Political Platform

Most of the political talk on Corned Beef Catholicism is focused on current events, as well as the deeper structural problems that exist in the government as a whole, and the Republican Party in particular. But sometimes, it’s important to just take a step back and think about the kind of policy you’d like to see if we can ever get this Swamp drained. Taking that kind of broad-based view as a big reason this page exists.

I also wanted a “full disclosure” page. Corned Beef Catholicism is unapologetically aligned with the Trump/RFK populist movement, but that movement is a big tent with room for a lot of angles coming at the same goal. I have a particular niche inside that movement and this page lays that out. Readers can get a top-level look at the prism by which I view the political world, with all the biases that are inherent in any of our worldviews.

Finally, let’s be honest—it’s just a fun little ego trip to lay out your own platform, as though you were a presidential candidate yourself. You get the fun without all the hassle. So, with that said, this are the issues that form the heart of what Corned Beef Catholicism believes in the political sphere.

MAKE AMERICA SANE AGAIN

To say we’re a nation that seems to have lost its way is a gross understatement. What is literally the most basic fact in the universe—the fundamental, biological difference between men and women—is now a source of partisan division. We aren’t going to make headway on the more purely political issues until we start moving at least in the direction of God. That’s why we start here.

Religious Liberty

All salvation flows from Holy Mother Church, as she marches inexorably through history, scooping up souls, including sincere people of good will outside her visible boundaries. Therefore, the freedom for the Church to operate is paramount to the salvation of the country and of individual souls. That freedom is appropriately extended to people of all religious traditions, as a reflection of man’s free will.

Furthermore, religious freedom is the only way we’re going to find a real solution to the deep-seated cultural decay in this country. When does life begin? What is the authentic definition of marriage? Were human beings created as man and woman? Do we have the necessary virtue to live as a free people? How would define what that virtue is? Even for those who are non-believers or not committed to specific religious concepts, these are questions that the traditions of faith have something vital to say on.

Ultimately, a human being’s only decisions that matter are the ones that relate to Almighty God. Those decisions have to be free of external constraint and the state has the responsibility to ensure that freedom.

The Right to Life

With over 60 million dead human beings since 1973, and even more ruined lives in conjunction with abortion-on-demand is the scourge on America. Thanks to Donald J. Trump and the overturn of Roe vs. Wade it’s now a matter that can be handled by the states. I hope one day our land will be in a place where the personhood of the unborn child can be enshrined in the Constitution. Until that happy day comes, it will have to be a matter left to the states, as Lincoln wanted slavery left in the hands of the states until circumstances came together for the Emancipation Proclamation.

For now, my threshold litmus test issue for the presidency and federal offices is narrower—candidates simply can’t codify Roe vs. Wade. Just let this work out at the state level, where a good stance on the right-to-life will remain the threshold issue for me.

THE AMERICA FIRST CORNERSTONES

The America First agenda is what is at the heart of what’s roiling the political establishment today. The phrase “America First” is not a mere pious expression of patriotism. It involves specific agenda items, including the following:

Coming Home

The United States never came home after World War II. We have treaty commitments all over the globe, most notably with NATO and Article 5. The phrase “our allies” sounds like a benign comment—like the buddy you watch sports with is your ally. But in the world of foreign affairs, it means this—you’ll treat an attack on your ally as an attack on yourself and respond as such. Here’s a list of the NATO countries. I don’t wish ill on any of them, but if they are attacked, why does the kid from your neighborhood, or even your own family, who volunteered for the Armed Forces, have to be on the firing line? These are kids that go into the military, often because it’s the best economic option. And our political elites have treated them as mere rabble, to be disposed of for reasons that have nothing to do with the security of our country.

I believe we need to be strong on defense. The Reagan adage of “peace through strength” remains as true as ever in a dangerous world.  But NATO and similar commitments should be dissolved. The troops should be positioned to protect against actual threats to our security.

To be clear, this is what I mean by “threats to our security”—It means something akin to the planes showing up over Pearl Harbor. It means traffickers pouring across the border. It doesn’t mean vague, undefined things halfway around the globe. If events in another country threaten our way of life that thoroughly, we need to either re-examine our way of life or re-examine our dependence on that country. Which brings us too…

Economic Nationalism

The United States is a blessed country, spanning an entire continent and with more than enough resources, from agricultural to energy, to feed its people and provide reasonable employment opportunities. Our elites have squandered those blessings. Our jobs have been outsourced to whatever country will pay pennies on the dollar in wages, all for the short-term hit of an abundance of cheap imported goods at Walmart.

