Income tax reform proposal: Part 2, some background

I was originally going to add this and tomorrow's post to the original post on the income tax policy, but realized that it would take you about half an hour to read through it and you'd probably break the scroll wheel on your mouse.  Ok, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I figured it would better to separate the topic into three separate posts.

So, here's part 2.

Let me explain some of my philosophy behind my view of the tax code, both as it currently stands and how I would reform it.  As the tax code stands, it is thousands of pages long and riddled by hundreds of deductions/credits/exemptions favoring various groups and interests.  In my opinion, that is the government trying to influence our actions.  Want to buy a car?  If you buy THIS type of car, you'll get a tax credit, but you won't if you buy THAT type of car.  If you are deciding whether to buy or rent, you get a tax deduction for buying (the mortgage interest deduction), but don't get one for renting.  And so on and so forth.

Another pet peeve I have with the current tax code is that it isn't fair in the slightest.  For the sake of making it a simpler explanation, I'm disregarding folks across the spectrum who itemize their deductions in a way that drastically lowers their tax bill--I'm only considering hypothetical people who take the standard deduction and that's it.  Under that scenario, the more money you make, the higher percentage you pay in taxes, which seems to me that it punishes you for being successful.  Before you cry that I am a fat cat who only supports the rich, let me preface this by saying I am firmly in the middle class, and much closer to the poor than I am to all those "millionaires" who make $200,000 or more a year.  I pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes now than I did when I first entered the work force.  I don't like that idea at all.  A personal anecdote: A friend of mine from college's dad got a promotion at work five or six years ago.  With his promotion came a roughly $7,500 raise...which bumped him into the next higher tax bracket.  With that raise and correspondng higher tax rate, his take home income actually declined by about $500 for the year.  So his $7,500 raise ended up costing him $8,000.  Sure sounds fair, huh?

So, where do I stand on the issue of the progressive tax structure and all you can eat deduction/credit/exemption buffet?  Trash 'em.  If you want to talk about people actually having to "pay their fair share," make the tax code fair to all, not just the targeted special interests.

Here's how it would break down (building on part one of the tax trifecta):

• Eliminate all the deductions, credits, and exemptions (except for the foreign tax paid exemption).  This will put everyone on the same page starting out.  In addition, it puts you, the citizen, fully in charge of what you'll do with your money.  The government's influence extends only to taking its cut from your paycheck.  It won't have any say over whether you buy this car or that one.  Or if you want to rent vs buy a house.  Or if you want to give to charity or keep your money.  Etcetera.  Your money, you decide what to do with it.
• Flattening the tax code puts everyone on the same page.  You will no longer be punished by higher taxes as you earn more income.  You pay the same rate on your income, whether you're making $25,000 a year or $25,000,000.  The more income you have, the higher your tax bill will be, but the rate you pay will be the same.  That way, no one can claim that another group is getting preferential treatment through the tax code.  Everyone is equal.

Is there anything from the current tax code I'd keep?  Yep, there are a two big things:

• Tax treatment of 401(k) plans.  I'm all about people saving for retirement, as seen in my Social Security proposal.  The 401(k) structure would continue almost unchanged, except that the limits on annual contributions would be eliminated.  Using either the traditional or Roth 401(k), you could put as little or as much of your income away for retirement as you'd like.  Totally up to you.  The reason I don't mind this is because you will end up paying the income tax on it, whether you do it now or when you start drawing on the payments at retirement.
• I'd possibly keep the tax treatment of medical insurance payroll deductions.  At this point, I can't say for sure, since I haven't come up with my healthcare reform proposal yet.

These reforms will have several effects:

1. The tax base will be very substantially widened, due to many more people now having to pay taxes, due to the eliminations of the loopholes in the tax code.
2. You are now placed in total control of your money, and have no pressure from the government to use it in one way or another.
3. With the widening of the tax base, your actual tax rate will most likely decline (5000 people each paying $500 in tax gives the government more revenue than 500 people each paying $4,500 in tax, for example).
4. Class warfare through the tax code will cease to exist.
5. The US personal income tax code could be written on a single page.  It would take you about 30 seconds to file your taxes, and that could be done on a postcard.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Criticisms?  Suggestions?



