Your Questions About Green Living

Would it not be more effective to eliminate carbon tax and cap trades and use the capital for innovation?

The carbon trade doesn’t make a dramatic impact on cutting carbon emissions in my opinion. I think we need to slowly drive up the cost of using fossil fuels through taxes. Then instead of letting a company sell of carbon credit to another company, essentially causing the same aggregate quantity of pollution companies should use that capital to make their business and surrounding environment more green. I feel that amount of capital use to buy products and invested in green energy companies can be utilized to foster innovation to assist in gravitating our nation and economy to a more green, carbon free, and less pollution direction. I understand the initials cost would be extremely high but innovation and investments now would slowly cripple the costs. Portugal produces 45% of their energy from renewable energy provided the Portugese paid twice as much for electricity for the last 5 years.

If my political party were real, would you support it?

Pretend I am running for president, would you vote for me? Why or why not? I’d peg myself as a social liberal and a right leaning economic moderate. I just want to get a feel for people’s positions on things and how my own views compare to others. Questions/Comments welcome.

Social positions:
-Take government out of marriage entirely, treat all legal unions as civil unions. If you want to go to a church and get married, do it and leave government out of it.
-Allow law-abiding citizens to bear arms, but reinstate the federal assault weapons ban
-Support a women’s right to choose and have easy access to birth control
-Legalization of all soft drugs; treat drug addiction as a medical problem, not a criminal one
-Outlaw the death penalty (not because of a moral opposition to it, but because the current system is broken and discriminatory)
-Increase border security and crack down on companies hiring illegal immigrants, but allow a path to citizenship
-Have a minimum social safety net (universal healthcare and social security)
-(Unsure) Mandate some type of volunteer, military, or foreign service after completion of high school for all citizens to promote civic involvement and national pride, using Germany, Switzerland, or Israel as a model.

Economic positions:
-Allow the government to go into debt during times of recession, but require a balanced budget otherwise.
-Strive to remove all trade tariffs and promote free trade
-Increase the capital gains tax and make income taxes more progressive to decrease the wealth gap (the largest since right before the great depression) and stop the increasing concentration of wealth at the very top
-Decrease corporate taxes to bring them in line with other developed countries and eliminate tax loopholes
-End all corporate subsidies (oil, farm, etc)
-End all alternative energy subsidies and enact a cap and trade or carbon tax to decrease carbon dioxide emissions. The market will decide what technology to adopt rather than the government pushing certain ones, like ethanol.

Foreign Policy:
-Remove all troops from Saudi Arabia immediately, and from the middle east entirely as soon as possible (Extremist Muslims probably would not hate us as much if we removed our troops from their holy land and stopped propping up a repressive dictatorship).
-Suspend all military aid to foreign countries (Yes, this includes Israel, they can take care of themselves).
-Strive for a two state solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Jerusalem as a shared capital.
-Decrease or maintain current funding levels for the US Military. It should not be immune from the current cost-cutting measures and debates.

Current Events/Misc:
-Increase the debt ceiling as soon as possible to avoid default and maintain our credit rating. Decrease social security and medicare benefits and possibly increase the retirement age to deal with the deficit in the future. Leave discretionary spending near current levels for the foreseeable future.
-Increase funding for manned NASA missions to the Moon and Mars (The return on the space program far outweighs the cost).
-Increase investment in high speed rail for intercity travel over medium/short distances, not the whole country
-Fund/allow embryonic stem-cell research
-Increase NSF/scientific funding
-Promote nuclear power as a interim power source while moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy
-Make election day a national holiday

Will you support Barack Obama for he is for environment?

Barack Obama is all for renewable energy.
http://obama.senate.gov/press/070319-obama_works_to/

Legislation proposed by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., to provide a federal tax credit to build E85 ethanol fueling stations across the country passed out of conference committee Wednesday.
http://obama.senate.gov/news/050728-tax_credit_for_e85_fuel_in_ene/

I am high school physics teacher I a make only $33,275 a year. I cannot afford to pay $4.12 for gas and I want cheaper gas. The gas used to be 1.29 five years ago,

and corn was was only $2 per bushel one year ago, and now corn is $7 and prices of chicken and beef and bread soared. My students underperfom in the class because their parents cannot affrod to by them breakfast.

Will Obama’s stimulus proposal help the economy or make it worse?

Business break for losses: Obama is considering a tax break for businesses that book losses in 2008 and 2009.

Job creation: Obama would establish a new credit for businesses that either create jobs in the United States or or avoid layoffs.

Middle-class tax cut: Obama would offer a tax cut equal to $500 a year for individuals and $1,000 for couples.

Small business write-off: Obama would increase the amount of expenses small businesses can write off to $250,000 in 2009 and 2010, up from $125,000 currently.

Additionally: double renewable energy production and make public buildings more energy efficient; rebuild crumbling roads, bridges and schools; computerize the health care system; and modernize classrooms, labs and libraries.

Will this help soften the recession, eliminate it, or make it worse

option on my plan to save America?

all poiticians do is debate and try to stab each other in the back without getting anything done. here is a list i assemled that i think covers what this country needs to do to get back on the right track. please take a little time to comment on how it could be changed and what party it (or pieces of it) are most like.

•Cut down on the deficit; create a budget with no more than 100bil in debt in 25 years. oDo not increase taxes but decrease loopholes
oCut spending on wasteful projects
•Cut back on government agencies either by consolidation or elimination.
•Create laws or a separate agency/entity that removes pork from bills
oCreate government “watchdog” campaign composed of members from all parties
•Stop all tax breaks for US companies that have ½ or more of either personnel or assets overseas.
•Invest in America’s future by providing subsidies to clean and renewable energy, this decreases our spending on foreign oil
•Legalize hemp. The production will have many uses commercially and all products can be taxed to further reduce the deficit
•Create more jobs by repairing roads and revamping transportation systems.
•Create more positions to monitor energy such as well inspectors to keep environmental tragedies to a minimum
•Limit our stake in international wars.
oStop promoting dictators that are “US friendly”
•Create more regulation on “big companies” such as large banks and multibillion dollar corporations to keep them honest
•Restrict credit card companies from high interest rates.
•Reworking or replacement of No Child Left Behind
•Rework the immigration laws to more forcibly enforce no illegal immigrants but make the process of becoming a legal immigrant easier.
•Raise the retirement age to 68 or 70 and repay the “borrowed” money from the fund with some budget < 50 years.
•Decrease (not elimination!) spending on low yield science applications such as NASA
•Decrease imports from countries such as china
•Increase exports and create beneficial trade agreements such as with South Korea
these are kinda like "planks" that i think should be goals for the govenment, not all are easy but i think that they will be the easiest in the long run. the tax system we have now would work and even decrease the deficit if it were all enforced. many companies are able to get outrageous governemt subsidies to offset taxes or hire lawyers to find loopholes. if we made them pay the full rate of thier taxes it would make a considerable dent.

to my knowledge no company taxes exports, just imports. and because of our trade agreements, (such as Nafta) we cant even impose those. china, our main importer (and our main loan source) would not be too keen if we were to put a tarif on thier goods so just decreasing what we buy from them is the only solution.