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Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson Wins 2012 Libertarian Presidential Nomination

Published on May 10th, 2012 by ronmoore

On Saturday May 5th former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson won the 2012 Libertarian presidential nomination. Johnson won the votes of more than 70% of the nearly 600 delegates who attended the Libertarian National Convention in Las Vegas. Johnson describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially tolerant and says he thinks most Americans are too.

He says he will propose a balanced budget for 2013 and cut spending by $1.4 trillion. He also promises to veto any bill that causes spending to exceed revenue. As New Mexico Governor he vetoed 750 bills. The vast majority of the vetoes were sustained.

Johnson would also immediately end the war in Afghanistan. He supports marriage equality and opposes drug prohibition. He advocates legalization of marijuana. He is also pro-choice.

He’s run for public office only twice -both times as a Republican for New Mexico Governor – and won both times in a heavily Democratic state.

Here is CSPAN video of Friday’s debate between Gary Johnson and his opponent Lee Wrights. Check out Gary Johnson’s Campaign here.

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The Top 5 Needed Macroeconomic Policy Reforms in the USA

Published on April 22nd, 2012 by Cameron

The Top 5 Needed Macroeconomic Policy Reforms in the USA

1) Income tax. The income tax allows write-off on debt and taxes equity twice. This special-interest policy towards the banking sector creates too much debt in the economy, and with it, crises as the Fed manipulates the interest-rate. There should be a flat income (or consumption) tax (or more politically feasible a two-tier tax), without any write-offs for anything.

2) Lender-of-Last Resort (LLR) policy. Given a central bank, the rules for making liquidity available to avoid crisis need to be reigned-in and clarified to prevent special-interest treatment to large well-connected institutions. Liquidity should be made available for short periods of time, for high (penalty) rates of interest and with good collateral. The Fed’s discount window should be made available equally to all financial institutions, and only under these conditions, with no exceptions and this should be overtly announced as Fed policy.

3)“Too Big To Fail” policy. The whole idea of 2B2F should be abolished, as this opens the door to special-interest treatment to the politically well-connected and creates unnecessary policy risk. With a reformed LLR as noted above, there would be no need for a separate 2B2F.

4) Inflationary-bias in central bank policy. Again, given a central bank, the Fed should have a single mandate, price-stability. However, unlike the current price-stability mandate, prices should be able to drop as well as to increase within a given band (say 3% annual aggregate price movements in either an inflationary or deflationary direction). The current upward price-bias in policy means that savers are penalized to the advantage of borrowers. Savings provide the capital-base from which investment is made, and only with real investment are standards-of-living able to increase. In addition, inflationary-bias in policy hurts the less wealth-off in that they have less discretionary income to spend on increasingly more expensive goods.

5) Housing policy. The policy of the US government for the last 75 years has been to encourage people to buy homes they are not yet ready to afford. This has been done through the Community Reinvestment Act, Federal Housing Administration policy, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 100% mortgage-backed bond guarantees. This misuse of society’s resources discourages entrepreneurial activity and prevents people from moving to find employment. All of these bad policies should be eliminated as soon as possible.