My Crazy Ideas

Ideas So Crazy They Just Might Work

Let's Have Written Debates

As presidential debates come up, there is the inevitable discussion on how they are just reality TV shows and how to do them better. So, here is my take. Instead, of doing them on TV, let's do them in writing. Here is how it would work.

A newspaper would host it, or perhaps a news website, and it would run over several days. The candidates are given a question, say "How would they improve the economy?". Each candidate writes an op-ed to explain their answer. And then the next day, the other candidates can publish their rebuttals.

They could have anyone write it for them as long as the candidate signs it. In others words, they are accountable to what is written. In fact, they would be much more accountable than in the way we do debates now.

Since this would go over days, there would be more than enough time to fact check the candidate's answers, and the candidates would know that before they wrote their op-eds.

Now, you could say we're not seeing how the candidate thinks on their feet or their grasp of the issues. And, I would say that is part of the advantage. This is how a president really works most of the time. Only under rare conditions does a president make split second decisions. They have experts research and produce proposals. Then, they sign their names to the ones they think are best.

The biggest problem is that most people would never read them, but enough of us would to quote them and bring their answers up in interviews. And of course, we could still do the regular debates. Because let's face it. We still want the reality TV show.

Bring Jobs Back to America

Here's my crazy idea to discourage outsourcing and factories moving oversea. It has two part and the catch is that both parts have to implements (which is always hard politically, but here we go).

First, we defined corporations as foreign if they have less than 50% of their employees or assets outside the US. That includes anyone they pay, what's in their bank account, investments, factories, anything they would use to declare their worth in the stock market or expenses on their tax returns. This also includes subsidiaries or other companies they own. Again, anything they would use to report their wealth to investors or costs to the government.

Second, foreign corporations are not allowed to participate in US politics in any way. They cannot lobby. They cannot contribute to campaigns. They cannot contribute to other organizations such as Super PACs. They are not allowed any influence in our political process at all.

The theory is that corporations would rather have political influence than more profit which is my experience. But even when that is not the case, a corporation that outsources too much would eventually be taxed and regulated more making them less competitive.

I do realize that this runs counter to getting corporate money out of politics. In fact, it relies on corporate money being in politics. I too would like to see corporate money made politically irrelevant. But, given our continual failure to do so, I would advocate using the situation to our benefit.

I also realize that there are a lot of details that have to be worked. Otherwise, corporations will use loopholes to not be considered foreign and make more profits overseas. However, to create and exploit those loopholes they would first have to move assets and hire employees in the U.S. I would also anticipate that this would be part of our panoply of political debates, which would always put those corporations in dangers of losing influence and limit the outsourcing the would want to do.