Tag Archives: 17th amendment

Twelve revolutionary acts that’ll make Donald Trump the greatest president in history and will make America truly great and free again UPDATED

  1. Selling off all federally owned land which includes national parks and reserves. Currently the federal government owned 640 million acres of land which is 28% of all of land in the United States. I start out with this cause this is an issue that literally almost nobody talks about. NOBODY. The federal government has constitutional obligation or authority to own any land other than say District of Columbia or any plots federal buildings sit on top of. National parks were first started by Teddy Roosevelt by executive order without any say from the states. Trump should simply give it back to states and private landowners, ranchers and contracters. If he were to sell off $50 an acre take that number multiple it with 640 million; that makes 32 billion dollars. A lost part of federalism would be restored overnight.
  2. Cut spending – BY A LOT. Cut spending where it isn’t needed or re-appropriate it to different areas. Cut the education department, cut the EPA, cut the DEA, cut the FDA, the education department, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, HUD, the Pentagon. Any kind of spending that isn’t needed in those departments (waste, fraud, abuse etc) needs to go.
  3. Eliminate unconstitutional departments. This is an extension of no.2. Departments that must go immediately; Education, EPA, DEA, FDA, HUD all gotta go. Give education and environmental issues fully back to the states. Same with drug issues and that means ending the War on Drugs and War on Poverty once in for all.
  4. Completely clean house of the neocons in the State Department and cut it. They’re bent on trying to make Russia heal and push on for endless wars in the Middle East. Fire them all and replace them with more rationally minded people on foreign policy.
  5. Bring home troops and shut down military bases overseas. We have total of 700 bases beyond our borders. Contrast to the supposedly evil Russia which has a grand total of TWO bases outside her borders. Should start with pulling back from eastern Europe and that further extends to NATO.
  6. Pull out of NATO and the UN. These two institutions have long outlived their purposes and only cause more wars and more destruction. In addition dismantle UN headquarters in New York.
  7. After repealing Obamacare, go even further in withdrawing the federal government from healthcare. Give it back to the states and let the free market thrive again. The free market hasn’t been in healthcare for 4-5 decades since Medicaid and massive regulations of healthcare were passed. Repeal and dismantle federal regulations on healthcare. Free up and liberalize the market so there’s real competition with big pharma companies like Aetna, Blue Cross among others. Let more laissez faire health centers like the Oklahoma Surgery Center. Open up competition. Lower costs of care. The healthcare industry will thrive like it hasn’t ever before.
  8. Repeal the Patriot Act, reign in the surveillance state and resurrect the 4th amendment. Admittedly on this one Trump has been a bit weak or hasn’t taken a strong position on it. But I think after all the espionage shit the CIA and neocons have doing with him there’s a decent chance he could become a strong advocate for civil liberties given time. He should be listening to Ron and Rand Paul with this.
  9. Decentralize and shrink the federal government. Further empower the states and federalism.
  10. Repeal the 16th amendment. This is part of what I like to call the God awful trio *get to the other two in a moment* that which has greatly empowered and grown the federal government way beyond constitutional boundaries in the past 100+ years. Initially the income tax was only 1% aimed only at the rich which back then was considered anyone making 25,000 (603.58 thousand in today’s cash) or more per a year. The progressives back then including Woodrow Wilson promised the rate wouldn’t go beyond that. And like all promises from progressive elitists that promise was quickly broken dramatically increasing the highest tax bracket from 1% to 70% in just a few years. That rate was lowered to 25% under Harding-Coolidge resulting in the Roaring 20s. Then was dramatically increased again under Hoover to 63% and then further to over 90% under FDR. Currently the highest bracket stands at 40% for those making 250 thousand or more annually. Trump’s current proposal to bring the tax brackets down from 7 to just 3 is pretty damn good, but he could go much further than that by proposing a 10% flat tax rate similar to what Rand Paul proposed during his run for the Republican nomination a year ago. That should mean eliminating the corporate income tax altogether as well as the payroll and Medicare taxes which are the only two federal taxes that affect most of the population. Eventually he should propose to repeal the 16th amendment via a constitutional convention.
  11. Repeal the 17th amendment. The Senate was never meant to be popularly elected. The people’s house is the House of Representatives which is why all 435 members are up every two years so the public can clean house entirely if they so wanted *though that hasn’t really happened in the modern era thanks to gerrymandering, the power of incumbency and lack of term limits*. The House is proportionally represented by population of every state with California having a hefty 53 congressional districts contrasted with Wyoming which just has one. It’s fairly democratic in a sense. The Senate though is deliberately anti-democratic so as to give all states an equal voice. Back in early American history if New York was in huge favor of a bill, but Delaware and Rhode Island were strongly opposed, it could easily pass the House but stopped in the Senate where each of those states have equal voices. Today the same is true where California lopsidedly outvotes Wyoming in the House, but each have two equal voices in the Senate. To that extent it was decided since that the House was elected by the people, Senators would be appointed by state legislatures. That remained so up until 1914 when the 17th amendment went into effect establishing direct popular elections for all Senators. Previously a number of states had already approved popular vote elections such as Oregon. Where previously Senators served their states, now they were at service of Washington cronies and lobbyists. Since that time federalism and the 10th amendment have been severely weakened and the federal government grown stronger. It’s been suggested that if this horrific amendment wasn’t passed then Obamacare wouldn’t of become reality. If you look at the make of states during the 111th Congress, some states such as North Dakota which had two Democratic Senators vote for Obamacare had a Republican governor and state legislature which staunchly opposed Obamacare’s passage. In a scenario where states still appointed Senators, a lot of Senators who unhesitatingly voted for Obamacare wouldn’t of done so as even a lot of state level Democrats didn’t like how it was originally passed. If you repeal the 17th amendment you restore the states’ proper role and voice in the Congress.
  12. Eliminate the Federal Reserve. Ever since it’s creation the free market has been increasingly watered down to the point where it’s no longer a true free market. You can’t have true free market capitalism while the money supply is controlled by a central banking system. After the Fed’s introduction other western countries adopted the model and now virtually every country in the world has a central bank of some sorts. The Fed has been at cause of every economic crash and depression since it’s creation via the supply of cheap money and cheap credit. The worst of what it’s done though has been since Alan Greenspan was appointed Fed chairman *a supposed gold nik libertarian who went to the Dark Side* who paved the way for the modern era of cheap easy money and full implementation of Keynesian model of economics. Since his appointment in August of 1987 close to 30 years ago, the value of the dollar has plummeted so far so fast down and real wealth has declined in Middle America which as David Stockman points out in his new book Trumped! led to the rise of Donald Trump. Eliminating the Federal Reserve will be a long and hard task to accomplish but certainly a great start is to audit the Fed which Rand Paul has picked up where his father left off with his exit from Congress in 2013 and Trump has said he’ll legislation to audit it. He should go even further and suggest the Fed’s power should be far more limited which could pave the way to its eventual phasing out. If that were to be accomplished then a true free market could return.

If Trump can do all or just some of these revolutionary act then he’d be the greatest President in the modern era and America would be at its freest and most prosperous in more than a century.