NOTE: This is part two of the #1 NYT best selling trilogy on my income tax reform proposal.  Episode III, The Revenge of the Tax Statistics, will debut tomorrow.

Extremely rough draft of income tax overhaul proposal

The project that gave me the original seed that blossomed into the idea to start this blog was an overhaul of the income tax that I started back in June.  Well, that's when I started formalizing it, although I've been tossing around various components of the proposal since last fall.

The sheer size of this proposal is very daunting...especially since I'm doing all the research by myself, as I don't exactly have an army of staffers to do all menial work... :-)
The enormous scope of the tax code has also been an enormous point of contention for me.  It currently touches Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security/welfare.  I've already posted the bare framework of my proposal to reform Social Security (I'm still working on fleshing it out and will post the finalized product whenever I get there).  However, I have no plans to tackle Medicare/Medicaid/welfare anytime in the near future, so that will be a gap in my tax proposal until I eventually get around to that point.  Eh, that's not entirely true, I suppose.  I've been tossing ideas regarding welfare around with Meredith S. for six or seven months now, but haven't put them into a formal proposal.  I suppose that would be the first of the big three remaining proposals on my docket.

Anyways, I'm pulling data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Census Bureau, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Joint Committee on Taxation, Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  And that's the main reason I've been slogging away at this thing for a year--there is an insane amount of data to sift through, and much is duplicated to one degree or another by several of the agencies I'm using data from.  As an aside, that's a perfect of government duplicative work--one 224 page report was produced/more or less duplicated with variations by the BEA, OMB, BLS, and IRS.  The latest complete tax data from the IRS is from 2009, so that's the baseline I've been using for my calculations.  Between the seven groups I'm pulling data from, I've accumulated nearly 3000 pages of information (thankfully, I don't have to print it out!).  Sifting through it by myself is one heck of a way to begin to consider that I may be a masochist...

All the background out of the way, here is the framework of my proposal. This doesn't include my scoring of the proposal--like my Social Security proposal, I'll post those later on, once I've ironed out the details.

• Completely eliminate the current tax code
• Base the new tax code on the Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines 

2011 HHS Poverty Guidelines

Persons in Family	48 Contiguous States and D.C.	Alaska	Hawaii
1	$10,890	$13,600	$12,540
2	14,710	18,380	16,930
3	18,530	23,160	21,320
4	22,350	27,940	25,710
5	26,170	32,720	30,100
6	29,990	37,500	34,490
7	33,810	42,280	38,880
8	37,630	47,060	43,270
For each additional person, add	3,820	4,780	4,390

• Any income above the applicable poverty level is taxed at a flat 12%, no matter the source of income
• Salary, dividend, inheritance, gift, capital gains, proceeds, anything and everything--if it's money in your pocket, it's taxable at the 12% rate
• There are no credits/exemptions/deductions with the exception of the foreign tax paid deduction
• To determine your tax bill, you'd simply look at what your applicable poverty level is on the chart, then figure out what 12% of your income above that level is--see below for two case studies
• Unless the size of your family decreases during the year, the only way you'd get a refund at the end of the year is if your taxes during the year don't take into account the poverty line (eg, if your salary for the first seven months of the year puts you below the poverty line, but the 12% tax has been assessed on it)
• If you don't pay income taxes, you don't get any money back, and if you do pay in, it would be impossible under any circumstances to get back more than you paid in

Case study #1) 

Molly is a married woman with three kids in Louisville, KY, and her household income for the year from all sources is $730,900.  Looking at the chart, she notes that the applicable poverty level for her family is $22,350.  To calculate her taxable income, she subtracts the poverty level from her gross income, which gives her taxable income of $708,550.  She then multiplies that by .12 to determine her family's tax bill, which comes out to $85,026.  That gives her family an effective tax rate of 11.63%.

