Tom Matlack cuts through the political rhetoric to identify what’s important to him.
What’s on your list?
1. Commit to serving for a single 4-year term.
2. Make the development of American human capital your first priority
3. Focus on equality of opportunity for all our citizens rather than equality of results, taking careful account of when race, gender, ethnicity and other factors show up in results that show categorical disadvantage in opportunity and lack of class mobility.
4. Overhaul education system top to bottom, pre-K through graduate school making access to educational excellence a human right in the U.S.
5. Create national physical education program, led by pro sports leagues, to combat epidemic of obesity, setting national goals by age group for fitness and body fat.
6. Create national mentor program whereby every boy is matched with an adult male who encourages the development of character.
7. Include inmates in the revamped education system, reserving prison for violent offenders and focusing on rehabilitating those who have fallen through cracks rather than giving up on them.
8. Make 2 years national service in Teach-for-America, Peace Corp, or a newly created infrastructure work program.
9. Require recipients of unemployment benefits to volunteer their time in schools, hospitals and prisons.
10. Force all private educational institutions to spend 20% of their endowments on programs that impact the population most in need of educational help.
11. Transition Social Security to a defined contribution rather than defined benefit plan.
12. Massively simplify the tax code, removing deductions, shrinking the IRS and making code fair and truly progressive by income level (eliminate cap gains and carve out for money funds who can characters profits as cap gains).
13. Cut government spending by 50% for all programs that doesn’t directly involve the development of human capital.
14. Create a fair path for illegal immigrants to earn full status as Americans.
15. Make reproductive rights a personal rather than political choice.
16. Refuse to take corporations contributions, either directly or indirectly, no matter what the Supreme Court says. Outlaw lobbying.
17. Mandate generous and equal paternity and maternity leave across the board to give our youngsters a chance and to underscore the importance of parenting in building our human capital.
18. Mandate gender equality on corporate boards and in government leadership.
19. Develop comprehensive plans to reduce emissions, increase fuel economy of our vehicles, develop alternative energy sources, and protect our natural environment in all forms.
20. Partner with the Gate Foundation to encourage the other 1%’ers to participate in aggressive philanthropy that changes the face of the country and the world for the better by providing incremental government funding to highest priority projects supported by private donors.
21. Legalize and regulate sale of drugs and sex.
22. Create task force to come up with a plan to deal with the over 500,000 returning veterans who are struggling with PTSD, brain injury or other battle related injury.
23. Make sexual preference a human right.
24. Define specific measurable goals for the health of our people, economy and environment and report against them each week, month and quarter. Bag the weekly radio rhetoric and replace with this government scorecard.
25. Move country to 6-year single term Presidency elected by popular vote.
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image http://christopherwink.com/
About Tom Matlack
Yes!(25) Tom Matlack for President.
That was yes times 25…not just yes on 25.
Thanks bro
I know, right?
Love these. Very good propositions but #1 for me would be to end the Fed, and fake fiat debt money, and take back the government’s right to control its own currency. Of course, he would then have to avoid assassination.
#2 is my favorite because developing human capital means I can own slaves. I’ve always wanted to do that. I could have a houseboy from the Philippines, an Irish maid, and gardeners from, I don’t know, Brazil.
Am I misreading your idea? Have I projected my grandiose sense of entitlement onto the internets?
The image of stark raving racist Abraham Lincoln at the top of this article is one of many reasons why all 25 items on my list of what I’m looking for in a president are non-existence. In 1860, voters in the United States had a choice between two pro-slavery racists and one racist whose concern about slavery was clearly subordinate to his concern for keeping centralized political power intact. In Lincoln’s own words to Horace Greeley:
“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”
This is what government breeds: addiction to power. That is why people think, as Tom does, they have any business regulating people’s sex lives, what substances they choose to put in their bodies, force workers to spend money they earned on someone else’s pet projects, regulate people’s associations through government control of immigration, temporarily enslave people through mandatory national service, and so on.
This is what every person who seeks to be president, and every person who votes for a president, has in common: they assert they have a right to micromanage my life for me. I reject that outright. I own my body. I own the products of my own labor. So long as I am not violating anyone else’s equal rights to their own body and the products of their own labor, nobody has the right to take over my life for me. I don’t run your life by force. Please refrain from forcing your choices on me.
Correction: In 1860, voters chose from 4 presidential candidates- 2 outright pro-slavery, and 2 at least okay with slavery, and all 4 blatantly and shamelessly racist.
Kirsten I am not a historian so perhaps you are right. I was trying to think of what image to use for this piece and the vintage photo of Lincoln seemed more grounding than a montage of modern Presidents or other alternatives. Say what you want, he did lead our country through a Civil War and to the end of slavery. One of the challenges we have now is that our problems are of that magnitude but far more complex, so it seems like we as a people have trouble making any progress to making real and substantial change. Perhaps it has to get worse, a lot worse, for change to occur. But I hope not.
