After seeing Nader's name a few times here lately I couldn't understand why anyone would vote for Nader and the Greens, so I went to the Green website to find out. Now I'm more confused than ever that any thinking person can take them seriously.

Some points from their website:

Build into the progressive income tax a Universal Social Security system to provide a guaranteed minimum income sufficient to maintain a modest standard of living. Everyone will receive a Basic Income Grant, paid in monthly installments like current Social Security.....In 2000, the Guaranteed Basic Income should be $26,000 a year for a family of four ($500 a week), with $3250 adjustments for more or fewer family members.

Excuse me? EVERY FAMILY in America gets 26K a year for doing nothing? Where in the hell would all of this money come from?

The Greens call for jobs for all through public works and a shorter work week. Private jobs are good, but public jobs are necessary for full employment.

Huh? Public jobs for full employment? Does that sound familiar to anyone? Didn't Russia try that?

Raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage-at least $12.50 an hour, indexed to the cost of living.

Why stop at $12.50? If that is good wouldn't $25.00 an hour be even better? Hell, pay us all a 100 bucks an hour, why aim low?

Cut the standard work week to 30 hours with no loss in pay for the bottom 80% of the pay scale. An immediate cut in the work week to 30 hours will increase full-time jobs by 33% and increase workers' free time by 25%.

Ask the French how well this has worked for them. People have to SNEAK into work, avoiding the police, in order to get their jobs done. More in that vein:

Establish a Social Dividend system to pay workers a "second paycheck" to enable them to receive 40 hours pay for 30 hours work....The labor productivity of American workers has doubled since World War II. Had we channeled these productivity gains into leisure instead of higher production and income (mostly for the upper reaches of the income spectrum), we would now have a 20-hour work week. Future productivity growth should be used to reduce working hours further rather than channeling productivity growth into higher production.

These idiots truly believe that eventually we can all work 15 minutes a week and still bring home our current paycheck! Now I see why they call themselves the Greens, cause they is smokin some POWERFUL shit! But wait, it gets funnier...

Enact a single-payer National Health Program to provide free medical and dental care for all, federally-financed and community-controlled by locally elected boards...Establish a nationwide system of federally-financed, community-based child care as part of the public school system and modeled after Head Start, available voluntarily and free to all who need it.... Provide free, quality public education from preschool through graduate school at public institutions.....Everyone household should have the right to decent housing that costs no more than 25% of their income. To achieve this goal, invest $25 billion annually over the next 10 years in state and local non-profit housing providers....

I could go on and on, as they do on their site, but you get the picture. In the utopian dreamworld of the Greens everyone gets everything for free, people work only a few hours a week, and somehow the money to pay for it all magically appears in the US Treasury.

And here I was under the misconception that Nader had a brain, boy was I off the mark!

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 07, 2000

Answers

Uncle, you just haven't been paying attention. This plan is already in affect. It's the federal worker plan. It seems the greens want a piece of the action too, but they're naive enough to say it out loud.

-- KoFE (your@town.USA), August 07, 2000.

Unk...

.....Communism is the same thing as globalism...

-- Patrick (pmchenry@gradall.com), August 07, 2000.

Unc, I'm sure that you've been around long enough to remember the 1960s. There was a goofball named John Sinclair who headed the White Panther Party, later changed to the Rainbow Peoples' Party, which was headquartered on Hill Street in Ann Arbor. His 9 or 12 point program (don't remember the exact number) read very much like the demands of the Green Party. I also seem to remember reading, "Everything Free for Everybody" in bold type on one of their flyers. I also remember thinking, how the heck are we going to pay for all of this? Barter?

My point? Same song, different band. I just can't get excited about politics at the moment.

-- (kb8um8@yahoo.com), August 08, 2000.

A thirty hour week, why isn't that called part time?

26K a year, at last I could retire! Yeah for the Greens!

Amazing that this way of thinking (even though we've seen it again and again) gets attention. IMO, the people who support it are those who enjoy living off other's hard work.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), August 08, 2000.

kb8um8

Its the late 60s and Im fresh out of the military and living in the Geddes Lake area of Ann Arbor while putting the finishing touches on my engineering degree. John Sinclair and the Rainbow Party manage to get control of the Ann Arbor City Council through the local election process. What was their first formal act? Why they went and *legalized pot use and the student body really got off on that. Of course, as an upstanding citizen and military veteran, I was abhorred over the whole deal:>).

* There were some caveats to this local ordinance but I was too stoned to remember.

-- Ra (tion@l.1), August 08, 2000.

Cut the standard work week to 30 hours with no loss in pay for the bottom 80% of the pay scale. An immediate cut in the work week to 30 hours will increase full-time jobs by 33% and increase workers' free time by 25%.

I wonder if anyone has pointed out to them that their math is as poor as their reasoning. Each day has 24 hours, each week has 168 hours. A 168 hour week, minus 40 hours for working leaves me with 128 hours of leisure time. In order to get an increase of 25% in leisure time we would need to get an additional 32 hours off per week. A one day work week. Dumbasses.

Regards,

Fots

-- Fotios Astopopoulous (it's@ll.greek.to.me), August 08, 2000.

Does Ralph have a real job? Whence his income? Anybody.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), August 08, 2000.

Ra, April 1 was/is Hash Bash Day on the Diag, but they got rid of the $5 pot law by the early 80s. Good ol' John matured into a restaurant owner (Saline or Ypsi, don't remember) and was subsequently picketed by his employees for unfair labor practices.

Anyway, the writings of the Green Party are similar enough to make me wonder if the author(s) either looked at some Rainbow People's documents and/or they're some of the same writers.

PS - knew Geddis well -- I used to go fishing out on Argo Pond, near the dam.

-- (kb8um8@yahoo.com), August 08, 2000.