Case Study #2

William is a single man with no kids in Charleston, SC, and his income for the year from all sources is $25,000.  Looking at the chart, he notes that the applicable poverty level for him is $10,890.  To calculate his taxable income, he subtracts the poverty level from his gross income, which gives him a taxable income of $14,110.  He then multiplies that by .12 to determine his tax bill, which comes out to $1,693.20.  That gives him an effective tax rate of 6.77%.

Here are a few things I'm currently trying to figure out, besides scoring the proposal:

• Should the tax rate be 12% or 15% (15% was my original rate, but I recently lowered it to 12%, and am now struggling over which works better)? 
• Should the poverty level be the base, or should the tax be on ALL income, regardless of how much or little you've made during the year?
• If the poverty level is the base, should it be a flat rate across the contiguous US as it currently is, or should it be adjusted based on geographical region?  That is, should NYC have a higher poverty level than Middle of Nowhere, KS?

What do y'all think?  Any comments/thoughts/criticisms/suggestions?

NOTE - This is part one of three on the preliminary scope of my income tax reform proposal before I fully score it.

Solyndra: What went wrong?

By now, unless you live in a hole in the ground, you've probably heard something about Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that recently declared bankruptcy and laid off over 1,000 employees in California.  Many of the articles I've seen on the subject focus only on the political ramifications for the Obama administration and the political side of the story in general.  That's all fine and dandy, but what actually went wrong with the company?

To answer that question, you need to first know a bit of the company's backstory.  Founded in 2005, Solyndra's product was a departure from your typical solar panel.  The conventional solar panel, as I'm sure you've probably seen before, is a relatively large, flat panel covered with photovoltaic cells, usually composed of polysilicon.  Solyndra's solar panels weren't panels at all--they were thin tubes covered with a chemical coating.  Much lighter and smaller than traditional solar panels, they were easier to install.

So, Solyndra was founded in 2005 with this product, bucking the solar panel market trend.  Due to the custom manufacturing process inherent with this type of solar array, production costs were quite high.  However, in 2008 (around when the company first started to really enter the market), prices on the polysilicon that its competitors used for their panels were sky high and the green energy movement was all the rage.  The idea was that the solar movement would really take off, and increased production efficiencies and economies of scale would drive production costs down, to the point where it would cost less to produce a solar cylinder than they could sell them for.  That's right, Solyndra started out selling its solar arrays at a pretty steep loss. 

By 2009, Solyndra was selling its arrays at a loss of $0.76 per watt (it cost $4 per watt to manufacture the cylinders, but they could only sell them for $3.26 per watt).  Starting in late 2008 and continuing in 2009, the price of the polysilicon that its competitors used took an 80% nosedive.  All of the sudden, Solyndra's questionably nifty idea to use a non-polysilicon material for its arrays didn't look so hot.  To be fair, who expects the price of the key commodity in your industry to decrease by 80% in a year?  In 2009, Solyndra's main US rival, First Solar (who made conventional polysilicon solar panels) was able to make its solar panels for around $1 per watt, so they were raking in the money at that point.  On a side note, due to increased efficiency, lower materials prices, yada yada yada, First Solar now makes its solar panels for around $0.75 per watt.

In 2009, Solyndra had a net loss of $172.5 million on $100.5 million in revenue.  They spent $273 million that year and only brought in $100.5 million.  Not sustainable in the slightest.

Now, with the business side of the story taken care of, let's trace the money that allowed this all to happen.

After being founded in 2005, Solyndra quickly attracted large amounts of capital from investors.  Between 2005 and 2008, Solyndra raised nearly $1 billion in private equity investments.  With a risky business model as described above, how was Solyndra able to acquire so much capital?  Two names, those of its financial adviser and its main investor: Goldman Sachs and George Kaiser.  'Nuff said.

