Oltz said:
EPA/National Parks/ Museums/Monuments – Should have a component at each level of government– Essential and needed but the EPA needs to be more controlled by congress and less by the executive administration’s policies so that both business and environmental groups have a more consistent and predictable landscape year to year. (My degree is Environmental Geology I work for “Big Oil” in the Marcellus shale Natural Gas Play of PA)
Yes I think rules are needed and are a good thing
You barely touch on this part of things, but I do feel the government does need to regulate things such as what types of waste are discharged into the environment and to regulate things such as financial transactions.
For the latter, the important thing is to ensure enough transparency that investors know what they're buying. During the big corporate scandals, I didn't feel the WorldCom and Enron scandals were nearly as damaging as scandals such as Arthur Andersen. Accounting firm scandals undermine confidence in the entire system rather than confidence in just one or two companies.
You didn't mention what role the government should have in stimulating the economy. Personally, I think that's a role that's beyond the scope of the federal government. Tax decisions should be made based on what's needed to run the government - not based on stimulating jobs through either increased spending or reduced taxes.
But, given the reality that government will try to control the direction of the economy in some fashion, you don't mention how globalization figures into things - whether the government should encourage global free trade or protect American jobs.
I think that's a math problem more than a problem of ideology. If a person is a consumer, then there's different ways to increase how much they can consume - either make more money themselves, or lower the cost of the items they consume. Globalization lowers the cost of goods, but lowers consumer salaries whether they lose their own jobs or not. Higher tariffs on imported goods raise employment and consumer salaries, but also raise prices.
Additionally, a person only works for so long, while they consume goods for their entire life. In other words, having profitable companies to invest in is one way to increase your capability to continue consuming later in life (in which case, policies that create high inflation are robbing people's investments). Another would be defined benefit retirement programs with cost of living increases, but the guarantees would still depend on the company remaining healthy after you retire.
Selfishly, the best policy would be protectionist trade, increasing the amount of money that a person earned throughout their career, right up until I personally retire, at which point the best policy would be to keep prices as low as possible at any cost. Realistically, there should probably be some sort of balance that keeps most people happy while ensuring very few people are terribly unhappy.
Both ignore the fact that the only way to make it a non-zero sum game is to sell more American products to foreign customers than we buy from foreign customers. Does our foreign policy create a bigger market for American goods or does it create more competitors?
This kind of figures into education, as well, since creating low tech manufacturers in third world countries creates a market for goods that only a high tech country can produce, but you can only capitalize on that if you actually have workers that can create those higher tech goods.
And, of course, attitudes about globalization depend on whether a person takes a more nationalistic view or a more global view. Globalization is more fair, globally. Instead of a few developed countries consuming the resources of undeveloped countries that are left in poverty, some of that wealth goes back into those third world countries, raising their standard of living closer to the level of the developed countries.
But, that wealth redistribution usually does come at the expense of the developed countries low skill workers, plus raises the issue of whether the planet can support an entire world of countries consuming as much as the developed countries. And some would suggest the solution would be to lower the standard of living in developed countries to provide a more balanced global standard of living without increasing overall consumption of resources - or even allow less developed countries to operate on lower standards regarding the environment until they catch up in standard of living.
I think the role of the federal government is to look out for the citizens of the US, even if one were to expand that role to serving as Americans' representative to the global community - and even more justifiably and to a larger extent than the representative of a Congressional district representing the interests of the residents of his district in the US government (there's always an inherent conflict of interest in Congress between the interests of the nation as a whole and the interests of the voters that put that Congressman in office). Maybe the federal government shouldn't be isolationist, but it should definitely be an America first type of organization.