In an ongoing series involving my “virtual” campaign for the Republican nomination for president, creating a platform a real candidate should seize, here are parts two and three. (The links are embedded in the headlines.) — Quin
Challenger must ensure debt bomb doesn’t explode (July 1):
The point of running a virtual campaign against President Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination is to focus on issues currently being badly neglected….
…This campaign aims to get the policies right, regardless of their initial political popularity. The ultimate attraction of the challenge to Trump will lie in the recognition that the public good, carefully analyzed, is the campaign’s only objective. Voters (especially virtual ones) may appreciate that.
This virtual campaign was launched to handle “debt, decency, and diplomacy.” Debt is deliberately listed first. On the domestic front, no other challenge threatens systemic collapse the way the combination of public and private debt does. The danger isn’t that today’s unprecedented federal peacetime government debt — 106% of gross domestic product — will, by itself, cause catastrophe. The problem is that if the economy, culture, or public safety experiences a major shock, the debt is already too high to provide any cushion. Indeed, the high debt would exacerbate the situation, causing more panic and possible disaster….
Trump hasn’t drained the swamp. Here’s how to do it. (July 2):
Donald Trump ran for president promising to “drain the swamp,” but even his sometimes-valiant efforts amount to no more than manually removing marsh-water one tin cup at a time.
Three Supreme Court decisions at the end of its term last week remind us that the federal administrative state, not the elective offices, is the entity through which most citizens encounter their government and which most frustrates and sometimes abuses them. The next president should make it a priority to radically restructure and reduce the administrative leviathan. The virtual GOP campaign against President Trump must make massive administrative reform a central, galvanizing issue.
The challenge could even employ a Trump-like slogan: Bust the bureaucracy!
The end goal should be, within a decade, to reduce the 2.1 million federal civilian workforce by nearly a third, while simultaneously making agencies more responsive, not less, to the citizens they serve…..
