Here's the second part of my platform, which contains some more stands on the issues:

IV. Education

The cost of education has gone through the roof due to the federal government's incessant involvement in it, and educational standards have plummeted as a result of the state's tinkering. The government schools, by and large, are nothing but political and ideological warehouses of propaganda aimed to create the perfect, obedient citizen who will never question authority or any wrongdoing by the state. SAT, ACT, and MEAP scores and other testing examination systems for scholastic progress and entry into colleges have been on a significant decline.

Education is too important to be left in the hands of federal bureaucrats on Capital Hill. It should be left in the hands of parents, students, schools, thus effectively establishing a true free market. A real free market in education would ensure that our children's future would be protected and never mortgaged by the teacher unions (like the National Education Association). Democrats want to propagandize your kids and use the teacher unions to leverage more power to themselves, demanding "better health benefits" and saying that they are "underpaid." It may seem to the average voter that teachers are paid less than other established professions. Yet, on average, they do, compared to other career fields (professional sports do not count), get three months off and get nice perks on the side. Republicans, on the other hand, want to propagandize your kids and use religious rhetoric and other boondoggles to leverage more power to themselves as well, demanding that prayer be returned or that the Ten Commandments be posted in the classrooms. However, many of them also support the use of state-approved, state-subsidized vouchers that will only be used by schools eligible for these programs and effectively transforming what's left of the private education industry into carbon copies of the government schools.

Government (and even private) teachers do pay income, payroll, and withholding taxes, and their tax burden should be lifted the same as any other taxpayer. Therefore, I believe that teachers should get bigger and more solid cuts in their income, payroll, and withholding taxes and should be free to keep their money like everyone else. They are unfairly burdened by the tax system as many taxpayers are and their burden (at least a portion of it) should be pared down as much as possible.

In recent years, the Bush administration, with the help of Congress and many federal education bureaucrats, pushed for the No Child Left Behind law, which delved Washington more into our schools and demanded insane testing standards by which no school in every state can abide. This law has established a one-size-fits-all policy, which has created a bureuacratic nightmare of its own making. The law must be repealed at all costs, and, if elected, I will work with the Congress, the Senate, and our President to see to it that it becomes repealed as soon as possible.

Years ago, Republicans say that they would get rid of the Department of Education (a plan that was originally stated in their party's platform). After the Republican Revolution of 1994, that never materialized. The Democrats have supported the Department of Ed as much as the GOP has and it has been a bane to education all the way. It has proliferated the decline of educational and testing standards and issued more bureaucratic regulations, which are and have been the heart of the entire government school industry.

Therefore, if elected, I will get rid of the Department of Ed. Education must be left to parents, communities, students, and the free market. Let parents and students decide how they want their kids educated. Bureaucrats only stand in the way.

V. Social Security

The Social Security system is going bankrupt. There is no trust fund. When the system was established by the Social Security Act of 1935, the American people were told by the Roosevelt administration that it was an insurance program and that people had the right to their SS benefits when they retired. However, in subsequent Supreme Court rulings, the program is not "insurance" by any means and that you have no contractual right to your SS benefits, meaning that Congress can change the rules anytime and you wouldn't even know it.

The SS tax has been raised over 40 times in the last 50 years, the program's benefits have been cut many times, and the retirement age has been raised a good number of times as well. The system is currently insolvent. In order to keep it going, we will have to either:

*raise the current tax rate;
*lower the benefits for future retirees, including the Baby Boomer generation;
and
*raise the retirement age

A majority of Americans today think that Social Security will not be there for them by the time they retire, even though most don't want to admit it. The trouble is that today's generation of working Americans are paying into a Ponzi-scheme system, in which the monies they pay are automatically redistributed to our grandparents. The young are, in a nutshell, subsidizing the old. As a result, there is a great deal of hostility between the young and the old, with many of the elderly thinking that they deserve their SS benefits, even if it's taken from the young, and the young resenting their grandparents for it. Even those elderly who are well off and very affluent think that they deserve a piece of the SS pie.

