Suggestions for President-elect Barack Obama

These are my suggestions for President-elect Barack Obama concerning the economy, family issues, literacy, crime, national healthcare, taxes & energy:

<B>Job Creation:</B>

New Deal-type initiatives like the CCC & WPA.  These would create real jobs, paid for by the US government (you and me), repairing the national infrastructure; for instance, rebuilding New Orleans & the rest of the still-reeling and still often unrecognizable Gulf and Atlantic coasts.  This would be trickle-horizontally economics, in that the living wages paid to these workers would be saved or spent by these workers, and in turn be saved and spent by the recipients of these workers' funds, again and again, raising tax dollars over and over again for Uncle Sam, creating a big-time real return on our investment in putting tax-paying people back to work in worthwhile jobs.  There must be zero tolerance and certain severe prison terms for any monetary wrongdoing by anyone involved in any agency created for this effort.

<B>Family Gardens:</B>

For families (and for the planet), we could encourage all able families to begin family vegetable gardens, to help families get back to Nature.  They could use saved rainwater from water barrels for most of their irrigation.  Working in the garden as families would bring families closer together, and they would get a better idea of how vital the Earth is for us.  These new gardeners would have food to eat and they could donate any surplus food to their neighbors or to city shelters for the less fortunate.  These gardens would create green space and make our air more breathable.  By the way, a similar program was set up quite successfully in Great Britain at the height of the worldwide Depression of the 1930's (<I>The British Heritage</I>, 1948), and to this day, if you travel by train through England, you can gaze down into all these tidy little backyard gardens, many of them having now been turned over to flowers.

<B>Neighborhood Watch:</B>

Create a new national agency as a central base for neighborhood groups interested in preventing crime in their neighborhoods.  The neighbor groups throughout the USA could get together at certain times in the year to brainstorm for new ideas in neighborhood safety; and these neighborhoods could then pass along these new ideas to the national agency, which would then broadcast them nationwide over the Internet to all the other neighborhoods, for a tremendous pool of ideas.  One idea might be zero tolerance for drug houses and laxer laws about prosecuting the inhabitants, shutting them down and boarding them up.

<B>National Healthcare:</B>

Our healthcare system is a mess of spinach.  It couldn't be any worse, so anything would be an improvement.  I suggest a commitee of doctors & economists make a thorough study of all countries with national healthcare and borrow from those countries their best ideas and avoid their worst ideas.  This way we can join the rest of the civilized world in the 20th century .  .  .  and only one century too late.

<B>Friends of the Library:</B>

Our city has a Friends of the Library store.  This is a store, staffed by volunteers, in which people from all over our city donate books for the "Friends" to sell, the proceeds going to the local libraries.  The Friends take the books in the best condition and sell them in their small store.  Other books, and they are donated thousands of them, are stored in a building two doors down and sold at three-day book sales twice a year.  These sales are very well attended, and people leave with huge stacks of books, most costing from $0.50 to $1.00.  The notion of a Friends of the Library store in cities all across the USA would be great for the country's literacy.

<B>Taxing big business:</B>

Any company or business enterprise making over a million dollars in profit will pay a flat tax on their net profit (yes, in addition to any other tax they owe, if any), and it will be applied to the National Debt.  This tax can expire whenever there is no debt.  In the meantime, it would encourage businesses to stake out positions against all government pork-barrel spending.  Don't feel too sorry for businesses: many of them pay less (if any) taxes than does a family of four earning $30.000 per year. Related Reuters article:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1249465620080812

<B>Cold Case Cowboys:</B>

Retired policemen, detectives & other former government employees should be given the opportunity to volunteer to work on cold crime cases.  Just bringing, say, four of these guys and gals together could represent 100 years or more of experience.  Retired people often like to recall their work years, and this would be a great way for them to keep their hands in their old fields.  This could bring long-awaited justice to many people and allow current law enforcement to focus on solving current crimes.  This is not an original idea of mine; I got it from the Cold Case Files TV show and am passing it on in hope it could catch on nationally.

<B>Energy:</B>

There must be no government handouts or bailouts to any auto company to use for producing cars that run on gasoline; we have been too long on that deadend road leading nowhere.  And you could talk yourself blue in the face and still never be able to convince me that our using up other countries' oil while sitting on our own oil is somehow a bad idea; our oil could me much more valuable to us in the future than to squander it now for two dollars per gallon at the gas pump.