Enter 2009 and the Stimulus.  Over the next couple of years, the Obama administration approved nearly $550 billion in loan guarantees to Solyndra using Stimulus funding, beginning with the first announcement in March 2009.  In January 2009, however, the Bush administration had turned down Solyndra's request due to Solyndra not being considered a good investment.  Two months apparently changed the minds of the aparatchiks in Washington.  I'm sure there was no political pressure to approve the loan in March--must have just been a coincidence.

What did Solyndra do with the hundreds of billions of dollars that it recieved from the government?  Remember, in 2009, Solyndra was $172.5 million dollars in the red...  With a business model going down in flames, a lackluster customer base, and no real improvement in sight, Solyndra kicked off construction on an approximately $500 million new plant in California.  Shockingly, the product continued to not sell as well as projected, and costs were still much higher than revenue.  Fast forward to 2011 and the bankruptcy.

So there you have it: terrible business model and rather poor business decisions by Solyndra executives, mixed in with a dash of political favoritism, stirred together vigorously, and you've got a bankrupt company that has put the government on the hook for over half a billion dollars.

(Note--to clarify about the federal loan guarantee: the government didn't actually give the money to Solyndra, but it was on the hook for paying those loans in the case of Solyndra failing, which has happened.)

1st, very rough draft of my proposal to reform Social Security

I’ve been working on a Social Security reform proposal for a few weeks now.  The government doesn’t explicitly collect a lot of the data I need to flesh it out, so I gotta comb through an insane amount of mind numbingly boring data to find what I need, so it’s been a ridiculously slow process.  I'm hoping to have all the data within the next few weeks.

Anyways, without many of the numbers to back it up and score the proposal, here’s my rough draft—once I actually find all the pertinent data, I most likely will have to modify this to make it work.

• The retirement age will be raised six months every two years until it reaches 10 years less than the median life expectancy for the US (currently at 78.3, meaning the retirement age would be raised to 68.3)
• After it reaches that benchmark, it is adjusted every four years to maintain that 10 year mark
• Everyone’s Social Security taxes will be immediately rolled over into a private market IRA administered by the government
• The government will charge a 1% fee on interest earned by the account—that will pay for the government’s admin fees and overhead
• If you are 60 years or older, your benefit amount will not change
• If you are 55-59, 95% of your benefit amount will roll over
• If you are 50-54, 85% of your benefit amount will roll over
• If you are 45-49, 75% of your benefit amount will roll over
• If you are 40-44, 65% of your benefit amount will roll over
• If you are 35-49, 55% of your benefit amount will roll over
• If you are 18-34, 50% of your benefit amount will roll over
• The government will guarantee the amount you have contributed into the account during your lifetime
• Any interest the account has earned is yours (minus that 1% cut the government takes as its admin fee)
• If you’ve contributed $300,000 in SS taxes in this system and it has earned $40,000 in interest, you’d get a payout of at least $340,000 (I’m not counting the compound interest in this figure, so it would most likely actually be a good deal higher than $340,000)
• If the stock market has tanked and you’ve had net negative growth on the account, resulting in an account only worth $280,000 at retirement, the government would make up the $20,000 shortfall, giving you a net payout of $300,000
• Upon retirement, your account is converted into an interest earning annuity and you are given several different term payout options
• The default would be equal monthly payments from your account for 15 years (so if you had $340,000 from the above example at retirement, the default monthly payment would be $1,888.88—again, I’m not counting compound interest in this calculation)
• You could also select 10 or 20 year payout options (which would give you monthly payments of $2,833.33 or $1,416.66, respectively)
• Your selection could be changed once a year
• Any benefits left over once you die could be willed to someone else
• All the money that the younger folks forfeit when the taxes are initially rolled over into the new accounts would go towards paying the benefits of those currently retired or about to retire under the existing system
• On the face of it, that sucks for the younger crowd, but…do any of us actually think we’ll see a dime of the money we’re paying into the system now under the current plan?  I know I don’t, so given the choice between getting none of my money back at retirement or getting half of it back at retirement is a no-brainer choice for me

Besides getting the numbers to back everything up, there are a couple details I need to hammer out:

• Ideally, for each age group, there would be a tiered rollover amount.  For example, someone who is 35 might get 55% of the SS taxes they’ve paid rolled over into the new account, while someone who is 36 might get 56% rolled over.  Something along those lines—just need to figure out how I’d go about setting the increments.
• The whole thing about using the money folks forfeit during the rollover period for paying those who are currently retired/about to retire needs a lot of work.  I don’t have any numbers to back it up, so the end result might look substantially different.