I’m not saying what I want about Lincoln, but letting him speak for himself. A little more history, again in Lincoln’s own words, taken from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates:
“I will say here while I am upon this subject, I have no disposition to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together on terms of respect, social and political equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there should be a superiority somewhere, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position…”
“I will say then, that I am not nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor have I ever been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people…there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
“I will add to the few remarks that I have made, for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject, that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, but as my friend Douglas and his friends seem to be under great apprehension that maybe they might if there was no law to keep them from it. I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law in this State that forbids the marriage of white folks with negroes.”
Yes, he presided over the end of slavery. He gets some credit for that. But let’s not pretend he did it for any noble reason. His own proud and public racist statements make clear it was only a matter of expediency in pursuing his own goals as a supposedly “superior” white man.
Ugh. Wrong link above. Warning: That one goes to an article I copied the URL for earlier on a drunk cop getting off with no jail after being convicted of felony sexual abuse of a woman he groped at a bar. This is the correct Lincoln-Douglas debates link.
Eliminating the tax on capital gains, which is making money from moving money around, while taxing income on the actual work that is required to make goods and services that are necessary for money to actually have value, is putting the cart before the horse.
I am saying taxing capital gains at the same rate as normal income rather than a dramatically lower rate. Sorry if that was not clear.
“Make 2 years national service in Teach-for-America, Peace Corp, or a newly created infrastructure work program.”
I like most of the rest of this list, but this one was particularly off-putting.
As a 20-something, I’m quite tired of hearing from my elders that my generation needs to sacrifice more. This seems like that exact sentiment, except in window dressing.
My generation faced increased college costs when public budgets were slashed. We took on student loans because we had no other options. The interest we pay on student loans has been used to try and control the national debt over the past several years. This was done so that older generations could continue to benefit from programs like social security and medicare, which will be broke by the time we get to retire.
If we forego college and seek union jobs, we face cuts wages and reduced benefits, and the cuts were largely used to pay for raises and benefits that have accrued to older and retired workers of previous generations.
I am sorry, but we have given, and have had quite a bit taken from us. If any generation needs to give more, it is not mine.
Mike perhaps a bad idea. But honestly the thought behind that item is to provide a national, focussed way to engage the energy and positive energy of our young people rather than all the problems you cite. Obviously unemployment, debt and even prison are epidemic problems among our young people and there is a grossly uneven playing field. I don’t know about you but I would love to see Ivy League graduates digging ditches with everyone else for a change.
6. Create national mentor program whereby every boy is matched with an adult male who encourages the development of character.
Who sets the definition of what defines “character?” What if the boys’ parents don’t agree with the mentors’ view of what is “character?” Would this mentor-ship be forced on boys?
9. Require recipients of unemployment benefits to volunteer their time in schools, hospitals and prisons.
I’d rather they focus on getting a job?
13. Cut government spending by 50% for all programs that doesn’t directly involve the development of human capital.
Had #13 been adopted 50 years ago, China or Russia, not the US, would have invented the graphical user interface (GUI), the Internet, Google Maps (now owned by Google), Unix, Cloud Computing, Siri (now owned by Apple) the Internet, and many other important technologies, and be the home of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and many, many other important technology companies that help keep the US economy from further weakening.
15. Make reproductive rights a personal rather than political choice.
As long as this applies equally to males.
17. Mandate generous and equal paternity and maternity leave across the board to give our youngsters a chance and to underscore the importance of parenting in building our human capital.
Would this be paid? If so, by whom and where would the money come from?
18. Mandate gender equality on corporate boards and in government leadership.
Gender equality must also therefore be mandated in everything else in society, including mining, trash removal, sewer maintenance, pest removal, roofing, and other dirty work. That would be gender equality.
23. Make sexual preference a human right.
This must include the end of the criminalization of polygamy, and the legal recognition of it.
13. Cut government spending by 50% for all programs that doesn’t directly involve the development of human capital.
So social services cut in half? When those are suffering already? How you develop humans to produce work, goods and ideas, if they are hungry and without healthcare?
Or do you mean cut programs like war and tech development?
I hate the phrase human capital. How about developing human beings. We aren’t all cogs, nor should we be.
Let me get this straight: this a list of things you want the President to do? You are aware that there is a thing called the Constitution which sets out the powers of the branches of government?
Many of the things on your list must be done by Congress, or anyway by the President and Congress together(11, 12, 13, 14), some of the things on your list could only be done through a Constitutional amendment(25), some things are a function of the States in our federalist system(4, 5 ), and some would be questionable no matter which official or level of government undertook to do them (10, 18).
I appreciate your idealism, but the rule of law is one of the most important things we have going for us.
I’m prepared to vote for Tom Matlack