This is gravely damaging to the cause of authentic social justice, as its people further down the economic ladder, and often lacking academic credentialism, who pay the price in the form of lost job opportunities and seeing their neighborhoods sink into despair. This, in turn,  is gravely damaging to the cause of social stability and has exacerbated income inequality. And this is gravely damaging to the cause of national security, as the industries that are being lost often produce vital technology.

Ultimately, all of this is damaging to the cause of basic charity towards one’s own, the first responsibility of any nation. Tariffs are the answer, and they should come in two different ways.

To begin with, there should be equalization tariffs. The difference in what it costs to produce the same product in the United States should be compared to every other nation, based on their regulatory requirements for environmentalism, wages, and worker safety. If it’s 10 percent cheaper to produce something in England, then impose a 10 percent tariff on that product. If it’s 60 percent cheaper to produce something in China, impose an equalization tariff of that same level. This can bring us to an equalized playing field.

But a level playing field alone is not enough. We also want to win. It should be the explicit preference of the government of the United States that homegrown companies be the ones that prosper. An outright protective tariff of 5 percent should be added on top of the equalization tariff. Five percent is a figure significant enough to give the American company an edge in the fight for price point. And it’s also not so large that it allows complacency on the part of the American firm, such as happened with the auto industry in the 1970s.

The Border & The Cartels

If you had asked me this question even a year ago, and certainly three years ago, I would have given an answer that might have seemed left-of-center. That answer was more migration from Latin America and to specifically focus on the poorer peoples. I would rather be in a society with them than I would with the increasingly woke upper-middle class of the Western world. I think poor Catholic migrants fit the tradition that matches with my own on the Irish side. I simply wanted a properly regulated system—including, if necessary, a Wall—to ensure that this migration could happen orderly, in a way that would protect the working classes already here, while still keeping the door open to others who would come in legally.

The last three years have ruined those hopes. The decision to blatantly not enforce immigration law has created a floodgate of illegal immigration. The job of the next president is not to think about ideal immigration policies, but to clean up the mess this lawless regime has inflicted. The open border has been great for human traffickers. It’s been great for employers who are willing to exploit a flooded labor market by paying lower wages. It’s not great for anyone else.

The task, then, is to close up the border, and start figuring out how to deal with the mess. Are deportations of illegal entrants possible? From the standpoint of a just remedy, I think it’s appropriate. But do we trust the government to properly identify and deport the right people? Particularly a vengeful regime at a time when so many legal Hispanic immigrants are breaking towards Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Junior? I don’t.

So, beyond closing up the border and stopping the flow, I don’t know what to do. I’m disgusted beyond measure with those who facilitated this and enabled it. We have to appeal to Our Lady of Guadulupe to turn this human tragedy into a blessing for all concerned.

THE FISCAL STRUCTURE

Taxes and spending are the bread and butter by which the government operates. The decisions made on them also help structure society. Here’s what I think we should do:

Taxes

The orientation of tax policy should be to encourage savings and investment by those on the upper end, and to protect the necessities of life for those on the lower end. It should further be aimed at facilitating family life. To that end, I would suggest the following:

·        All taxes on food and gas, at both the state and federal level, need to be stopped immediately.

·        There should be a single tax rate of roughly 15 percent, with anyone below what’s considered middle-class entirely exempt.

·        Sales taxes aimed at luxury products and non-essentials should be levied.

·        The trade policy outlined above will tax foreign imports.

·        The tax credit that parents can take for their children should be increased.  

·        There should be tax breaks for investment in machinery and other manufacturing equipment meant for domestic production.

I’m not a “soak the rich” person, but in the event that more revenue is needed to cover legitimate spending and to pay down our national debt, we can then look at bumping the rates for upper-middle class people to 20 percent and for the upper brackets to 25 percent. These would still be the lowest tax rates in the Western world.

All of this is aimed at giving everyone—not just the wealthy, with their army of tax accountants—a way to reduce their tax burden. You can buy domestic products and avoid the tariff. You can save money rather than put it into luxury items and avoid taxation. You can invest money into heavy industry, thereby creating jobs, and avoid taxation.

We recognize the reality of the need for some taxes. The goal is to protect those least able to pay while also protecting the rights to enjoy the fruits of one’s work, all the while making the United States the premier place in the world for investment dollars to flow.

Spending

Spending is an extremely broad subject, covering individual issues, many of which will be discussed further down. But there are general principles which should guide the entire debate. 

First and foremost, the debt limit cannot be increased anymore. Contrary to the corporate media hysteria that ensues every time an increase in the limit is debated, holding the line would not automatically trigger default. It would simply mean that the government can’t keep raising the amount of money they’re allowed to borrow.

