Ashby2008 Blog Partial Amnesty for Telecommunications Companies. 2/27/2008 Congratulations John McCain. 2/210/2008 McCain and Fiscal Conservatism. 1/29/2008 Voter ID and Equality of Individuals. 1/12/2008 Club for Growth 1/7/2008 Baffled by Club for Growth. 1/07/2008 I'm glad they destroyed the torture tapes. 12/9/2007 The Bush Tax Cuts and Oil Prices. 12/6/2007 Why Does the President Hate Iran? 11/12/2007 Ashby Defends the IRS 11/05/2007

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DOUBLE NUCLEAR ENERGY

The United States needs to increase its reliance on nuclear energy by doubling generation at existing plants from the current rate of about 20% to 40%. This is a safe and efficient means of energy production and new generating capacity should be allowed without requiring the new environmental impact surveys or community approvals that are part of the Site Pre-Approval process for licensing nuclear plants. read more

NATIONAL SECURITY

Iraq: We Should Ask The Iranians, Syrians And Saudis To Contribute Troops To Iraq. The minor troop increase the Bush Administration refers to as a "Surge" will fail. From the beginning military leaders called for 300,000 troops to stabilize Iraq, but no more than 180,000 have ever been on the ground at one time. Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are the most willing and logical sources for troops operating under the U.N. mandate. Some may suggest this is naïve; Iranians will occupy the state and use its resources, namely oil revenue, to fund terror. However, if the United States isn't willing to commit the troops necessary to avert civil war and exits before stabilizing the country, Iraq will inevitably fall to their laps anyway. The only naïve option is to not involve these countries now when the United Nations can still impose formal oversight. Under this scenario the U.S. will leave more honorably and peacefully than if Iraq is left solely in its care and troops flee amid a civil war.

Afghanistan: We Should Allow The Taliban To Participate In The Afghan Government If They Turn Over Bin Laden. Like it or not, the Taliban are representative of the beliefs and values of many of the Afghanis. Truly supporting democracy means recognizing not only the governments that we like - it means recognizing governments that are chosen by the people of the country, whether the U.S. approves or disapproves of its policies. If the Taliban will prove their commitment to the standards of international justice by turning over bin Laden they should be allowed to participate in the democratic elections, and respectively, take power if they win. Yes, this may cause a diminution of human and women's rights, but this is the responsibility of the Afghan government-not the United States.

ECONOMY

Cancel The Bush Tax Cuts. No point in trying to be clever - cancel the whole thing, and return federal revenue to where it was during the Clinton presidency. We need to continue to have discussions about the distribution of the tax burden, but first and foremost we have to get our tax revenue back to where it covers the government's bills. The easiest way to achieve this is by reverting to the pre-Bush Administration tax burden distribution. And while we are addressing the revenue side, we also need to change the expense side - we need to stop spending what we want, and start spending what we have. We need to re-institute the pay as you go spending rules and formulas if we ever intend balance the budget. This is more than a financial issue-it is an ethical issue. The Republic Party that prides itself on its moral compass is the same Republican Party that is stealing from our children.

The Economy Won't Tank If We raise Taxes Back To The Old Levels. It amazes me that it is now the Republicans who argue the economy won't grow unless the government borrows hundreds of billions of dollars to pump up investment and consumption. The Party used to actually believe that the free market itself would tend to reach a natural balance of consumption and investment which best utilized our resources to promote growth. "Faith in the Free Market", we used to call it. The word Republicans used to call people who thought our economy would only work with government controlling investment and demand was "Socialist". Strange to think but if this were the late forties and this President were running these massive deficits while expanding government spending, Richard Nixon would have been calling him "Red George".

Tort Reform: Attorneys who initiate lawsuits for plaintiffs on a contingency basis should share liability for the other side's legal expenses. Tort reform is an important issue for businesses. I'm hesitant to suggest completely taking away the power of juries to award excessive punitive damages in cases of egregious corporate misconduct. However, we need to acknowledge the impact of the changes in the legal profession and the impact of technology. An attorney who takes a case on contingency in the hope of earning a large settlement is also a participant in an economic process - the attorney, just like a manufacturer, is in it to make money. Technology has significantly lowered the cost of filing lawsuits - a process that once took dozens or hundreds of hours of typing now takes five minutes of find and replace. For attorneys, there almost no downsides to filing a suit - it doesn't take much of their time to initiate a lawsuit, if they win it could be huge, and if they lose they don't have to pay the legal costs of the other side. Having them carry a share of the liability will restore some balance to the process.

