By Tom Burke / Herald Columnist
Time for a snap quiz about … your future; asking what you think about the following proposals for how America should be governed.
Answer yes for a good idea or no for a bad one as you consider them in terms of the impact they’ll have on you and your children and grandchildren’s lives and the health of our democratic republic.
Should we:
• Ban all contraception (and invitro fertilization).
• Eliminate unions and worker protections.
• Ban all abortions regardless of health of mother.
• Raise the retirement age.
• Use the military to break up any domestic protest the administration doesn’t like.
• Deport 11 million immigrants (after rounding them up and putting them in detention camps).
• End birth-right citizenship.
• Pardon all Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrectionists.
• Stop all federal funding for any public school system that mandates any sort of vaccine (i.e. measles, mumps, polio, etc.).
• Cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs.
• Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act thereby raising prescription drug costs for many of the medications you may take, among many programs
• Prohibit Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices.
• Eliminate the federal Department of Education.
• Use public taxpayer funds to pay for private religious schools.
• Mandate teaching of Christian religious beliefs in public schools.
• Ban Muslims from entering the country.
• Execute drug dealers.
• Dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, thus the Weather Bureau and National Hurricane Center.
• Dismantle the FBI and Homeland Security Agency.
• Institute a new tax on health insurance.
• Ban all African-American and gender studies at all levels of education.
• Eliminate Head Start.
• Eliminate all free and discounted school lunches.
• Ban school books and curriculum about slavery.
• Replace career federal civil service employees with political loyalists (who pass a loyalty test to the president) by firing tens of thousands of current workers.
• Allow the president to use the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies to a president’s benefit.
• Purge the military of anyone who disagrees with the president or his policies.
• Eliminate anti-discrimination protections against minorities.
• Put the Federal Reserve under the president’s control, ending its independence.
• End education loan forgiveness programs.
• Fully fund the border wall.
• Totally defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports National Public Radio and PBS.
• Eliminate all climate protection measures and project funding.
• Stop raising fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
• Repeal the federal Dietary Guidelines that provide nutritional advice and set standards for school meals.
• Repeal the federal labeling mandate for genetically engineered food so people won’t know if what they eat has been genetically altered.
• Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.
• Require workers be paid time-and-a-half for working on the Sabbath.
• End FDA approval of mifepristone.
• Include a citizenship question in the census despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling against adding the question.
• Cut all LGBTQ+ health programs.
• Criminalize those who provide abortion care by using the government to track miscarriage, stillbirths and abortions.
• End federal government protections for members of the military and their families to get abortion care.
• Increase Arctic drilling and shutter the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change departments.
• Mandate all public school students take the military entrance exam; but not Christian or private school students.
• Repeal the Affordable Care Act.
• Bring independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission under direct presidential control and White House review.
• Impound funds for Congressionally appropriated programs, a practice which was outlawed under Nixon.
• Move thousands of overseas-stationed troops to the southern border.
• Expel Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients.
• Implement a universal baseline tariff of 10 percent on all imports and 100 percent tariffs on foreign-made cars and a minimum 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.
• Cut U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs costs by cutting health conditions that qualify veterans for disability benefits.
• Take away parents’ ability to apply for Parent PLUS college loans and graduate students to apply for Graduate PLUS loans; and deny loan access to any school providing in-state tuition to undocumented aliens (Washington and 24 other states provide in-state tuition).
• Cut overtime protections for 4.3 million workers.
Now while you, gentle reader, may not think these are good ideas for the next presidential administration, the Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump do.
Because all these proposals come directly from the MAGA conservative Heritage Foundation’s 900-plus page Project 2025, a blueprint for a new Trump administration (80 percent of Project 2025’s contributors are former Trump administration officials.
They are, as described in Politico, “an authoritarian Christian nationalist movement and a path for the U.S. to become an autocracy.”
Or in the words of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts “We are in the process of the second American revolution.”
And it’s what you’ll get if you vote for Trump or any Republican this November.
So be warned.
And just for contrast, here’s what Joe Biden says he’ll work to achieve in his first 100 days:
• Pass the PRO Act restoring the right of workers to freely form a union and bargain for workplace changes;
• Ban assault weapons;
• Restore and pass a permanent child tax credit;
• Cap insulin at $35 for everyone and lower the cost of prescription drugs;
• Build more housing;
• Invest in child and elder care;
• Sign the John Lewis Voting Rights and Freedom to Vote Acts;
• Restore the abortion protections of Roe v. Wade;
• Protect, expand and strengthen Social Security and Medicare;
• End medical debt;
• Raise the federal minimum wage;
• Keep leading the world on climate and clean energy;
• Cap rent increases;
• End tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, requiring billionaires to pay a minimum tax of 25 percent (instead of the 8 percent they currently pay).
Quite the contrast and quite the choice: Biden or Trump; authoritarianism or freedom; Democrat or MAGA. This November, vote like your future depends on it.
Because it does.
Slava Ukraini.
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
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