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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

All Our Base Are Belong To Us

Thomas Geoghegan's reminds Democrats that you have to feed your Base to win.

Geoghegan has ten proposals, and a few of them seem to me especially good.

Propose not to "save" a "fragile" Social Security system but to strengthen the best most popular social program in the United States by raising the entitlement from roughly 39% to fully 50% of income, and pay for this by lifting the cap on income and restoring the Estate Tax on millionaires and billionaires and sending the proceeds directly into the Trust.

Propose a buy-in to Medicare for Americans from age 55, paid for by a surcharge competitive with private insurance premiums.

Propose a cap on usury at 16% and starve the unproductive exploitative destabilizing financial casino-capitalism sector to death.

Propose that every American has the right to six consecutive paid vacation days a year by law -- I personally think this is genius.

Propose the ending or at any rate radical reform of the Senate filibuster.

He has ten proposals, and explains all of them at greater length than I did. These are my five favorites. I like the idea of a popular movement to support community banks more than his idea of small government banks, and I'm not entirely sure I fully agree with or even grasp the labor reform he proposes -- I'm still hoping we will hang onto majorities and get EFCA through before 2012 myself. I do happen to think filibuster reform, a usury cap, and medicare buy-in could all have a fighting chance in descending order in 2011, at least to be proposed and debated, especially if we all organized behind them, but since that would require people to push against a stone wall rather than whine and stamp about betrayal and threaten to stay home on election day when confronted with a stone wall, I'm not holding my breath. Geoghegan's premise is that the Party must feed its progressive base, so that comment of mine was not at all in the spirit of his essay -- but, then, I believe the progressive base should feed the party as we organize to take it over rather than the other way around. I don't know what the fate of the paid vacation proposal would be, it's not something I've thought through -- though I certainly think the American spirit of living to work rather than working to live is profoundly pathological and could use a tweak -- but I just love the visuals I'm imagining of the floor debates and all the Republicans opposing this with their privilege and vitriol against everyday Americans irresistibly boiling up to the surface over and over again. I also happen to think a second stimulus building a high speed interstate rail system and putting solar panels on rooftops in every American neighborhood would generate a lot of excitement and do a lot of good, and I like the idea of subsidizing the transformation of everyday American lawns into region appropriate edible landscaping, but Geoghegan doesn't have much to say in that department.

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