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If I Were President, I would:
- Fire Everyone in the White House.
- Find an American who has spent his/her entire life helping people worldwide, and I would put him in charge of foreign affairs. It would be even better if that person hated oil.
- Locate some truly grateful and joyful people who love what our country should stand for and want to make a difference to become the domestic policy and public affairs department.
- Hire a pacifist to head up the defense department.
- Hire an environmentalist to run the energy department.
- Hire Jon Stewart to be my Press Secretary.
- Ask Maya Angelou to help me write my speeches.
- Put together a cabinet consisting of kids ranging in age from 7-17. They still remember what life is all about.
- Find the wealthiest person in America who also gives the highest percentage of that wealth away to help others; he/she would be my economic adviser.
- I would require lobbyists to prove they are lobbying for things they are truly passionate about by working for less than a teacher’s salary. And maybe on that note, pass some kind of amendment that gives teacher’s the salary of oil and gas lobbyists…. hmmm.
- Remind people of the reason for separation of church and state.
- Ask every American to read the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence at least twice a year, rather than one time in Junior High School.
- Get a jump plane and set up a landing area for the White House lawn so I could skydive into work everyday (just kidding. It would be cool though).
The way I see it, anything is an improvement over the current situation, although it’s probably a good thing I’m not leading the country! What would you do if you were President? My son answered this question when he was 5, and you know what his answer was? “I would make all the people eat Broccoli”… Just an example of how you should impose NO limits on answering this question for yourself. Your answers could very well help you make a proper decision come election time for who you feel would best function as our President.
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If you promise those things I would be happy to vote for you! Oh hang on… I’m not American
. Jon Stewart for press secretary is best idea ever… did you see him interview Tony Snow the other night??
Hahaha. I thought so too. The sad thing is, Jon Stewart would never do that in a million years (which is, coincidentally why he would be so great for it).
I’m happy to know I have one vote for my presidency (whether its from Canada/Australia or not).
AWESOME article!
I suppose I’d have to move back to the US to become president…or do you think there’s a rule against Eurotrash running for prez?
First I’d fire Rumsfeld. Oh, already been done. Ok, I’d fire Gonzales. Also been done, eh? Damn, can’t fire Scalia. Hmmm…I’d probably be pretty into firing a lot of people in any case.
First I’d make sure that kids whose parents earn 3 times the poverty level get health insurance…and 4 times and 5 times and 100 times the poverty level. Seriously. They’re kids for @*&%-sake, just insure them. Oh, then I’d move onto insuring the rest of Americans…modeling the system on some radical country like Canada or Sweden.
Then onto cutting carbon emissions, ending the Iraq war, getting people reasonable vacation time.
Told you I was eurotrash
Yeah, who gives a flying f*** about qualifications or experience or anything.
Let’s just hire nice people.
While you’re at it, just steal from the rich who earned their living through hard work and give the money to homeless alcoholics, thats totally fair.
Remember, stealing is ay-ok as long as it’s from people who actually earned a good living.
Sounds good QueenB, I suppose you will also crap money to do all that?
I would let the private companies do the work for me. They know how to make money; they make better stuff. The problem with health care is the government regulation, its one of the worst institution’s because its the most highly regulated.
David, do you really believe that the people currently running are either qualified OR doing a good job? I believe the people and types of people I’ve chosen would make good candidates because they’ve shown success in their lives both in the area of the government that I would ask them to work and in finding ways to help people around them. It has nothing to do with rich or poor. I appreciate your response and your honesty and the good thing about American is that we can see things differently.
I know you mean well and certainly everyone wishes for such a World, but it is not going to happen. First, being a pacifist, those people who are out to kill us will quickly take this country. Second, you cannot rob from the rich and spread the wealth. That is communism which has failed over and over. We all work to help ourselves, not the government or often times, not even our fellow man. That is why capitalism works so well. We all have an opportunity to excel and enrichen ourselves. Sorry to pop your bubble.
Some really great ideas!
I would also add:
1. Create a Peace Department that automatically got 25% of the Military budget.
2. Replace the minimum wage with a Living Wage that is directly tied to the cost of living and that would go up quarterly as the cost of living did.
3. Put a cap on the upper crust and just how much they can gouge us for.
4. Eliminate Corporate welfare, forever.
5. Take away the cap on taxing the rich. If they make it, they get taxed on it.
6. I would make education free – tuition & books.
7. I would expand the national park system and wherever possible join them them to give wild life more room to roam.
8. Eliminate the IRS and simplify the tax system, and maybe even do away with tax filing all together and just make it a sales tax.
9. Recycling would be mandatory.
10. Pollution would be taxed and the more pollution produced the higher the tax.
11. Have nothing but organic food, period.
12. Create a national health care system that worked from a prevention side first to eliminate disease by as much at 80%.
That’s enough. At least if I were the dictator of the U.S., I would make fun mandatory too.
Love your ideas Richard.
Full of rhetoric, no substance.
LMAO, A pacifist for Defense?
7-17 year olds in the cabinet?
Well that would be cool for the rest of the world, Israel Gone, the world as we know it would change… well ok maybe it wouldn’t be all bad…..
Great stuff! I liked the article never mind these guys!
Kelly
Amen! I will vote for you! I especially like your views on teacher salaries. I’ll take that lobbyist’s salary any day!
Thank you chic girl! There’s something fundamentally wrong with salaries in this country. Teachers should be paid for educating future leaders of our country… that’s a pretty high value job if you ask me. I suppose the good thing is that you really have to believe in teaching the youth to want the job.
While Ben seems to believe that you need to ‘crap money’ to have universal health care, it is simply a matter of priorities. America is a filthy rich country. If we continue to spend obscene amounts of money on war, then true enough…we have no money for other things. The fact is that we all still foot the bill for treating the uninsured since hospitals don’t turn dying people away and it costs far more money to treat people with serious conditions that have gone unchecked than it would if they got proper management of their illnesses and/or preventative care.
I’m curious as to whether people who knock health care reform have personal in other countries. If so, how do they compare in terms of quality of care, cost of care and access to preventative treatment?
In my experience, American insurance companies were impossible to deal with, often rejecting legitimate claims, premiums were prohibitively expensive, and if you have a pre-existing condition you’re screwed. My experiences in European countries, while not perfect, have been far less stressful, no financial burden and I’ve gotten a very high quality of care. I’d choose ‘socialized medicine’ any day and am perfectly happy to pay for it.
I would do research on the greed gene and try to eliminate it. David and Jay’s children will see paradise, while waiting for human misery to die with their fathers.