The Anti-Manichaeist

I wrote an earlier version of the following for Bart Campolo at his blog.  It summarizes the main issues I’d ideally like to see on a third party platform.  He likes to go by his own drum, as do we all, and so we’ll see if he responds to it. 

Bart et al, I just thought I’d let you know about an idea I had recently on how we might save Social Security by having the US gov’t set up its own mutual fund using a conservative investing strategy.  The US Gov’t would use the Social Security Trust Fund to target holding 6% of the total net asset value of stocks in the New York Stock Exchange.  It would base its weekly holding decisions on a simpl conservative investing strategy and a relatively simple statistical algorithm that would use 26 weeks of data of the Stocks traded on the NYSE.  The Mutual Fund would save Social Security, give people a better return on their savings, and reward more long-term investment and penalize short-term unproductive attempts to time the market. If it were coupled with requiring companies to list compensation under employee option plans as a direct business expense to avoid further Enrons, it just might make a decent rallying point for economically progressive candidates.

I think that this idea and the Basic Income Guarantee plan for income tax and welfare reform, coupled with a Land Value Tax to keep marginal income tax rates down and oil taxes to force us to conserve and reduce our foreign oil dependency problem and taxes on $peech given to politicians/parties/PACs, and my vision for making state legislatures unicameral with a hybrid between a majoritarian and representational election system and annual elections where near 100% voter participation is encourage along with healthcare and educational reforms would work well if coupled with the image improvement in matters of national security and a reframing of the cultural wars issues thru aspects of “my pragmatic prolife manifesto” and a redirection of LGBT activism from seeking more legal gay marriages to more concrete and less symbolic rights issues and winning more public goodwill by championing family values issues that are being neglected by the religious right.

So what say you? Any chance you’d care to get on the pragmatic progressive bandwagon and encourage others to do the same?

dlw