And not a point that needs to be hammered out, just some background—private market IRAs have had much better historical returns than has Social Security.  That would allow folks to get bigger bang for their buck and the 1% fee on interest would give the government enough overhead/admin fees to run the program with and not have to dip into the actual accounts to fund the operation.

Analysis of the President's latest job plan

I watched the second half of the President's jobs speech on Thursday and read the full transcript.

First, one utterly non-substance related comment.
Good lord, Congress sure got a leg workout during the speech!  It seemed like they were standing up to clap (at least, the Democrats were doing it, since a lot of people didn't stand up all the time) every time Obama paused to take a breath.  I wouldn't be surprised if some of the elderly Congressmen had to be helped out of there afterwards.

Now, onto the speech itself.
I was quite disappointed, both with how the speech was delivered and with the content.  To be fair, I didn't go into it with high expectations, but after all the hype this speech got for the last month, I fully expected more oomph.  I heard/read a lot of rhetoric and political platitudes (talk about a lot of sound bites for his campaign, good grief!), not to mention lots of attacks on straw men.  That last part, the straw man argument, has been standard for Obama's speeches since he was Candidate Obama, so it didn't surprise me in the slightest.  And the whole "pass this now" mantra got really old really quick.  In terms of style, that component of the speech just rubbed me the wrong way, coming across as desperate.  Whatever I think of his policies, that just smacked of bad speech writing.

Anyhoo, the White House released a fact sheet in conjunction with the speech, since the President didn't actually lay out any of the specifics of the plan in his speech.  That part irked me the most--why have such a special speech when none of the specifics are actually laid out in the speech and are released separately? Back on point, I've examined the fact sheet and will attempt to try and grade each proposal objectively.  I'm grading each component separately, as the whole package will not make it through Congress as a single bill.

Tax cuts for small businesses

-Cut the payroll tax in half for the first $5 million in revenue companies have through 2012.

In general, I like tax cuts.  However, due to the temporary nature of this one, not to mention the poor financial state of the entitlements, this doesn't make sense.  All I see happening with this, best case scenario, is moving hiring forward a bit, kinda like what Cash for Clunkers did with auto sales.  After the tax reduction is phased out in 2013, it is then a 100% payroll tax for companies hiring after that.  I can't think of many businesses that don't plan more than one year out.  In addition, Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid are all on shaky financial footing.  Halving the revenue of those programs will speed up their decline.

Grade: C+

-Eliminate payroll tax for adding new workers or increasing wages up to $50 million above previous year levels, through 2012.

Again, temporary nature of this--all I see it doing in the best case scenario is shifting hiring.  Where does that put companies in 2013?  It will effectively be a massive tax hike on companies at that point.

Grade: C+

-Extend 100% investment expensing through 2012.

Shifting investment spending.  In addition, I haven't seen any figures that show that the current 100% investment expensing has been of any benefit.

Grade: C

-Help small businesses access capital.

Even the fact sheet is pretty sketchy on the details.  One thing it does mention is speeding up government payments to small vendors.  That I like.  Without concrete details, I can't grade it on more than general concept.

Grade: B/B+

Putting workers back on the job

-Returning Heroes and Wounded Warriors tax credits of up to $5,600 and $9,600, respectively, for hiring vets and disabled vets who've been looking for work for more than six months.

