US Politics - The First Hundred Days - Winfield Patterson |
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George W. Bush will be President by the time you read this article. Here's what he should focus on in his first hundred days. 1. He should pardon Bill Clinton. It would make Bush look magnanimous, while ensuring that Clinton's name would forever sit next to Nixon's in the history books. Bush could frame it as an attempt at bipartisanship, term it an olive branch, a way to control the more vindictive wing of his (our) party and simultaneously guarantee that he would never be a serious factor in any political race in the future. 2. He should cut federal withholding taxes at the bottom of the tax brackets immediately. He could do so by extending a peace offering to the Dems and the public school teachers by offering to exempt teachers from federal withholding, which would pave the way for. . . 3. . . . school vouchers. Emphasize that taking kids out of the public schools, and giving them vouchers for private school education lowers the student-to-teacher ratio over all. And when coupled with a federal withholding exemption, doesn't punish educators. 4. Cut the capital gains tax from its current rate of about 35%, to a more reasonable 18-20%. 5. Eliminate the death tax. 6. Initiate some type of Voting Reform legislation, which tries to keep what happened in Florida from ever happening again. 7. Raise the maximum deductible amounts for 401k's and IRA's, and allow workers to choose to set aside a small percentage (say, 10-15%) of their current Social Security withholding to be diverted into those plans. Workers who choose to do so would get a cut in Social Security benefits later on, but would have more money saved privately and would be less of a burden on the system later on. Those are simple, effective, and dare I say, bipartisan pieces of legislation that would have positive effects very quickly and would be politically expedient, all at once. Long-term goals might include exempting volunteers from the federal income tax, renovating closed military bases into housing for homeless families and veterans, and allowing doctors who treat the indigent or uninsured to be exempt from withholding (We might also pair that up with some tort reforms.) Just a suggestion.
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