Cutting Kids Health in California, an Indirect Casualty of the Drug and Vice War
This shabby tactic promulgated by California’s movie star Governor is a distressingly common practice in politics sometimes called the Washington Monument Gambit –
See! See! If I don’t get my way we’ll be so broke I’ll have to close the Washington Monument (or National Parks or whatever) something high profile that people care about or need.
Really to get our economic house in order we need to legalize drugs and adult prostitution across the board and tax them. This would free up money from the criminal “justice” budget and raise vast amounts of revenue (the total crop seized was about $10 billion in 2007 thats 1$ billion US at a 10% tax only on the value of one drug seized ignoring criminal “justice” costs, the various other drugs that could be made legal , prostitution and so on. Its a vast cash cow.
The thing is though the drug war is a religious war more less, its a rational as the Inquisition and so reform, at least as long as these bozos are in office is pretty much a long slog.
What we need are better people in office. To get them is tricky. While I don’t think the Constitution will allow a ban on private campaign financing and unfortunately the powers that be will not allow 100% public financing ala my article on The Seminal and/or having the districting done by outside 3rd parties to prevent gerrymander districts like we have here in California.
This kind of leaves us stuck.
However if we did this state by state and you combined the two ideas above with the term limits we have in some places and some kind of mandatory voting scheme (vote or you get no tax deductions say) plus “none of the above” option US politics would improve quickly.
What do you say folks?