The Observation Deck

Wow!

What a list of great ideas.

1) Get us out of war and stop entangling alliances that get us into trouble. We don't need to pick fights with everyone and we don't need to be the policemen of the world.

2) Restore our Civil Liberties.

3) Stop Foreign Aid to countries that don't need it. This includes military bases (like Bermuda). I'm all for helping to cure malaria and HIV aid but 10 billion a month to Iraq is nonsense.

4) Develop alternative energies to create clean energy, get us out of depending on foreign sources and create jobs that can't be outsourced.

5) Solve our health care problems - I too favor the single payer health care system that Dennis discussed, but honestly almost anything is better than what we have now.

6) Work to develop a culture of respect and tolerance in regard to people of different races, creeds, income levels, national origin, sex, disability or sexual orientation.

Doing number 1, 2 and 4 will solve most of our economic problems.

BTW, maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I think Steve and DL are for the same thing and I am too. Gay marriage should be legal period. Whether a church decides to perform the ceremony or not should be up to them. Just as some churches refuse to marry people that are divorced. Theses should be 2 different things, the civil or government aspect and the religious aspect. JMHO.

there was plenty enough trade before world war II. avocados, pineapples, and bananas have a reasonable shelf life. there's nothing in the Constitution about having the right to every food item all year long.

glass is made mostly from Sand. Rubber can be made from latex extracted from the roots of russian dandelions. The shipment of basic resources would generally be more efficient than consumer goods: manufactured goods generally take up a lot more space. Consider a tire. the volume of a tire is mostly empty space.

Did they not use trucks before WWII to move goods? lol So every region will have their own tire and a glass factory? Wow.. that should be cost effective and good for the evironment

yeah. there was plenty of trucking before NAFTA. Trucking is great.

Making Tires in a few places in the U.S. is better than making them in Mexico and Asia. Pollution is an incentive to develop manufacturing processes that produce fewer toxins. Pollution is the price of having great manufactured goods. society shouldn't have manufactured goods if society does not want to also enjoy the resulting pollution.

Politicians will make an issue of modern China having more industrial and finance weight to throw around in the world. They will use this as justification for more military spending. the savings from outsourcing will inevitably be spent on taxes for the military, overly ambitious education standards, and welfare.

yeah. there was plenty of trucking before NAFTA.

There still is....