You've got 535 people in Congress, 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. Now, [my wife] Gena and I went to the House chamber last year. They were debating a bill. Well, not debating — they were screaming at each other across the aisles. And I'm watching them and thinking, this looks like a grammar school class. Who do we hold accountable in the House of Representatives? If you blame one Congressmen for something, he blames Joe Blow over there. Well, how do we know? Let's reduce it down to one or two Congressmen per state. First of all, we'd save millions in salaries and secondly, now we'll know who to blame.
And here is where Chuck proves he knows nothing about the government. Let me break it down.
House of Representatives:
435 members
members allotted based on population (more power for larger states)
less deliberative body more closely in tune with the passions of the people because they're elected every 2 years.
Senate:
100 members
members allotted two per state regardless of population (much more power for smaller states)
more deliberative body, members elected every 6 years.
Congress is a compromise that was worked out by the Founding Fathers to balance the interests of the larger states with those of the smaller states. The smaller population states (mostly Republican states) benefit greatly from the present composition of the Senate. If the House were reduced to one or two members per state regardless of population it would put all the power in the hands of the small states completely disenfranchising the larger states. One person in New York would be infinitely less powerful than one person in Alaska. In addition, the electoral college would have to be changed because currently the composition of the electoral college is determined by the number of Congressmen and Senators each state has. If that were reconfigured to reflect the new composition of Congress, we would never see a Democratic President again and one person in Alaska's vote would become equal to hundreds or even thousands of residents in New York.
Get rid of our tax structure. That's what's killing our people: the income, state, capital gains, corporate, property and social security taxes. It's not right, and it's not the way it was intended in the beginning from our founding fathers. Implement a Fair Tax where we tax consumption.
This would lead to poverty on a horrible scale while ushering in a period of unimaginable wealth for those who are already rich. The gap between rich and poor would grow ever larger as poor people spend all their money on sales taxes. It would also usher in a new caste system where the rich can pass all their money to their offspring who will advance by virtue of their parents' wealth instead of their own talent.
I think you can learn from history. When I started reading, I got interested in the Barbary Wars, when extreme Muslim pirates were capturing our ships and holding them for ransom. Congress decided to negotiate with the Barbary pirates, and Tripoli started a war with us anyway. It was interesting reading about this situation where we dealt with extremists 200 years ago, and thinking about where we are now.
The Barbary Pirates attacked our ships because they were pirates, not because they were Muslims. We started a war with them to protect our interests and we won. We didn't invade Libya and occupy it for 100 years. Nor did we invade Ethiopia based on lies and then occupy that for a decade.
As an option. I'm not trying to cram it down people's throats. Give people an option, a choice, of what they want to do. We teach evolution in school. Why can't we give kids an alternative choice of a Bible curriculum and let them make up their own mind?
By teaching the bible in public schools it ceases being "an option" for those kids who aren't Christian. In a majority Christian school, which is almost all schools in this country, a child is going to realize that they have no choice in the matter. They will go along, and have their rights infringed, in order not to get beat up or penalized by the teacher.
That's a personal thing. It happens to millions of young kids today. That's because of our open society, where sex is not a big thing: "If it feels good, do it." These young kids take that to heart and wind up making a big mistake, just like Bristol did. But you cannot condemn her. It's a mistake she's going to have to live with, but that has nothing to do with Sarah Palin and her abilities as a leader.
Funny how it's only a personal thing if the person involved is a Republican. It's never a personal thing when the mother is a black woman in the inner-city. It wouldn't be a personal thing if Obama had a pregnant 17 year old daughter.
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