Best Idea

Most of us know who really runs our government, sure we get to vote the people in but do they really work for our best interest? After all, where do these people get the money that pays for their elections campaigns? Sure some of it comes from private individuals but most of it comes from lobbies. Of course some of the lobbies are in our best interest but a lot are not. Now trying to get rid of lobbyist is more difficult than removing tics from hound dog. Take for instance the petroleum lobbies, the past few years they have spent millions on our government and it seems to be working as the government has done nothing to help ease the cost of petroleum. The petroleum interest would have us believe that it is supply and demand that is keeping the price high, although there have been no real shortages and there probably won't be any because if they have shortages it would hurt their profits. I believe that the cost of fuel is going to hurt our economy as everything we buy has some built in fuel cost and not only that, we may be funding the terrorists war against ourselves in an indirect manner, but this is a different rant I do not wish to cover in this post.


There is a popular saying 'We have the best government that money can buy.' which I believe to be partially (mostly?) true and it really shouldn't be that way.

So here is my idea, we have all seen the little check box on your tax form that ask you if you would like to contribute 3 dollars to the election campaign fund, right? I believe that most people do not support this fund, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that you may not want to support the (re-)election of people that do not share your views and or you may consider corrupt in one manner or another. For whatever reason, here is my proposal, we create a new fund or change the current fund and use it to create a lobby that will support the majority of our interests. In other words we create the 'American Lobby' (or something like that) and we staff it with real lobbyist and fund it from what we voluntarily contribute every year on our tax returns.

This does three things;

1. Your contribution will mainly go to support your interest. (Which to me is knocking down pork, controlling taxes for us working classes, consumer interests, such as petroleum and other things that we all care about.)

Now you may be asking how do they know what my interest are? The 'American lobby' will ask you. This could be done in many different ways (by polls, mail and or the internet, others?). Of course there are always two sides to any subject and I would expect that this lobby would present both sides, like what they do on most voters pamphlets (if you do not know what that looks like I suggest you vote).

2. It would make it more difficult for our representatives to ignore our interest on a real-time basis and also give the current lobbies competition making it more expensive for them to conduct business as usual.

What I mean by this is that currently we vote our representatives in and after that our only real pull is to threaten them with not voting for them next time. With our own lobby we would be funding/not funding their re-election in real-time. This 'American Lobby' would dole out the funds to representatives that represent, how could they ignore it?

3. It takes a current system that is not working and turns it into something useful.

By current system, I mean the check box on your tax return, if we do as I suggest then I believe more people will contribute and we will be able to take the power back that we should of had along.

How do we get started?

One way to get this ball rolling is to share this idea with other people, see what they think, most people that I have mentioned it to think that it is at least interesting and quite a few say they like it a lot. Other people can blog about it, anything to get it started. If this idea can make it into the main stream press/internet so more people can hear about it and talk about it, then we might have a chance. It will need to be discussed and have all the kinks worked out of course.

After a lot of people have talked about it, we will eventually need a sponsor to get a bill started, so if you really really like this idea and you have some pull (I don't) contact your congressmen or you could just send this link to your congressmen and tell them that you think this a great idea. We must get congress to create this lobby, I know this is a long shot and that all the other lobbyist are not going to like having competition, which means they are going to fight against it with tooth and nails. But if we have enough support from a lot of people for such a lobby and keep the pressure up, I believe it can happen, I hope it can as I see no other way to balance the system.

Here is the current system, it is called the Federal Election Campaign Act and it would take such an act to make this happen, so let's get started!


A few suggestion for the lobby;

1. That this 'American Lobby' be run to represent our national interests, if it is allowed or forced to split the money into regional interests then it will loose it's ability to fight pork and other regional type issues, plus it will make it very difficult if not impossible for it to do it's job. We already have regional representatives that fight for pork, what we need is something to counter balance that by lobbing against pork filled bills.

2. It should be setup as a completely autonomous corporation, separate, as much as possible, from the government for obvious reasons. We the people should be the lobbyist only concern, it should not take on any other partners; i.e.; no conflict of interest.

3. Just as now, you will only have to check the box on your tax form (no cost to you) to be part of this lobby and only individuals who elect to contribute should be allowed to participate in this corporation, i.e.; vote and receive financial reports. Everybody who elects to contribute will receive exactly one share no matter how much extra voluntary contribution they make; this will keep rich individuals from having more influence than poor.

4. Also the person that is chosen to run this lobby should be elected (re-elected) every one or two years by a national contributor vote, keeps him honest and hopefully doing a good job.

5. This lobby should also have to report their finances to all contributors yearly like a corporation that the contributors are shareholders in, which they are. This may include who got what money (re-election contributions) and why, also expenditures such as salaries and other things it may spend money on; this will allow us to measure the effectiveness of our lobby.

First a brief history

I am a 54-year-old white married male. I am a mostly self-taught electronic engineer/technician currently working as an hourly technician on night shift (15% premium). My wife works for the same company as I as a material handler. She also helps people with dog issues in her spare time. The bank (mostly) and I own a modest 48-year-old dwelling in central Florida. I guess that I would be consider middle-class by some, but I am not the middle-middle class, in fact I think that I am probably part of the working poor, maybe one or two steps away from loosing everything. We do have health insurance from our jobs, which is good (most of the time, more on this later). We have two cats and three dogs, one of which was ‘left’ to us by an aunt. The cats are rescues. I have no children, but I do have two siblings, my brother and sister, and both my parents who live nearby. My wife has two adult sons from a previous marriage. I am not telling you any of this to bitch (that comes later), I just want you to know where I am coming from, but yes, there have been better times (sigh).

As a person who works in electronics I am asked to repair problems using certain tools including my brain. I am not super intelligent or I wouldn’t be in my current situation, but I do believe that I have taught myself to try to think ‘outside the box’ so to speak, or at least approach problems from new and hopefully creative directions. In my line of work this is called trouble-shooting, so this is what my blog is going to be about, but not about electronics. I am going to post some of my ideas on what might help in the political/social arena. I will try to stay out of the any political arguments (us verse them) and stick to fixes that don’t involve specific political parties. So here goes nothing… :-)