With all the fever surrounding Election '08, Clark wants to (jokingly) throw his hat in the ring with a presidential bid for 2012! His platform probably won't get him elected, but he still wants to lay it out for your perusal.
•
Spend only what you make -- In a Howard administration, your president would pass a balance budget amendment to the Constitution. We'd become a pay-as-we-go country -- instead of doing the opposite as we have for years.
•
A flat income tax policy -- The flat tax would be somewhere around 18%. There would be a high standard deduction so that those with lower incomes don't get pinched. A flat income tax would also eliminate the corruption in Washington and let you know what tax burden you have.
•
No more employer-provided retirement plans -- Goodbye to the 401(k), 403(b) and any other form of employer-provided retirement. Your president would require that every dime on a dollar your earn goes into a personal retirement account with ultra-low management costs and simple investment choices.
•
Just say no to socialized medicine -- In a Howard administration, there would be just 12 health plans offered: 3 HMOs, 3 PPOs, 3 HSAs and 3 of the traditional 80/20 splits.
Every insurer would have to sell identical plans. That way you could switch to another insurer's HMO plan No. 2 if your insurer's HMO plan No. 2 is too costly. You would pay your premium based on age, and there would be no redlining based on your past medical history. You wouldn't be required to have health insurance, but you wouldn't be allowed to buy it when you're sick; instead, you'd have to wait 18 months.
A word about Medicare: Seniors would buy healthcare from private insurers in one of the 12 plans, but the government would subsidize catastrophic care at ages 55 and older.
Is it possible to simultaneously achieve the first 2 platform points? Of course not. By 2028, the costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will exceed what is today the entire federal budget, according to
Forbes. So we would either have to raise taxes to an unconscionable level or tell people the truth that we can not afford to be Santa Claus to everybody.
In a Howard administration, we would all need to do a hard reset about the issue of personal responsibility vs. what we expect from government. Santa's sack is getting less and less full, so you've got to be your own Santa. Clark will be running on the Ebenezer Scrooge platform for 2012!