President Bush's "ownership society" program partly advocated "partial privatization" of Social Security, except that it wasn't true privatization to begin with, or even a part of it. The plan entailed the government telling you what portion of your money you can invest into the state's approved and chosen retirement account for you. You have no control of that money, considering that it would have transformed the financial services sector into a carbon copy of the SS program.* (*Note: the financial sector is already subsidized by the state, and this action would have made the sector into more of a government sector than it already has become.)

The only way to solve the SS crisis is to abolish the program, but it must be phased out in transition with its assets being liquidated while upon delivering a lump sum payment to seniors who should receive their benefits. There are many government-owned properties, including the buildings of the Social Security Administration, so those properties can be marketized and the sales of those properties can be diverted to a multitude of newly-established true private retirement funds for the elderly. Once the tax is repealed and those sales are finalized, individuals can be free to choose any retirement money that they can invest out of their pocket.

If elected to the Office of the Vice President, I will work with Congress, the Senate, and our President to see to it that the young are freed from the clutches of the Social Security tax and the Social Security administration and that the elderly are taken care of via the above-proposed private means.

VI. Health Care

The government's involvement in health care has been a disaster. After the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, Medicaid, and the odious and onerous federal regulations that regulate prescription drugs, the insurance companies, and the entire medical profession, the health care industry's costs of providing care to the sick, poor, elderly, and needy have skyrocketed. Over 80 percent of the costs of prescription drugs continue to rise because of excessive regulations by the government, thanks to the 1962 Kefauver Harris amendments to the Food and Drug Act. These amendments have increased the requirements for new pharmaceutical developments by tripling the time from getting the drug from the laboratory to the market from 4.5 years to 14.5 years. Because of this, patients are dying after being denied new drugs that could have saved their lives. 5 million people have died as a result, since 1962 because of the additional 10-year wait that prevents them from procuring lifesaving medications on their pharmacies' shelves.

Barack Obama (and recently Hillary Clinton) renewed calls for moving the U.S. from the already-half-socialized medicine that we have to their version of a full-blown socialized medicine, which is now touted as "universal health care." It is true that many Americans cannot simply afford health care, but that's because the goverment has mandated that 50 percent of the tax monies go into the system (subsidizing the care via the insurance industry). Thanks to the HMO Act of 1973 (which was eventually repealed anyway), it led to the federal government and many states mandating "one-size-fits-all" health care policies that are contributing to the out-of-control costs and the decline of quality at the hospitals and clinics. Remember, when the government provides a service, its costs double and continue to rise. We pay those costs via taxation or inflation (whichever comes first), when the government expands the money supply (printing more money out of thin air) via inflation (thanks to the Fed) to cover them. Socialized medicine, as it is accurately called, will only increase the cost of health care further, not solve the problem as its supporters believe.

All it will do is to ration care in order to prevent the entire system from crumbling. Rationing care means that some people will be denied care and others will be forced to be put on waiting periods of six months, maybe longer. That means people literally die before they even see a physician or a specialist, especially when it's important for those patients to receive that care. Think about it. In Britain, kidney dialysis patients, who are mainly seniors, are routinely denied by the government-run hospitals in order to conserve resources for the young. Canadian seniors come through the U.S.-Canadian border and flood our hospitals to get treatments for serious health threats like cancer, cardiac bypass surgery, and hip replacements that they cannot get in their own health care system because they are routinely put on a two-year queue. There are not enough resources in their homeland to provide for the care they so desperately need.

As bad as the current health care system is, universal health care, or more accurately "socialized medicine," isn't the answer. The answer is a true free market in health care, which has been in non-existence for decades. It's time to repeal all laws and regulations that govern the industry. It's also time to put the Medicare and Medicaid programs to pasture. The same must be for the Medicare Drug Prescription Benefit that was passed in recent years, widely touted to cost $400 billion but ended up actually costing north of a trillion dollars.

It's time to return health care to the free market once and for all.

That's it on my entire campaign platform.

Yours in Liberty,

Todd Andrew Barnett
Candidate for Vice President 2008