My thoughts on voting in 2010

As O'Rielly would say...Factor 1: I have the attention span of a nit. Government and business suffer from our collective desire for everything to happen instantly, in the moment, without any wait. I think technology feeds into this. How did the world survive before cell phones and instant messaging?

Shareholders would rather sue a successful company than allow the management to make investments to strengthen that company for the long term. We want our dividends now and as large as possible. This is one of the reasons privately held firms are making such a come back today.

In governing, we can’t wait two years for a slow recovery from the worst recession in decades. It doesn’t matter that it took Reagan and his tax cuts and budget deficits and Bush and his wars and his tax cuts and budget deficits a combined 16 years to make this mess. Our impatient cry is “Why isn’t it fixed immediately”.

I can't wait to hear the outcry when more Republicans like Reagon's former budget chief Stockton start agitating for tax increases to reduce the deficit they are so worried about. In a country with very low overall taxes compared to other civilized countries we still want more for less and God knows let's not tax the wealthy!

Factor 2: Time to make some practical changes to our voting process. We need to do away with the Electoral College. We have all kinds of machines that can count individual votes and we settled the state’s right’s issues some decades ago. Florida alone doesn’t get to choose the next President as much as Floridians might wish it. The popular vote is what counts.

We need to do away with lame-duck sessions of Congress and delays in seating those elected to office. Election winners should be swore in that week or at the latest that month. We can all get to Washington pretty quickly these days since we are not traveling by horse and buggy.

Elections should be held on a Saturday or Sunday like in the rest of the world. I know Republicans don’t want to make elections convenient because then the young and the poor might remember to cast ballots but I think we should try to make voting easy and convenient.

And I hate to break the Tea Party’s collective heart but forget term limits, it is never going to happen. Even those crazy Tea Party candidates that got elected will forget that promise as time goes by in a seniority based system. Instead, pass a mandatory retirement age like judges have in Massachusetts. 70 seems reasonable to me. It’s often after this age that legislators get into big trouble.

Finally, I know the conservative members of the Supreme Court decreed that any entity, foreign or domestic, could donate millions to the candidate most likely to do exactly what that entity wants. In that case, I think we should implement some sort of full disclosure measure so we know how much the government of India is paying for Republican Congresspersons so American companies that outsource additional jobs there will not be chastised.