passenger cars throws that into question. And if you want to make insurance cognizant of the extra damage they cause in 2-car accidents, you also have to make insurance more cognizant of the extra damage econoboxes take over their more weighty cousins. Finally, the size issue just doesn’t wash, unless you dictate Federal or State size restrictions. Otherwise, I can make an equally condemning case against minivans and pickups, because they’re all impossible to see over or around from my position behind the wheel of my Sentra.
It’s scary, Katherine, but it seems like the only thing we disagree on is point 23 – I’m a dog person.
One of my biggest interests is the way in which points 13 and 19 intersect – it’s very tough to come up with a local planning policy that creates affordable housing. I’m the reporter for the local paper in Malden, MA, and this is probably the biggest social-justice problem that I see on a regular basis. The gap between the sort of incomes people can earn and what they have to spend on housing (and health care) is big and getting bigger, and it makes a lot of people’s day-to-day lives completely unsustainable.
Seth–I was a reporter for a local newspaper in MA too. Scary. (The “Back Bay Courant” though, so it was all about subjects like those unsightly newspaper vending machines and whether the Christmas lights on the Commonwealth Avenue were good or bad. I must have written close to 100 stories for that paper and I now remember almost none of them. It’s weird.)
19 connects very much to both 12 and 13.
Slartibartfast: comparing damage in an individual accident doesn’t tell you everything about the risk for that vehicle. Larger vehicles are more likely to get into an accident in the first place — look up a Hummer’s braking distance sometime. A heavier vehicle is inherently harder to bring to a stop, or change directions in a hurry; throw in a high centre of gravity and you’ve overridden any safety advantage that greater robustness gives you, while increasing risks to other drivers.
Oh yeah, and the damned things are ugly as sin, too.
Oh yeah, and the damned things are ugly as sin, too.
Start outlawing vehicles because of their lack of beauty, and you’re going to have a whole lot of people throwing their cars straight into the crusher.
I happen to be mortally offended by rice, and I contend the world would be a better place without that crap on the road.
I live in New York, so I’ll use it as my example. There are average widths to the one way streets in my neighborhood. Say it’s 22 feet, just for argument’s sake.
You can park on either side of my street. Say the average non-SUV car is 6 feet across (again just for argument’s sake and easy math). That means with a car on each side of the street, I have 10 feet in the middle to drive down, but my car’s 6 feet wide too, so that leaves me 2 feet on either side when I drive through my street. (Which is close to accurate, I’d say, and currently a comfortable amount of space). NOTE: I don’t own a car currently, but I rent for a few days at a time occassionally, so I’ll continue….
Occassionally, a few trucks will park on my street and I’ll need to weave back and forth through the labyrinth, but with a regular sized car opposite them, it’s not so bad. Two trucks parked opposite each other present more of a challenge. And many New Yorkers have mid-sized to compact-sized cars (or at least they did when the streets were last re-engineered).
Now say we add 6 inches to the width of every car on the street…or, in other words, everyone on my street buys an SUV or Hummer. That’s 18 extra inches of car in the three-cars-across scenario (two parked, one driving). That leaves only 6 inches manuverability (three on either side) where before there was an average of 24 inches room.
Add those two trucks parked opposite each other and you start to need to back up the wrong direction down your own street just to park.
This is not an argument about the aesthetics of cars…just their width, and common sense.
I didn’t propose outlawing anything — though it would be nice not to have to subsidize them. I’m just pointing out that the “safer” argument is hooey, and that the “light trucks” loophole on safety and efficiency standards is big enough to drive a, er, truck through.
Edward:
Unless you outlaw the trucks, too, you’re not going to do yourself much good. Even if you up whatever local vehicle registration fees to absurd levels, there’ll still be those that will pay up. If you really want to get rid of the problem, just close your street to everything but bicycles. You could always charge an enormous surtax on SUVs toward the end of widening the streets to accomodate them. Thank God I don’t live in NYC. I thought Chicago was bad.
zrblm:
That’s more like it; I can get behind that.
Can’t improve on your points except to point out to the Randians that no man is an island.
Can’t improve on your points except to point out to the Randians that no man is an island.
To steal a line: However some men are peninsulas.