UNITED NATIONS

Create A United Nations Agency On Democracy. I have always been amazed that the U.N. manages agencies on Human Rights, such as combating poverty and ensuring the well-being of children, but heads no such agency to rate the Democratic well-being of nations. If a country's government is democratically elected its resources are more likely to be directed toward improving the quality of life for its citizens, as history has repeatedly shown. I believe this should be a primary goal of the United Nations - to evaluate political systems and promote the spread of democracy. The U.S. flavor of democracy doesn't have to be used as the standard. What counts is that every country has some formalized and valid method to allow its citizens to periodically vote for the leaders of their country. To my mind, the freedom to choose one's own government is the most basic human right.

Non-Democratic Nations Should Only Have A Half Vote In The U.N. The U.N. is a representative body of national governments. Why then should nations with non-democratically elected governments have the same standing in the U.N. as those that are fair, representative and democratic? I propose that the United Nations establish an "Agency on Democracy" that would be the body responsible for rating national governments on the degree to which a country is democratic. If we are serious about the U.N. as a concept and as a forum for addressing issues facing the world as a whole, then it is only right that all citizens of the world have a right to make their wishes known. The people of Myanmar deserve the same voice as the people of South Korea.

ENERGY

We Should Allow All Existing Nuclear Power Facilities To Double In Capacity, Without Requiring Environmental Impact Statements Or Consent Of Surrounding Communities. Every viable option for alternative energy must be explored, and although it may seem controversial, nuclear energy is still the most proven of the non-carbon energy sources. Doubling capacity in existing facilities, without necessarily building anew, is the least disruptive way to safely increase our general energy production for three main reasons: neighboring populations have long been accustomed the plants, it leverages existing security operations, and provides the surest method of reducing carbon-fuel dependence.

We Should Allow Sugar To Be Imported Into The U.S. At Free Market Rates. Sugar is a far better starting point for biomass energy production than corn. Trade barriers to imported sugar were put in place many years ago, in a different political environment. But at this point energy independence trumps other issues. And yes, we should eventually phase out the subsidies for corn ethanol.

We Should Pursue The Many Small Ways Available To Reduce Energy Consumption. Conservation is a critical part of reducing our dependency on foreign oil. While conservation is again receiving attention, we need to expand this focus. Through public and private efforts, we need to continue to identify and implement incremental changes to our economy and consumer products to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption. It is easy to get caught up in the broad sweeping movements, but the fact of the matter is most change comes through the aggregate effect of many thousands of incremental improvements.

WELFARE REFORM

We Need To Make It Easier To Take Children Away From Welfare Mothers Who Are Not Doing A Good Job Rearing Their Kids. I know this is harsh, but this is a key issue that affects everything from the health of our economy to education to crime. To my mind, the statement "It Takes A Village To Raise A Child" is obviously true - the efforts of the parent must be supported and furthered by the community as a whole. But the village has always had a way to take a child away from a parent that wasn't doing a good job. Maybe it was that relatives stopped providing financial support, and the woman was forced to put the child in an orphanage. Maybe it was more direct, with a grandmother and grandfather physically taking the child from its mother and father. But at the end of the day, this was critical not only for the well-being of that child, but the well being of the village as a whole - if children were left with bad children, it was possible that the bad children would start to set the norms of behavior for all of the children in the village.

In some ways, this is what is happening now in many poor neighborhoods. The children of parents to who doesn't care or are overmatched set the standards of behavior for the neighborhood. They harass the kids that try to do well in school, beat up children that won't join gangs. Raising a child is hard enough already - in poor neighborhoods, the efforts of the parents who care are often overwhelmed by the kids of parents who don't care. Again, harsh to say, but the worst parents are essentially setting the standards of behavior for the whole neighborhood. Until we address this issue, we will have a hard time making progress in many other areas. It hurts our economy, it hurts our educational system, and at the end of the day it makes it much harder for government to fulfill its role in extending equality to opportunity. Certainly, it is easier to talk about removing the children than to agree on a reasonable process for deciding which welfare mothers need to have their children removed. However even though the question is hard, we still need to ask it. Personally, I think the other parents in the neighborhood should be involved in the decision process; they are the people who have the most direct knowledge of which parent's children are causing the most trouble, and they are the ones who most directly feel the impact.

