ARP - Domestic Policy

The ARP proposes a three-pronged approach to the National Debt and Deficit. We will begin with

This one cent tax on the little packets of ketchup, salt, pepper, and mustard given away at fast food restaurants will bring in approximately $650,000,000 annually. Obviously not a solution to the problem but it shows the kind of creative thinking artists can bring to bear on an intractable issue. We didn't think of this, but we recognize genius when we see it.

This one's all ours. The ARP will pay off the national debt by nationalizing the nation's art museums and auctioning off all non-American art. The Met recently received a donation of Cubist art—78 pieces—valued at $1.1 billion. The total value of the Met's collection is in excess of one trillion dollars, and there are scores of other American museums of nearly equal size. Easy money people, the only ones who will be upset are art lovers, and who cares about them? A no brainer.

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The museum nationalization plan is a good one in itself, but ultimately it represents a one time pay off. After all the art is sold, we're done. What the Federal government needs a steady, reliable source of income that everyone is glad to pay and no one complains about. The states have this problem too, and their solution traditionally has been the lottery. Nobody complains about the lottery, even though in real terms it may be a more burdensome drain on people's incomes than taxes. Could the Federal government go into the lottery business itself? I suppose so, but what would be the point? It would be just one more competing game with nothing really to distinguish it from the others. Payoffs are already in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Federal government cannot realistically offer prizes an order of magnitude larger than that.

Furthermore, state lotteries prey inordinately on the poor and foolish. What we need is something like a lottery that will prey on the greed and foolishness of the wealthy; hence

Once a month the Federal government will hold a raffle; we could have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court do the drawing. A single ticket will be selected and the lucky winner will never have to pay Federal income tax ever again, for the rest of his or her life.

Tickets will cost $1,000 each. This is well beyond the means of the poor, for whom tax freedom is not that big an issue anyway, but well within the means of the merely well-to-do, who can be expected to dip into the kids' college fund in the same way the poor raid their kids' piggy banks for Keno, and will present an irresistible attraction to the super-wealthy, whom we can expect to buy large blocks of tickets in the hopes of clinching tax exempt status. If everyone in the 1% buys ten tickets per month, monthly revenues will exceed $30 billion. However, I would expect actual revenues to be far in excess of that. In any case, this would constitute a regular and undisputed source of income for the Federal government to apportion as it sees fit. Twelve tax-free billionaires a year would be a small price to pay.

These three programs, in concert with thoughtful tax increases on the well-to-do, should solve our nation's finance problems once and for all. But wait, there's more!

The ARP will eliminate the twin economic disasters of Mother's Day and Father's Day. No one is ever happy with the outcomes of Mother's Day or Father's Day. The husband ends up in the dog house for buying his wife a new vacuum cleaner or cooking implement, or morosely stores away his unwanted tie or useless tool with the other disappointing gifts from his marriage.

Under the ARP, both Mother's Day and Father's Day will be eliminated, replaced by a single, official Federal holiday, Parent's Day. Parent's Day will include a tax holiday as well to encourage consumption. The official tradition will be that on Parent's Day, parents go out and buy themselves exactly what they want. No guesswork, no shilly-shallying, no disappointment, no feigned smiles and pained thank yous. Everyone will get exactly what they want, cheap. It will be a huge shot in the arm to the economy and a huge boost to the nation's morale.

The ARP will guarantee womb-to-tomb social welfare for anyone who wants it: male, female, young, old, able-bodied or disabled, you are guaranteed a home, food, child care, heat and air conditioning, electricity and unlimited access to the Internet for life. There is only one requirement:

Eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, you have to attend classes. I don't care if you study basket weaving—you have to study something. The only exception is for visual artists, who upon certification by the appropriate art board, will be entitled to unlimited federal support and an additional stipend for materials.

We don't care about the ethical issues at stake. We merely note that these two issues should be linked. If abortion is outlawed, then so should be the death penalty. If the death penalty is outlawed, so is abortion. And if one of them is permitted, both must be permitted.

The death penalty and abortion are both institutions that at heart are morally indefensible while at the same time socially invaluable. Abortion saves women from poverty, illness, and death. The death penalty properly punishes the indefensibly evil, dissuades similar behavior, and provides closure to the families of the crime's victims. They should both be legal or they should both be outlawed. Don't much matter which.

Our administration will offer a $10 trillion cash prize for the inventor of an economically feasible, easily-maintained, high temperature superconductor, patents for which become the property of the Federal government. If the prize is not claimed within a year, the amount will be reduced by a trillion dollars. If after ten years the prize still has not been claimed, we can safely conclude a room temperature superconductor is not currently feasible. If it were claimed, though, all our energy problems would be solved, immediately and forever.

Border crisis? The crisis is that we are harassing the hard-working immigrants who largely maintain our economy and keep goods and services cheap and plentiful.

Far from closing down the border, our administration will make America officially bilingual, print our money in English and Spanish, propose union with Mexico, and cede them back Arizona and New Mexico as a gesture of good faith. See International Policy for a further explanation of this policy.

The Red State War on Women now constitutes a severe health crisis in this country. Regardless of the pathological hatred of women inherent in anti-abortion statutes, it is as much the responsibility of the Federal Government to address this national healthcare emergency as it would an outbreak of Ebola. The Federal Government already provides free abortion services to servicewomen who become pregnant. The Government will simply make the same services available to all women in every state, regardless of local ordinance.

Providing such services nationwide will require major infrastructure. Fortunately, such infrastructure is already in place: the VA Medical System. Our administration will open women's health clinics in all VA Medical Centers, in every state, regardless of local statute. If necessary, we will offer "compassionate enlistments" where a woman signs papers joining the Army, has her procedure, and then resigns.