If you and I are unable to raise our credit card limit, does that mean we’re about to go into default? No. It simply means that we have to start making our payments. A refusal to increase the debt limit would put the government on prioritization of payments—first of which would be those dealing with the debt and the second of which would be Social Security and national defense. It’s long past time for that to happen.

Second, there has to be real transparency regarding spending. It’s long past time for every program to be voted on individually by each member of Congress. No more lumping everything into a big appropriations bill. That might have been acceptable when we had a government whose fiscal responsibility could be trusted. That trust no longer exists. That means we need lots of roll-call votes on each specific spending program. At the very least, we the people can get a handle on what our money is being spent on, who supports what, and make more informed voting decisions.

Those two principles—no more debt limit increases and complete transparency-should guide our spending debate. On many of the component issues involved, including some we’ll discuss below, I may or may not be an advocate for spending federal dollars. But when it all comes together, everything has to be subject to these two principles.

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THE OWNERSHIP SOCIETY

There are a lot of divisions right now among voters who are either Republicans or at least incline in that direction. The divisions are serious enough that we appear to be headed for a political divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences on the issues above, notably the America First agenda. But in the midst of the bitter divorce, let’s not forget that those on the other side of the GOP debate have developed some good ideas over the years. There was a reason that many of us, at one time, used to like people like Paul Ryan. Or, going back to the 1990s, Jack Kemp.

The reason was that they, and their type of Republican, often thought innovatively on how to use the private sector and free market to achieve positive ends for middle-class families and those on the economic margins. In fact, we might say they used strategies (the free market) that are associated with conservatives to achieve goals (social justice) that are associated with liberals. In the cases we’re about to discuss, the worthy populist goals involve getting more individual control over how one’s children are educated, ownership of health care and more ownership of your pension.

Corned Beef Catholicism has spared little criticism of George W. Bush, but it has to be said—he introduced the term “The Ownership Society” into political discourse, and in 2005 made an honest effort to give people more control of their Social Security. The fact he was abandoned by cowardly Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress, should not deprive him of an area where he deserves his due.

In short—these issues—education, health care and Social Security—are areas of common ground, both with our opponents within the GOP and among rank-and-file Democratic voters who want more control over their own lives. Here’s how I see them:

Education

This is a state and local issue and should be handled as such. At the federal level, it’s time to abolish the Department of Education. On the state and local level, the focus needs to be returning control to the family. That means a wholesale transition to a voucher program. Every student gets a voucher, and their parents have the exclusive prerogative on where to use it. Homeschool co-ops are a part of that program.

Furthermore, financing should move away from local property taxes and onto statewide taxes, whatever they may be. There’s no reason for students in a poor urban county to have less access than the suburban counties. But the only government role is providing the voucher and providing reasonable oversight on what schools qualify for the voucher. Suffice it to say, that qualification should be given generously, without regard to the political, cultural, or religious beliefs of the school.

This will necessarily involve including schools who teach things that everyone—myself included—would consider offensive. But the divisions in our society are too fundamental and too deep to maintain social peace any other way.  

Health Care

There is no issue on which the polarization of the two parties has had worse consequences than on health care. The reality is that both sides have good ideas. Moreover, the average voter would generally agree with both ideas.

Democrats are right that a basic guarantee of health coverage should go to everyone. Regardless of what you may or may not have done in your past and what mistakes have been made, getting medical treatment is a basic human right. It makes no financial sense to exercise that right through emergency room care.

Republicans are right in that the optimum solution is for people to own their own private insurance coverage, and for private charities to fill as much of the void leftover as possible. States , not the federal government, are the proper mechanism for dealing with health care for the poor.

The federal government needs to run Medicare, given that putting this on the states would—like with Social Security, which we’ll get to in a moment—leave Arizona and Florida bearing a disproportionate burden in the care of the elderly.

The two sides need to come together and work out a solution that builds off the best of Obama Care---protection on pre-existing conditions and universal coverage—while cleaning up its worst bureaucratic excesses that hamstring the private market.

Social Security

When Social Security was created, it was built on assumptions that the average elderly person was not going to live much past 65 and that they were likely living with family members. Today, life expectancy has soared well past that, and people live on their own. The system is now having to do something it was not designed to accomplish—provide a living for independent people for as long as twenty years and perhaps more.  

Furthermore, the taxation system is one of the most regressive. Payroll taxes stop being taken out at $160,000 a year, meaning this is a tax that falls disproportionately on people who can least afford it. This is class warfare in reverse.