ABORTION

Abortion Should Be Legal And Covered By Government Health Programs. Making abortion illegal would have a significant impact on the U.S. budget, and the country cannot afford it - every unwanted baby has a significant financial cost to the government. This is harsh, but unfortunately it is far less expensive to allow women who do not want to give birth to - choose your terms, abort the fetus or kill the baby.

HEALTH CARE

Health Care Is Far Too Complex To Be Captured In A Couple Paragraphs, And I Am Working On A More Complete Health Care Platform. A starting point for discussions on reform need to start with the explicit acceptance of two truths: rich people will always get better care than poor people and responsible people will always get better care than irresponsible people. And although this is harsh, we need to acknowledge that we cannot afford to save every premature baby or resuscitate every eighty year old person. We need to more explicitly acknowledge that we do make Death Decisions, and arguably change how these decisions are made. Universal health care is certainly an important goal for our economy and people. However while the single-payer system would lessen the complexity of making death decisions - by giving that power to the government - it is hard for me to imagine how having the government sign doctor's paychecks is going to address all of the problems facing our health care system.

EDUCATION

We Need To Take A Deep Breadth. I know education is a critical issue, but sometimes I think we need to take a deep breath before discussing the topic. To my mind, most children in the United States do get a reasonably good education, and if I had to guess I would say most parents are reasonably satisfied with the job that their own schools are doing. Every time we institute a new school reform or experiment, there is a transition cost on the kids currently in school - there is a disruption to their education. We need to be careful not to turn our educational systems into laboratories of constant change.

Education Will Be Hard To Improve Unless We Make Changes To Our Welfare System. The effects of any other reform, from better financial accounting to removing under-performing teachers, will be limited until we address welfare. I talk about this elsewhere, but we need to make it easier to take children away from over-matched or irresponsible mothers on welfare. Once we've done this, the atmosphere in many classrooms will improve substantially, and the teachers will be able to focus their efforts on education instead of keeping the peace.

We Need To Repeal No Child Left Behind. Two critical functions in education are standards and accountability. No Child Left Behind lets each State set its own standards, but then uses the threat of School Choice to enforce the standards. I'm sorry, but system-wide school choice doesn't work, and anyone who understands Adam Smith should be able to figure this out. School Choice is unfortunately a perfect example of the effects of crackheads in the party - its proponents base their support on a theoretical fantasy. I do support federal standards for education, however still believe that local parents, with the right information, are still the best lever for insuring accountability.

We Need To Make It Easier To Remove Underperforming Teachers. I understand the reasons the tenure system developed, and understand and support the needs for teachers unions. But at the end of the day those few teachers who are doing a bad job have an impact throughout the educational system; we need to protect the students more than we need to protect the teachers. Certainly, there are many questions that need to be answered: What constitutes "underperforming"? How do you adjust for the differences in groups of students? How do you protect against unjustified retribution by the school administration? But just because the process is difficult doesn't mean we don't need to do it. Personally, I think the other teachers in the school should be involved in the decision process; they are the people who have the most direct knowledge of who is doing a good job, and with the students most directly feel the impact of other teacher's underperformance.

We Need To Develop A Uniform Chart of Accounts. Years ago I did a research project on the St. Louis School District. It was very difficult to compare expenditures from school to school, because it seemed that each school booked expenses in different ways. I think there needs to be one standard chart of accounts that all schools across the country use. Consistency of accounting will not have a direct impact on education, but it will give us much better insights into where educational dollars are going, and allow better comparisons between well performing schools and poorly performing schools.

GLOBAL WARMING

I'm Baffled That The Existence Of Global Warming Is A Political Issue. Anybody who has sat in a traffic jam can feel the micro effects of humans on the environment - it seems logical to me that there must also be a macro effect. I acknowledge that natural cyclical climate change is also likely a cause of rising temperatures, but just because it in part might be happening naturally doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about it, or respond to it. We need to ensure our planet continues to be habitable by utilizing the formidable tool of human ingenuity toward the task of protecting our environment and climate.