Red State abortion laws kill women. They must be stopped, regardless of political consequences.

We live in Massachusetts. Massachusetts has the lowest gun death rate in the US, an eighth that of states like Louisiana and Alaska. The difference between Massachusetts and even other low gun fatality states is the final step in the permitting process.

The Massachusetts cops are no more anti-gun than any other cops. We have a friend who, in our opinion, should not be allowed to own a gun who owns a gun here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts because he passed the interview.

If a cop says you shouldn't be allowed to carry a gun, you really shouldn't be allowed to carry a gun. Common sense controls like this on gun ownership can significantly impact the war of all-against-all currently brewing in the anything-goes gun states.

My administration will make pass an amendment making it harder to amend the Constitution, not easier. However, there is one other amendment that first needs to go on the books, the Nepotism Amendment:

"No person more closely related than a third cousin to, or the spouse or former spouse of any sitting President of the United States of the past 75 years shall be eligible to hold the office of President of the United States."

I never want to hear the word, "President-Elect Kennedy/Bush/Clinton/Obama or Trump" ever again.

We're afraid reparations are not a good idea. For starters, once reparations are paid, a lot of people will conclude that absolves white America of all further responsibility for its actions. Every act of racism and profiling will be discounted; you got your money, now shut up.

A much better solution would be to take a small fraction of that money and send every cop in America, on a rolling basis, back to the Academy for an additional two years of training. As matters stand, even in the most enlightened of states cops receive at most four months of training before being handed a gun and handcuffs and sent out to keep the peace. By comparison, here in the People's Republic, hairdressers are obliged to get two years of training before they can cut hair. Police training should be at least that long and include intensive instruction in race relations, mental health awareness, community issues, conflict resolution, and Krav Maga (so they won't be in such a hurry to go for their guns).

That along with intensive psychological evaluation prior to their acceptance at the Academy (to weed out the nutters and sadists) will prove much more beneficial to the minority community than any amount of financial reparation.

The Treasury is considering replacing Alexander Hamilton's face on the ten dollar bill with that of an illustrious American woman. Vigorous discussions are being held is on who that woman should be and the final choice is bound to be controversial. Here is our proposal.

It should be Sacajawea. And not just on the ten. Sacajawea should be on all our currency, the one, the five, the ten, the twenty, the fifty and the hundred, and all our coinage too. It's Sacajaweas all the way down.

Why Sacajawea? Sacajawea is our country's Queen Mother. The Brits, the Ozzies, the Kiwis and the Canucks all slap the current monarch's puss on all their currency and nobody complains. Our currency has the benefit of reaching deep into our national past for its portraits. Still, we bet there are plenty of people who object to Lincoln on the five and the penny, or FDR on the dime. Every now and then someone comes out with a proposal to put Reagan on our currency, which would be an abomination.

Let's put all argument and future discussion to rest once and for all. Color code the currency, sort the coinage by size (pennies should be square), and put Sacajawea on everything. Problem solved.

Our nation is faced with a number crisis. In populous states multiple area codes are required to accommodate all the necessary phones numbers. We may soon run out of Social Security numbers as well. These area code and Social Security number crises are among the most serious facing the nation. On the international front, the United States continues to hold the line against the Bilderburg Illuminati Freemason scourge know as the Metric System (it was invented by the French!). Were it not for our courageous insistence, the glorious Imperial System might have long ago gone the way of the passenger pigeon.

The Imperial System is far superior to the Metric System. Can you easily divide a meter by three? No, you get a repeating fraction. You cannot accurate represent one third of a meter!

One third of a yard is a foot. One third of a foot is four inches. One third of a meter is 333.3333333333~ centimeters. The Imperial System is inherently superior to the Metric System. The problem isn't with our measuring system. It's with our numbers. We don't have enough of them.

If elected, our administration will immediately form a committee to identify potential experts to review the possible implications of the American conversion from the decimal system to base 12. By adopting the duodecimal system, two additional numbers (X and E) will immediately become available. This will create a 20% increase in the amount of available numbers, an ample supply for the foreseeable future.

Twelve is a much superior basis for a numbering system than ten. The following description is copied wholesale and without apology from Wikipedia:

"The number twelve, a superior highly composite number, is the smallest number with four non-trivial factors (2, 3, 4, 6), and the smallest to include as factors all four numbers (1 to 4) within the subitizing range. As a result of this increased factorability of the radix and its divisibility by a wide range of the most elemental numbers (whereas ten has only two non-trivial factors: 2 and 5, with neither 3 nor 4), duodecimal representations fit more easily than decimal ones into many common patterns, as evidenced by the higher regularity observable in the duodecimal multiplication table. As a result, duodecimal has been described as the optimal number system.[1] Of its factors, 2 and 3 are prime, which means the reciprocals of all 3-smooth numbers (such as 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9...) have a terminating representation in duodecimal. In particular, the five most elementary fractions (1⁄2, 1⁄3, 2⁄3, 1⁄4 and 3⁄4) all have a short terminating representation in duodecimal (0.6, 0.4, 0.8, 0.3 and 0.9, respectively), and twelve is the smallest radix with this feature (because it is the least common multiple of 3 and 4). This all makes it a more convenient number system for computing fractions than most other number systems in common use, such as the decimal, vigesimal, binary, octal and hexadecimal systems."

The duodecimal system will instantly create millions of new telephone numbers and exchanges. Our long national Area Code and Social Security Number nightmare will be over. The duodecimal system will enshrine the Imperial System as the only sensible measuring system, for all time.

A duodecimal United States would have a substantial advantage over those clinging to the outdated decimal system. It's not like they could stop us. The entire world already has to deal with our insistence on Imperial measures. This would simply be more of the same.