Let me preface my analysis by saying I am very pro-troops.  That being said, I disagree with this proposal.  For one, it creates a new task force for this purpose, and I don't like the additional growth of government.  Two, most companies I know of give preference to vets already, so the tax credits are unnecessary in my opinion.  Most government contractors and the government itself give you a pretty big preference if you're a vet or disabled.  Three, the temporary nature of these tax credits.  Shifting hiring, yada yada yada.  When the tax credits expire, will companies still want to hire vets over everyone else?

Grade: C+

-Preventing the layoffs of firefighters, cops, teachers, and hiring thousands more with $35 billion.

This is a bandaid, nothing more.  Will cities and states be able to afford all those employees when the latest round of federal money runs out?  Most likely not, if the last few years are any indication.  In addition, what about all the other public employees who have been laid off, who aren't union members?

Grade: F

-Modernizing over 35,000 schools and spending $30 billion on school infrastructure, which will employ thousands of construction workers.

Sure, I agree with the concept.  I just don't think it should be the federal government's job to do that.  In addition, as with any construction project, this will take a loooong time.  Many such projects are measured in years from when the idea is first proposed to when ground is first broken.  As such, this will have a long term impact, but little impact on hiring in the short term (12 months or so)

Grade: D+

-Make an immediate $50 billion investment in roads, railroads, and airports.

This is even more of a long term impact than the school modernization effort.  Take the planned I-526 expansion in the Charleston, SC area.  The $500 million, seven mile expansion has been in the approval process at least since 2006.  Not shovel ready at all!

Grade: F

-Establish a National Infrastructure Bank with $10 billion in capital.

I don't mind the general concept of this idea.  While it has flaws, it puts the onus on the private sector, rather than the government, which I am completely a supporter of.  However, I don't like the effective subsidy process of giving loan guarantees.

Grade: B

-Invest $15 billion in rehabilitating foreclosed properties.

Shifting construction activity.  In addition, what happens if $50,000 has been spent rehabilitating a house and it still won't sell?  This concept is all fine and dandy, but I see serious pitfalls in how it would be carried out, and what impact it would have.

Grade: C-

-Expand high speed wireless access in a "deficit reducing" way.

Umm, I'll believe this one when I see it.  Zero details offered on this plan.  In addition, I don't think it should be the government's responsibility to do this.

Grade: D

Unemployment Insurance extension and new unemployment programs

-Extending 99 week unemployment date one more year.

Where's it going to end?  In addition, there are plenty of studies, including some by that fearless Keynesian economist, Paul Krugman, that extending unemployment insurance adds to structural unemployment.

Grade: F

-Work sharing programs--folks would be allowed to work fewer hours rather than being laid off, and would be able to draw UI benefits while doing so.

So you'd still be able to work part time and draw UI at the same time?  That doesn't make sense to me.

Grade: F

-Bridge to Work/reemployment programs--companies could hire unemployed folks as temporary or volunteer workers and they'd be able to continue to draw UI while they do so.

I see that being ripe with the potential for abuse on both sides.  Taking UI out of the picture, I like the idea of companies bringing on unemployed folks as temp workers or volunteers.

Grade: D+

-Tax credits for hiring long term unemployed workers/investing in low income youth and adults.

These programs would give a $4,000 tax credit for hiring folks unemployed for more than 12 months or would subsidize the wages of low income youth and adults.  I find both quite troubling from both a financial sense and from a policy standpoint.  Little offered in the way of concrete details, so I don't have much to go on.

Grade: D-

Help folks refinance their mortgages to today's low rates

-Remove barriers preventing folks from refinancing their homes.  I disagree vehemently with this proposal.  The housing industry is finally starting to have serious requirements regarding mortgages again, and this would relax them back to how they were during the bubble...which is kinda what got us where we are now.

Grade: F

This plan is fully paid for

-The $447 billion plan is fully paid for.

Uh, none of it is paid for.  The President hasn't offered a single way to pay for any of the proposals, instead passing the buck off to the Super Committee and Congress to come up with a way to pay for it.

