This site was created as a random place for me to put all my lazily aphoristic reasoning. Then it became a blog about centrism as an approach to our current political moment. Now it has returned to its original self, what it was always meant to be.
If for some inexplicable reason, you’re curious about the political interlude… well, I’ve left it all out there for you. But I recommend neglect.
It’s long past time to stop bickering over ideological deadlocks and partisan grievances. Instead, we need to focus on the real, material changes we can make right now to improve our country. But if we agree to put the big problems on the side for the moment, what’s left? Well… only everything.
Playing small ball would still keep us plenty busy. Here are some examples of fixes, patches, and duct tape solutions that will each have some measurable positive impact – without incurring too much partisan backlash, I hope.
- Pass bipartisan legislation to clear hurdles for cheap, widely available telemedicine
- Clean up congressional ethics laws on insider trading and profiteering
- Put an end to policies that seem almost designed to lead people into a debt spiral
- Clean up IRS rules to ensure that crowdfunding campaigns for health expenses aren’t taxed as “income”
- Expand on successful models for providing rural healthcare
- Try unique funding approaches to find a cure blindness
- Set higher safety standards and testing requirements for mass transit (Amtrak)
- Look into multiple approaches to mitigating our student debt crisis
- Implement novel strategies for treating opioid addiction where it’s most needed: our jails
- Fight obesity by making provider training and reimbursement a higher priority
- Put an end to baseless civil forfeitures
- Fix some of the crazier state licensing laws and regulations
- Build better floodplain maps to improve national resiliency and responsiveness to worsening floods
- Establish protections from predatory municipalities that abuse fees and fines
- Save billions in taxpayer dollars by consolidating government data centers
- Standardize approaches to preventing the spread of infections in our hospitals
- Reduce neonatal mortality for at-risk infants by adopting successful milk bank models
- Advance Open File policies to keep innocent people out of our prisons
- Expand the Research & Development tax credit
- Reduce prison overcrowding with bipartisan approaches to bail bond reform
- Fix America’s broken system of zoning and land-use regulations
- Encourage more cities to install a Chief Service Officer to bring government closer to the people
- Create job training tax credits for businesses to coach up their own workforce, since they know the market better than big, unsuccessful retraining programs
- Establish laws and standardized procedures for evidence kits in sex crimes and provide the needed funding to resolve the national test kit backlog
- Implement ranked choice voting in primaries and general elections
- Repeal the medical device tax to allow more innovation
- Promote water affordability at a federal level
- Adjust the congressional schedule and committee rules to make Congress more functional
- Adopt and expand on Louisiana’s successful approach to boost early childhood education
- Help deflate the rental crisis and fund new housing by eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction for second homes
- (Working on it… never said I wasn’t lazy.)
- (Actually this is starting to get pretty long now.)
Leave a Reply