Joe the Sherminator's Position Paper Part I

The Sherminator’s Presidential Campaign Platform Part I

October 3, 2015

There are qualifying requirements for many occupations. Music teachers, barbers, airplane pilots, professional baseball players are examples of vocations for which practitioners must have credentials and skills.

As we have seen in the U.S. this year, no qualification or experience is needed to be the President of the United States. Anyone who was born in the U.S. at least 35 years ago can run for President and can become President if he can get enough people to vote for him.

Therefore, I am announcing that I am a candidate for President. If you read what follows you will know about some of my recommendations for changes that I want to see in this country. It does NOT represent my entire platform. I omitted my views on many issues like climate change, health care, and prison reform. I may write about these and other issues as my campaign progresses. So here we go:

1. Reteach American History

An American future based on sane and humane values cannot be built on the unapologetic, triumphalist view of America as the greatest country on earth that is taught in history classes in our schools. In order to have a corrected future, America must be understood as a country that was built by the dominance of wealthy white males over everybody else. Our heritage as Americans includes a history of genocide of Native Americans, enslavement of blacks, militaristic imperialism throughout the world, racism, exploitation of immigrants, discrimination against women, and suppression of organized labor. All Americans who understand their history must accept their deserved burden of guilt and shame and use it to motivate a resolve to change their country.

2. Abolish America’s Culture of Violence

The United States is and always has been a violent country. The history of the United States is one of chronic violence. The United States can begin to reverse this by immediate, unconditional, unilateral demilitarization.

The American population is armed to the teeth so it is too late to repeal the Second Amendment and pass a law against gun ownership. However, gun ownership and use can be regulated in the same manner as car ownership and use already is. The following are my proposals for regulating use of guns:

• It must be illegal for ANYONE to own a gun without a license.
• To qualify for a license, applicants must take a gun safety course and pass written, psychological, and gun-shooting exams. (Drivers must do all these things to get a license except for a psychological test. Since road rage can make drivers dangerous, I propose that both drivers and gun-users should pass a psychological test before they are deemed to be qualified.
• Applicants passing all the requirements must pay a fee for their license.
• Gun license holders must be re-examined and if they pass, must pay a fee for renewal each time their license expires.
• As with licensed drivers and cars, licensed gun users must register every gun they own and pay registration and renewal fees for as long as they own each gun.
• Like car owners, licensed gun owners should be required to carry insurance covering them for liability resulting from any personal or property damage from the use of their gun. As with cars, larger and more expensive guns would require higher insurance premiums.
• Gun owners’ insurance premiums would also be raised in response to any insurance claims resulting from any incident involving one of their guns.

The glorification of violence must be relegated to America’s past.

Producers of all movies and TV shows in which guns are used shall pay a violence promotion tax. These tax revenues will be used to sponsor production of anti-gun public service messages that must be shown before, during, and after all entertainment that contains gun violence.

Movie theaters and cable TV stations that show violent material will collect a violence tax from ticket buyers and cable subscribers. These tax revenues will go as subsidies to producers of non-violent media entertainment. The lower cost of non-violent entertainment will be passed along to consumers creating a monetary incentive to choose non-violent entertainment.

3. Demilitarize America

The Pentagon and all military bases in foreign countries should be closed. All military personnel should be retrained and set to work installing wind and solar power generators in every part of the U.S. The military budget should also be redirected to infrastructure maintenance and upgrades and the building of a vastly expanded network of local and inter-city train lines.

America must cease all manufacturing and selling of military equipment. Weapons factories shall be retooled to begin manufacturing useful items (ie, bicycles and saxophones) for a peaceful America. 

4. Make the U.S. economy MUCH more egalitarian

There must be no inherited wealth. Institute a 100% inheritance tax.
There must not be any billionaires. Anyone should be able to get by for life on a 999 million dollars. Wealth beyond that must be appropriated for public use.
There must be a reasonable maximum and minimum wage. Beyond a reasonable amount, there should be a 100% tax bracket. Taxes on the wealthy should be redistributed to low-income people as a negative income tax bringing them up to a minimum wage that is above poverty level.

