If I Were President ( COVID-19 )

Based on my outline of topics this was certainly not present in the draft outline.  The first guide to all of the people is to be safe and respectful of others.

As President, the first thing to do is to assemble the most brilliant doctors and scientists to develop the right strategy for our country.  Based on limited reading this did not appear to happen.

In general, I struggle with the First Amendment as it pertains to potential national emergencies.  As the COVID-19 news broke there seemed to be so much misleading information in haste to get the news out.  The public seems confused and that should not happen.  The other negative is immediately the blame game emerged.  Depending on the media source there was finger-pointing at both primary parties.  I support the First Amendment, but I would welcome the opportunity to go back in time when facts and integrity were foundational to the news we receive.  Despite the news source, the facts should be the facts.  Speculation and sensationalism bring little value when we are facing a global problem.  I am truly perplexed on how a President, Government, or Society can correct this news ship.  I will have to come back to this concern in a future post.

For the past few months, I have been diligently studying resiliency as applied to software.  The one primary lesson for me is that in order to get a deep understanding of an incident is we must be blameless.  The term blameless seems to have become a cliche, but it is really true.  COVID-19 is an international incident and the world should inspect deeply all of the things that have emerged.  I thought humans were naturally resilient, but human factors are as complex as our biological chemistry.  It is perplexing that many times the first thing that happens is to blame.  We should form a strategy to mitigate the problem, then analyzing deeply what happened and what could change for the better.

I am puzzled by some of the human factors during this Global Incident.  Specifically the panic purchasing and the hoarding of goods.  This is a psyche that I do not understand.  Are we truly a global "me" society and not a "we" society.  I think this is the most disturbing aspect of the human factors influencing the COVID-19.  As a society are we going to instrument circuit breakers for groceries similar to the stock market.  I am going to have to talk with many people with varying views on this topic to better understand the psyche.  I am certain I have some sort of bias, but I am confident if I needed help some of my human networks would come to aid.  I hope those people who hoarded items, even fought over items, reflect on their actions.

If I were President, we would have to assemble strong business leaders to craft a strategy to help those who cannot work from home and temporarily would be without wages.  I would encourage businesses to continue to pay their employees so that we can survive this Pandemic. 

If I were President, I would have to thank everyone around the globe who is manning the hospitals.  Everyone who has chosen to self-quarantine.  All businesses that quickly took action with work from home policies to flatten the spread of this virus.  All of the experts who produced consumable data and facts that make sense.  All of the individuals who were disciplined and purchased what was needed.

Be kind to all!

If I Were President (Introduction)

This is intended to be a series of posts that I have been thinking about for some time.  I do not believe politics belong on Facebook or Twitter.  If you want to express political views write a blog, so join me on this journey.  Challenge any piece you wish with peaceful comments.

First of all the unfortunate truth is that I could never be President with the current state of things.  I am not a billionaire, a millionaire, nor willing to be bought by some damn greedy corporations.  The blogpost is over.  No, it is not!  What would need to change?

This past Tuesday was the primaries.  I had no primary to vote in.  The first thing that we should consider changing is that there should be a primary for all potential political parties.  For several elections in the past 20 years, I have abstained from the two primary parties or went into a party to demonstrate that I was willing to vote. The fact is that the two parties of power are simply not pragmatic and frankly they are polarizing.  The second thing that seemed truly frustrating about this recent primary was all of the ridiculous poll questions people were asked to weigh in on.  I think those need to move to a separate format so that voters can get things done quickly.  I read that some people in Texas waited 8 hours to vote.  The purpose of the primary becomes focused on reducing the number of candidates and that is all.  Maybe we use Survey Monkey to poll the people

The biggest obstacle to becoming President is money.  My proposal would be comprised of two key things.  The first is every Presidential candidate gets a fixed sum of money to campaign with.  The question is what might be an adequate sum of campaign funds for the primary.  I would propose $500k.  The candidates would complain that it is nowhere near enough money.  Candidates would have to get creative.  The second part of the proposal is that there would be taxpayer funding for public TV and radio channels for candidates to express their views and frankly have professional debates.  Each candidate gets the exact same amount of air time.   All debates are on these channels and all candidates are invited.  Prior to the primary, these debates would be party specific. As a side note, I recall during the last Presidential election there was a congress or senate race in Florida where the candidates spent almost $700 Million.  To me, that is a huge problem because think of all the social good we could do with that amount of money.  This is where the taxpayer-funded TV and radio channels come into play.  We have to stop individuals and corporations from buying elections.

So my party, The Pragmatic Party, now has a primary.  The candidates are all on the same footing as all other parties.  I convince the people that my ideas are reasonable.  The people select me as a candidate.

We move into the Presidential election.  The funding increases slightly $1M per party candidate.  There is more air time because we have fewer candidates.  The candidates have their portion of the air time to convince the people of their ideas.  These amounts can change but they would come from a balanced government budget.

I would require that we operate our government with a balanced budget.  Our monopoly money society has probably made this damn near impossible, but we need to do something.  I am not sure about everyone else, but I do not feel that the tax dollars I contribute are put to good use at all.  I feel the tax dollars are lining the pockets of the greedy or are supported by the greedy or are fueled yet by more greed.  I have worked hard and yes I do want to live a wonderful life. Today to have a good life takes money, but do we need millions or billions? 

While I am living in fantasy land there are a couple of other things I would require.  And the biggest one is term limits.  Two terms for the President make sense and should not change.  For congress, we should also apply the same term limit.  It is really a problem that we have had people in congress for 40 plus years.  People tell me the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again.

So I have been elected, we have formed a plan that will not spend more than we take in in tax dollars.  There is no corporate influence.  Ending lobbyists would be a good thing in my opinion. There is one more thing that must be done.  Bills flowing through Congress can have only a single purpose.  Riders and clauses cannot be added.  We vote on one thing at a time.  I just read today that the Covid-19 bill was denied because of the pork fat added in by our political heroes.  I was devasted years ago when a rider was added to the port authority act to halt online poker in the US.  Did Congress know that was part of the bill?  More importantly, did the public?  I am not the most informed, but I was certainly surprised.  There went my entertainment where I was actually making a small amount of supplemental income.

"IF I Were President" I would end daylight savings time!

Finally. "If I Were President", I would run our government using Agile methodologies.  We would be lean, transparent, and iterative.  We would have a public kanban board where everyone can see what we are working on.  Hopefully, we did a great job of socializing the why and the value of the outcomes.

There are many other complexities that I am probably naive to, but this is where I would start.  One last thing I would completely eliminate is all of the signage placed on fences, billboards, and popping up at voting centers.  This is nothing but pollution!