Therefore, the first priority should be to reduce the payroll tax burden on working and middle-class employees. New Deal myths aside, these taxes are far from the sole mechanism financing the system. The tax structure per se isn’t going to impact benefit payments.

But we do likely have to revisit the benefits themselves. Given the context in which 65 was designated as a retirement age, is it really unreasonable to gradually raise that to age 70? Of course, you grandfather in all people currently on the system so they aren’t impacted, and you introduce it slowly enough so that anyone who is affected will have plenty of time to prepare. Why is this unreasonable, especially at a time of trillions of dollars in debt?

I understand that from a fiscal responsibility perspective that are several items that should be on the chopping block before Social Security is touched. We can start with the America First agenda that headlines all of this and then move into the transparency issues discussed in The Fiscal Structure. When all of that is done, we’ll know where we stand with Social Security.

What I strongly suspect that when we reach this point, we will find that Social Security as we know it won’t be sustainable without any of significant tax hikes, cuts in other popular programs or structural reform as outlined above. I believe the structural reforms—raising the age to 70--will be less painful than any other option. But I don’t think escaping this fiscal crisis without pain is going to be possible for any of us.

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THE SPLOTCH OF BLUE

There are areas where my opinion is more aligned with the Democratic Party platform, issues that have their roots in the pre-1968 period, when the party cared more about the bread-and-butter needs of the working man (or woman) and less about what pronouns they used to identify themselves. These are areas where I would diverge not only from the Republican Party, but, I would guess, from my fellow travelers in the America First populist movement, and quite likely, from many readers of Corned Beef Catholicism.

But before you disagree with me, hear me out. Even more important, consider the issues where you might part company with those you are generally aligned with. The reason I say this, is that American politics is going through a fundamental realignment. The populist movement that Trump leads has opportunities to reach out to voters who have otherwise recoiled from Republican candidates. Look to see if there’s any issues that you might be able use as a tool to reach across the aisle to disaffected Democratic voters. After all, if we want to get rid of the GOP Establishment, we have to replace them with something else. Here’s where I can reach across the partisan aisle:

Labor Law

Workers have a right to organize. The Catholic Church teaches that this right is fundamental. The denial of workers just wages is a sin that cries out for vengeance from Heaven. And while we can acknowledge the enormous problems with union leadership—from being co-opted to serve a Marxist agenda to personal corruption to flat-out incompetence—this is still the only mechanism of which I’m aware where workers can use their collective power to bargain for better wages and benefits.

As such, I oppose “right to work” legislation, which allows for workers to decline to join a union that their colleagues have voted to form. The reason is this—if one worker can opt out, management can use that as leverage to selectively favor non-joining employees and undermine the entire union. While this would not formally contradict the basic rights of workers to organize, it would severely undermine it.

This doesn’t mean I think that every time a vote to organize comes up at a particular place of business, the employees should always vote yes. That’s a decision appropriately left to them, and one that—if it were me—would depend on a range of factors, from how management us to how competent and effective the union leadership would be at turning my dues into something concrete. But if the decision of the employees as a group is to unionize, then that choice must be across the board for everyone. Otherwise, the right to collectively bargain exists only on paper and not in real life.

Minimum Wage

The responsibility to pay someone a living wage should be up there with basic responsibilities employers have with regards to worker safety and reasonable care for the natural environment. It’s appropriate that wage laws be done at the state level—the cost of living is considerably different in places like California or my home state of Massachusetts, than it is in West Virginia or Alabama. In the former, the $15 hour minimums pushed by Bernie Sanders & Co. are reasonable. In the latter, it would be excessive and drive up unemployment rates.

The last point leads me into a common conservative objection against the minimum wage, which is that increases in the minimum lead to lost jobs. But how good are these jobs, if they can’t even keep a person out of poverty? Isn’t the person better off just looking for another job or starting their own venture if they’re going to be broke anyway?

Furthermore,  larger corporations rely on government programs to fill the gap between what workers earn in wages and the poverty line. When did it become conservative to let businesses turn into freeloaders? Is it not more conservative to insist that a business that benefits from an employee’s work bear the responsibility of providing a living wage than the taxpayers at large?

Both of the ideas in this section are ultimately aimed at strengthening the private sector. The labor union is a better mechanism for improving compensation and working conditions than is the government. Businesses, not the government, should have the responsibility of getting their employees past the poverty line. Unions have been discredited with large swaths of people in this country—not just Republicans and conservatives—because of their own corrupt leadership. But we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE

We’ll close with ways to make government accountable to us, rather than vice-versa. If the people fear the government, you have tyranny. If the government fears the people, you have democracy. Let’s get back to the latter.