5. Make Education in the U.S. egalitarian

• All schools must be funded equally across the country.
• Private schools will be abolished.
• All students must attend the public school that is closest to their home.
• Wealthy parents cannot make donations to the schools their children attend. All voluntary donations must go into a general pool and be equally shared by ALL schools.
• Every school is required to offer a full curriculum of arts education, including instruction on a musical instrument provided by the school for every child who wants to learn how to play. (This is easily paid for by taxing the rich and redirecting part of our so-called defense budget.)
• College education shall be free for everyone.

6. Eliminate undemocratic features in the U.S. Constitution

• Revise Article II Section 1 and replace the Electoral College with a straight national popular vote to determine the winner in Presidential elections.

What is so terrible about the Electoral College? If you already know the answer to that question, you may skip the following two paragraphs.

The number of Electoral votes from each state is equal to 2 plus the number of Congressional districts the state contains. The 2-vote bonus heavily skews the voting to favor the states with the lowest populations. For example, the Presidential popular vote winner in Wyoming, (population 563,000) gets 3 electoral votes. The choice of the plurality of California’s voters (population almost 40 million) gets 55 electoral votes. Thus there is one electoral vote for every 188,000 people in Wyoming and one electoral vote for every 727,000 people in California. A Wyoming vote carries almost four times the weight of a California vote in a U.S. Presidential election. The Electoral College is inherently undemocratic!

There is something about the Electoral College that is even worse than its weighted bias in favor of low population states. The Electoral College completely disenfranchises the vast majority of Americans! Since insane political polarization has taken hold in the U.S., 39 of the states have come to be defined as red states or blue states. Red states are conceded to the Republican candidate and Democrats do not campaign for their Presidential candidate in those states. The same holds true for Republicans in the blue states. All political campaign spending is concentrated into the 11 states that are defined as swing states. In recent elections, analysts have refined the focus even further to only three states – Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. The conventional wisdom says that the candidate who wins two of those states will win the election. If you live in a blue state, like New York, or a red state, like Utah, your vote has no real bearing on the outcome. Your state’s electoral votes will go as both parties assume they will. The outcome of the election depends completely on the voters in a few states, so most of us are effectively disenfranchised.

• Revise the Second Amendment to mandate complete government oversight of all privately owned weapons.

Read the Second Amendment as it now stands carefully carefully:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Whatever this meant to our Founding Fathers in 1791 is clearly inapplicable to life in the 21st century. There hasn’t been any such thing as a well regulated Militia made up of civilians in the U.S. for a very long time. Therefore THERE IS NO CONSTITUTIONAL RATIONALE FOR GUN RIGHTS!

My plan for gun regulation is outlined in section 2 above. The Second Amendment should be replaced by a version that explicitly allows the government to license all gun users, register all guns, and to confiscate all guns and revoke all licenses of citizens who fail to pay registration and renewal fees.

• Democratize Article I Section 3 and reconstruct the Senate

Article I Section 3. It calls for the formation of a U.S. Senate consisting of 2 Senators from each state. This gives half a million citizens of Wyoming the same representation as 40 million Californians. Clearly this is undemocratic. I therefore call for the immediate abolition of the U.S. Senate and the transfer of all its powers as defined in the Constitution to the House of Representatives. Or, if there is to be a Senate, then 100 Senate districts must be drawn so that each one contains close to 1% of the U.S. population. Today that would mean approximately 3.25 million people in each Senate district. Brooklyn, N.Y. has enough population to get one Senator. North and South Dakota and Idaho have a combined population that is close to the population of Brooklyn. Therefore, those three states could be a district represented by one Senator.

• Elimination of Disciminatory Age and Birthplace Restrictions in Articles I and II

The Constitution states that the President and the Vice-President must be at least 35 years old, that Senators must be at least 30 years old and that Representatives must be at least 25 years old. It also stipulates that the President must be born in the United States.

A citizen is a citizen. They must all be treated equally. There is no justification for setting an age or a birthplace requirement for any office holder in the U.S. Government. All of these should be eliminated from the Constitution. If a plurality wants to vote for a Presidential candidate who is under 35, or who is a naturalized citizen, then that person should be the President. That’s democracy.