Grade: F-

OVERALL GRADE FOR THE SPEECH: D

He proposed some good ideas, which I've given him credit for here.  But also some terrible ideas, in my opinion, and more ideas straight from the patently failureicious playbook of Stimulus I.  In addition, I view much of this as too late--why didn't he propose this when he had a "laser focus on jobs" in 2009 and 2010, or as part of last year's "Recovery Summer?"

The Republican debate on 9/7/11

I watched the Republican debate earlier this week.  For me it was the first time to see all the challengers together--with Perry and without Pawlenty.  Hosted by MSNBC and Politico at the Reagan Library, it was an interesting meld of ideologies for the venue.

I thought the moderators did a very poor job of fostering debate--they asked very pointed questions of specific candidates and then moved on to an entirely different topic for a different candidate.  That being said, overall I thought the questions were more or less fair, without too many below-the-belt hits.  A note--I have no problems with this type of forum, just not when it is masquerading as a debate.

On to the candidates themselves.  Overall, I was only mildly impressed.  I'd say a good 60% of the time, they actually answered the question that was asked.  While that's a pretty low percentage in the grand scheme of things, I've seen plenty of debates in the past where the answers given rarely had anything to do with what was asked of the people.  Unfortunately, the other 40% of the time they either skirted around the question or ignored it completely in order to give a campaign sound bite.  I missed about 15 minutes of the debate due to a pretty spectacular thunderstorm in the area screwing with my DirecTV reception, but I think all were guilty of that, with Bachmann and Huntsman being the most egregious with it that I saw.

I did get a kick out of how some of them would use 10 seconds of their alloted 30/60 seconds to answer the question, then go back and actually engage in debate with other candidates on previous questions.  In my opinion, THAT'S what the debates should be about--the mods ask a question and then the candidates debate it.

In terms of policy pitches and campaign platforms, I think there were some good ideas, some great ideas, and some ...not so great... ideas. 

Good ideas: Cain's idea of Social Security reform--going to the Chilean model of personal accounts.  However, there's a gap between now and that end goal, so I'd need to see more specifics of his plan, but I like the gist of it.  Overall, they all had a good idea of what to do with immigration reform and strengthening the border, but NONE of them dared to answer what to do about the millions of illegal immigrants who are currently in the country.  That ticked me off.  They all offered a fair number of platitudes on job creation, but not too many specifics.  I liked what Santorum had to say about welfare reform, about it being a transitional program, not a lifelong program.

Great ideas: Herman Cain's 9-9-9 taxation plan.  I like it a lot, although I'll need to see more specifics before throwing my support behind it.  That was the only "great" proposal I got out of the debate, although more great ideas might have been presented during the time my tv was out.  Ron Paul's idea about reverting a lot of stuff (such as FEMA) to the states was a good idea that several other candidates touched upon, but it was lacking specifics, so I'd count it as a good/great idea.

Not so great ideas: I'm sorry, but I really don't get Ron Paul's appeal.  He gets high marks in my book for his ideology, but on the political realism front, a fair number of his ideas mean he's trudging along at the bottom.  For example, his idea to completely deregulate the airplane/airline industry--I think that is lunacy and correctly falls under the interstate commerce clause.  Could it be done by private industry?  Probably, yes.  But what if each state says that airplanes that fly through their airspace need to meet different safety requirements?  That's where I think federal regulation has a role, and where I firmly disagree with Ron Paul.

Conclusions on each candidate:

• Rick Santorum - a few good ideas, but I don't see why he's still in the race, since his platform is quite small from what I've seen
• Newt Gingrich - same thing
• Michelle Bachmann - some good ideas, but some flat out looney ideas ($2 gas, anyone?)
• Mitt Romney - he's got some pretty good ideas, but he's got a pretty mixed record.  I give him props for the business background, though
• Rick Perry - he's got some pretty good ideas and has extensive executive experience running one of the largest economies in the US.  He's also the only one of the candidates with the guts to call Social Security a ponzi scheme (and rightly so, in my opinion)
• Ron Paul - he's got some good ideas, but others are rather looney, as I mentioned above
• Herman Cain - he's got some great proposals, but didn't offer too many specifics.  I give him props for the business background
• Jon Huntsman - a LOT of campaign sound bites and very little offered in the way of specific ideas (unless I missed his substantive stuff during the downtime)

So, if I had to pick a President/VP ticket from the eight candidates today, I'd pick Perry as the President and Romney or Cain as the VP.  However it ends up, I think we need at least one of the two to have extensive business experience.  Political experience is all fine and dandy, but business experience is just as, if not more, important these days.

