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Democrats:
The Party of Tax Cuts, Homeland Security, and a Sound Economy
...
Oh, yeah, and Health Care ...
Oh, yeah, and Education, too
May 17, 2003
By TygrBright
 This,
my friends, is the winning Democratic platform for 2004. This
is the 5-point, focused, unifying juggernaut that will propel
us to victory. This is the plan that the GOPpies don't want
you (or any other Democrat) to know about, to talk about,
to think about, to campaign on.
This is the unashamedly patriotic agenda that is also simultaneously
liberal, broad-spectrum, principled, and positive for all
Americans.
It's all in the spin, as the dear GOPpies have taught us.
Let's take a closer look:
Democrats: The Party of Tax Cuts
American voters want tax cuts? Okay, let's give 'em tax cuts!
Real tax cuts that will benefit real people.
Let's start with exempting all earned income up to the Federal
poverty level from payroll taxes. For a single person under
65, that would mean the first $9,359 of their paychecks would
have NO payroll tax deductions. For a family of three, it
would be the first $14,494.
Do I have spell this one out? How many voters get income
the old-fashioned way—by sweating their asses off for
it? Okay, now, how many get it via stock dividends and capital
gains? What are people who actually work for a living likely
to do with the extra $700-$1,000 bucks in their pay envelopes.
Invest it off shore? I don't think so.
Real tax cuts. Democrats can OWN this issue.
Democrats: The Party of Homeland Security
This one can be summed up in a few well-chosen words: Cities
that are safe and healthy to live in. How do
we achieve it? We start by coordinating and channeling serious
aid to our struggling cities for law enforcement, public health,
and emergency services to improve both catastrophic and quality-of-life
service areas. We add help to enable cities to save and/or
replace their decaying physical infrastructure—sanitation,
roads, public transit, water, public safety, etc.
Then we streamline existing standards, enact needed new standards,
and improve enforcement to make certain that industrial and
manufacturing sites that are potentially vulnerable to terrorist
exploitation or other catastrophic events will not endanger
surrounding populations—and that they won't endanger
them in the normal course of doing business, either, by polluting
the air, water, or land their neighbors depend on.
That is real Homeland Security, my friends. Not snooping
into people's library habits. Not pissing off the rest of
the world. Not strutting around banging our metaphorical genitalia.
Safe, healthy cities, well-prepared and alert enough to stave
off terrorist attacks and equipped to respond quickly and
minimize the damage in worst-case scenarios.
Democrats: The Sound Economy Party
Two words, people: Job creation. They're famous for hyping
it. We're famous for doing it. We've done it before, we can
do it again. Targeted tax credits, incentives, public-private
partnerships. Democrats wrote this book. Let's dust it off
and show America the pretty pictures.
A sound economy is an economy where anyone who wants to work
can get a full-time job that will let them support themselves
and their family. There is no other legitimate definition.
Democrats: The Party of Health Care
I think America is ready, don't you? Mandate employer-based
coverage with compensating tax credits for small businesses,
and re-regulate the insurance industry to keep them from vulgar
profiteering and turning real insurance into a which-shell-hides-the-pea
"managed care"-style scam. Control costs by creating a Federal
malpractice insurance program similar to the FDIC insurance
for banking, and let hospitals and individual practitioners
buy into it.
Control costs further by reviving incentives for pharmaceutical
research in non-profit educational and health care institutions,
where such research belongs, and capital investment in the
equipment and infrastructure needed for such research. Let
the American people own the patents and license the manufacture
to private companies for a reasonable profit. Regulate the
hell out of pharmaceutical and medical technology profiteers
in the private sector.
Finally, revive real insurance for seniors and those unable
to work-and broaden the pool to enable self-employed entrepreneurs
to buy into a public insurance program managed nationally.
Democrats: For a Real 'Education President'
Lift all the unfunded federal mandates on schools and put
federal education money into two things, and two things only:
Infrastructure support (school construction, renovation, and
equipment funding;) and a federal "wealth bank" of educational
consulting expertise that states and localities can access
at little to no cost to help with planning the financing and
operation of their public education systems.
It's that simple. Those five things. Over and over, keep it
simple. Pick a candidate who can put this program across,
and get behind them. Form a squad of pit-bull media managers
to exploit every spin-doctoring elision, evasion, and fabrication
the GOPpies pull out of their tall pointy white hats and pinstriped
pockets.
If we do this, we will nail their coffins back down for another
twenty years, and they know it. They're terrified we'll come
out of the chute with this agenda and a credible candidate.
They will try to distract, to obfuscate, to what-if, to deny,
to delay (or should that be DeLay?) everything we do. We stay
focused, we will win.
Is our Party leadership ready to take us to victory?
Call 'em and ask. Forward this to them. Print
it out and post it on the bulletin board at Party headquarters.
Start getting the message out NOW: Keep it simple. Keep it
focused. Resist the temptation to be all things to all people.
Resist the temptation to get distracted by pretty ideological
toys.
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