Bill 2 - D2A, yours truly presiding, see above.
Bill 3 – Personal Responsibility Act, Scott Klug's baby. This was welfare reform in all its myriad forms, including prohibitions against giving welfare to underage mothers, ending extra welfare benefits based on family size, ending open-ended welfare benefits, and requiring people to get a job. There were going to be a lot of little provisions, and the Democrats would hate every one of them!
Bill 4 – Tort Reform Act, Jim Nussle. Personally, I figured this one was the least likely to get passed. Trial lawyers were big fans of the Democrats, since by creating all sorts of new 'rights', the Democrats gave fertile ground for law suits when somebody violated somebody's rights.
Bill 5 – Rebuilding America Act, me again. I had a fair bit of knowledge from when I had written Eat Your Peas!, and I used my contacts shamelessly. I got in touch with Harry Johnson and used his ideas repeatedly. If he couldn't figure out something, he knew somebody who could. More on that later.
Bill 6 – Unfunded Mandate Elimination Act, Chuck Taylor's responsibility. This was pretty straightforward in concept. An unfunded mandate was pretty routine these days, and was created whenever some government agency ordered something done without paying for it. For instance, if the Department of Education requires all schools to hire a counselor for some reason (who knows why, who cares, they did it all the time!) but leaves paying for that counselor up to the local school district, which now has to raise taxes to pay for this person, that was an unfunded mandate. Chuck's bill was supposed to require that this sort of thing be prevented.
Bill 7 – Regulation Reform Act, Rick Santorum. A whole shitload of items related to cost-benefit studies and restrictions on various government entities to write new regulations willy-nilly. I hoped Rick could pull this off. While we were all going to be running for re-election, for Rick it was an even bigger deal – he was planning on running for the Senate in Pennsylvania.
Bill 8 – Social Security Reform Act, Frank Riggs. Another unlikely item, but worthy nevertheless. For instance, I knew that he was working on raising the age Social Security could be collected at. When it was passed in 1935, you couldn't collect until you were 65, but at the time, the average life expectancy was only about 61. Currently, you could start collecting limited benefits as young as 62, but the average life expectancy was over 75. The numbers made absolutely no sense. Simply indexing benefits to age would save us a fortune!
Bill 9 – Business Tax Reform Act, John Doolittle. I figured this one was going to be as big a boondoggle as the balanced budget act would be. Still, I would love to see the end of double taxation on dividends, and while the Buckman Group had never really done much investing overseas, I knew taxes were handled quite differently elsewhere, and not to America's benefit.
Bill 10 – Congressional Reform Act, Newt Gingrich to preside over. This was really a long shot. It had a bunch of little things, like cutting the number of committees, numbers of staff, adding term limits, and all sorts of odds and ends that my fellow Congressmen would fight tooth and nail. They'd vote to let the Republic end before they would let a single staffer go!
I was going to push the Rebuilding America Act as both a repair bill as well as a jobs bill. A lot of those jobs are blue collar jobs, which are a big draw for the Republicans. I was also going to push repairs over new construction. There were more than enough potholes, rusty bridges, and leaky dam locks that needed to be fixed. In order to raise the funds and keep this revenue neutral, we wouldn't raise taxes, but we would increase various fees and tolls and charges. No taxes though, since Republicans hate taxes! In addition, we would index them so they would rise. Four cents a gallon on gasoline when it costs a dollar a gallon is a four percent rate, but if the cost of gas goes up to two dollars a gallon, and the fee remains at four cents, your rate drops in half. Keep the rate the same, so you collect enough to pay for the repairs. Some rates needed to be on gas or diesel, some on tonnage, some on axles, and so forth. Make the drivers and freight companies pay enough to pay for the repairs.
If you have 250 million people in the country, and you need to raise $100 billion for repairs, that works out to $400 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Since kids aren't driving a whole lot, maybe $1,000 for every driver. Sounds like a lot, but work it backwards. First, the $100 billion won't be spent in one year, it might be over five or ten years. Second, it will be buried in things like gas and diesel costs, so they only are paying a few pennies a gallon in fuel, or a few quarters on something shipped to them by UPS or Federal Express. They're much more likely to complain about the road construction than the cost!
What I was also adding to the bill, which tied in with the regulatory reform Rick Santorum was going to push, was cutting down all the regulatory nonsense with infrastructure. I used to run into this all the time when I was with Lefleur Homes on my first shot. For example, the New York Department of Transportation once proposed a plan to widen and repair an important stretch of Route 23 in Oneonta right before the Great Recession started. Mind you, this was a repair to an existing road, not building a new road. A new road would have been an even bigger nightmare!
DOT proposed the rebuild, which took the road from three lanes to five, and changed three stop lights to traffic circles. Then they had to post this all in the paper and wait sixty days for responses. At that point they had to post any changes, wait sixty days, and hold public hearings. After that, make more changes, wait some more, etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, everybody and their brother was weighing in on this with their lawyers. The local eco-freaks wanted the bridge over the Susquehanna River, the only bridge connecting to a highway for five miles either way, converted into a public park. (Yes, dig up the roadway on a bridge and plant trees in holes in the concrete!) The local shopping mall and Wal-Mart both brought in lawyers and consultants stating that traffic circles in front of their location were a bad idea, and needed to be in front of their competitor. Meanwhile, you had wetlands conservationists suing for an Environmental Impact Study. At the end of the process, the whole thing got shitcanned because the state didn't have any money anyway. If they did get some money, it all had to start over again. What a clusterfuck!
The Chinese are a lot smarter. If they wanted a road built, they told people to get the fuck out of the way, we're building a fucking road! It's not really a stretch to figure out why they were handing us our asses.
Meanwhile, I had to get myself reelected, otherwise all this was for naught. Here's a helpful little idea, when you're told to go jump in a lake, do it! Well, sort of, anyway. If there was a dunking booth at a local fair or school fundraiser, I would volunteer. It shows you're a 'man of the people' and, more importantly, that you have a sense of humor. There is, however, the off chance that the school coach will recognize you and line up the high school baseball pitching rotation to throw at the target. It happened at Hereford High, and I swallowed a lot of water that afternoon! It didn't help that Charlie had scraped up some quarters and was paying them to strike me out! Every time I protested, he'd laugh and cough up another quarter, the little bastard! I chased him down and dunked him in the booth at the end of the day.
It's not like I ignored that stuff in the off years. People remember that, too. I did, however, do a bit more in an election year. There's an old saying that all politics is local, and this is the ultimate expression of it. I think a major reason I whipped Andy Stewart back in 1990 was that he pretty much ignored that personal touch. He relied on the fact that he was a Democrat in Maryland, a Democratic state. It was never out of my mind that I was a Republican in that same state, and I needed to do more.