Update on forthcoming proposals/topics

To clarify and update what I said in the original post on the blog regarding the topics that I'll be posting over the next few weeks--here's what's on the docket:

 

-My impression of the current Republican Presidential contender field

-An analysis of the President's "major jobs speech" tonight

-My detailed proposal for reforming the tax code

-My detailed proposal for reforming Social Security (this one is pretty difficult, since the metrics I'm looking for aren't really collected by the SSA or the government, so I'm having to cobble together data from various think tanks and what sketchy information the government has available--no clue as to when it'll be finished)

-My proposal to reform significant portions of the DoD budget

 

Other items I've thought about doing proposals on are reforming Medicare and Medicaid, reforming the other welfare programs, and a host of other reforms.  However, at this point, I haven't done an ounce of research into those proposed reforms, so I'm not putting them on the docket right now.

My forthcoming policy proposals - a note

A quick note regarding my policy proposals--unlike many politicians, I actually have the numbers to back up my claims.  Take my forthcoming (hopefully within the next week or two) income tax reform proposal.  I've got data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Census Bureau, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

For this proposal, I've accumulated approximately 2000 pages worth of data in order to present a real proposal, backed up by real numbers.  I've been working on this thing since early this summer, and it's been a real slog going through the literal reams of data.

For all my proposals, I will back them up with the data, so you can rest assured that I'm not just pulling figures out of my behind.  For those of you who are like me and are a masochist when it comes to looking at pages and pages of government numbers in a tiny font, I'll provide links to the applicable documents.

Just thought I'd go ahead and throw that out there in the open beforehand, since it is the norm for politicians to proclaim wonderful sounding platitudes without an ounce of data to back them up.

Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?

Just to clarify--the title of this post has absolutely nothing to do with the post itself... :-D

Up until about 2004 or so, I had zero interest in politics, local, national, or international.  My parents have always been conservative and have followed politics, but I had no interest in it until the 2004 Presidential election.

The next year, I went to college and ended up majoring in (among other subjects) International Politics and Military Affairs.  That major, while not really helpful on the domestic politics side of things, did introduce me to the world political stage, and more specifically (having gone to a military college), the military side of global politics.

Around 2007, I started to become interested in domestic politics and started to follow various news websites, mostly Yahoo and MSN.  I didn't have access to tv at the time, so I never started to watch any news shows, and still don't to this day.

In 2009, I began an MBA program and picked up a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.  The MBA was a complete departure from what I had studied as an undergrad, and was my first introduction to the world of business and economics.  With the WSJ and business classes, I became extremely interested in politics and the economy.  With the recession and resulting flailing about in Washington, I started to come up with my own ideas of what could be done to fix Washington and put America back on a sustainable path.  Over the past year or so, I've worked with a number of folks and have come up with several policy proposals.

Enter this blog.  I've decided to present my policy proposals here, as well as offer up my political commentary/analysis, and general thoughts on politics.  Being a staunch Roman Catholic, as well as a very conservative independent, I've got an interesting mix of motivations and reasons to think the way I do.

Specific policy proposals I have, and will post here once they are finished:
-Social Security reform
-Tax code reform
-Military spending reform

Those are just the issues I've already performed research on, and am more than willing to tackle any others.

Many thanks for the folks who gave me the idea in some form or fashion to start this blog: Meredith, Mew, Fabs, Mike, Matt, Ange, and Pops!  All of them, in one way or another, fostered my political debate or encouraged me to research the issues.