Term Limits & Transparency

The Founders did not intend for a professional political class to govern this country. They anticipated that government posts would be held by people from normal walks of life, who then returned to their professions. Furthermore, even allowing that, they feared allowing any one person or institution the ability to gather too much authority. Hence, the delicate system of checks and balances was put into place.

All of that is shattered today. The fact that members of Congress go to Washington and stay forever is only the most visible abuse. There is also the huge bureaucracy, accountable to no one and elected by no one. All of it has to be dismantled.

Term limits are the place to start, and then a long slog of changes have to be sought to make the executive branch more accountable to the democratically elected president that it is supposed to serve.  

It has to be said that none of these abuses could have happened without our tacit consent. We the People chose to keep electing incumbents when we always had the option to blindly throw everyone out. Those representatives had the option to exercise real oversight over the executive branch—not just for political purposes aimed at partisan gain, but simply to ensure that agencies were carrying out laws and regulations as they were intended. The fact we currently have a Regime both unelected and unaccountable falls on us.

That’s actually good news. Because if the blame falls on us, it means the opportunity to fix it also lies with us. It will be long, long slog, filled with more than a small amount of discomfort and pain. And it will only be worthwhile if the United States becomes a good country once again, per the Make America Sane again section. It is still a battle worth fighting. I’m doing it in the hopes of enacting policies like the ones outlined above. You may have entirely different ideas. If we succeed in making this a government of the people again, at least that debate can be had. Right now, the debate is all for show. That needs to change.

Elections

There was never a reason for our elections to become as divisive a topic as they’ve become. The reality is that, of the steps needed to secure the process and give everyone confidence, there is a broad consensus. Showing a photo ID to vote is supported by huge majorities, including healthy majorities of rank-and-file Democrats.

Mass mail-in voting and drop boxes must be eliminated. It wasn’t Donald Trump who first warned about this. It was Jimmy Carter, who in a report co-authored with James Baker after the 2000 presidential election, said that mail-in voting and other actions that remove the process from the voting station itself, are recipes for fraud. I might add that simple common sense would tell you the same thing. How about we just go back to limiting non-Election Day voting to absentee ballot requests, where cause is demonstrated, along with military voting? Otherwise, you show up on Election Day and cast your vote.

To make that easier, let’s move Election Day to a Saturday or Sunday, to make it easier for people to vote. That would require a constitutional change, as the first Tuesday in November is specifically noted in our founding charter. If we want to stick with Tuesday, at least make it a national holiday so everyone is off work. For our heavily congregated urban areas, let’s use as many large facilities as possible—the big basketball arenas and convention centers—as voting locations, to eliminate long lines.

When it comes time to count the votes, we’re long overdue for transparency. The totals should be reported by all the counties at the same time. No more of this letting the big cities—i.e. the Democratic machine counties—wait until all the red counties have reported. After the votes have been reported, there should then be a complete audit, overseen by participants of all involved campaigns.

It bears emphasizing that an audit is not a recount. An audit is aimed at ensuring that the ballots cast can be connected to actual human beings who are legal residents. An audit ensures that the books balance, whereas a recount just adds up fraudulent votes a second time, as though it would make any difference.

Photo ID. Same-day voting. National holiday or weekend. Expanded vote centers. Simultaneous reporting. Followed by audit.

I have to be blunt—if you have a problem with any of this, I need to assume that you have some other motivation besides a fair and honest election.

Gun Rights

I’ll make an admission here—this has been a blind spot for me. Not that I’ve ever been a gun control person, but I could go a little wobbly, and not being a gun owner myself, can certainly be blind to abuses.

In the past, I’ve focused too much on the ideal world—one where you could do things like background checks for issues like mental health. People like my brother and my late father—neither of whom can be considered “gun people”--took the hardline 2^nd Amendment position and said if you give the gun controllers an inch, they’ll take a mile. They were right and I was wrong—or at least too soft.

This is not a society that can be trusted to exercise any reasonable control over guns beyond a check for a prior criminal record. They can’t be trusted to distinguish true mental health problems from the person who’s just struggling. Above all, the government can’t be trusted to benignly oversee an unarmed citizenry.

We saw what happened during COVID-19 in places like Australia. The fact our citizenry is armed is the only thing that keeps us safe from our own rulers—just as the Founders anticipated. I’d like to say that maybe it will be different someday. But human nature and the lust for power being what it is, I wouldn’t count on it.

There you have it. There’s so much more that could be said, but spilling over 5,000 words will have to do for now. This is the general framework by which Corned Beef Catholicism views the political world.