General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums32 Crowdsourced Questions for the Presidential Debates
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/32-crowdsourced-questions-for-the-presidential-debates/261155/Yesterday, I made a plea for better questions for presidential debates. Here's what you came up with:
1) Can you describe legislation which you think would be good for the country if only it could be legally enacted, but which is unconstitutional?
2) What lessons do you, as current (or potential) commander-in-chief, take from America's war in Iraq? If you think the war was a mistake, how will you conduct our foreign policy to avoid a repeat of that experience? If you still stand by American intervention, why was it a good idea?
3) Wade Michael Page, Nidal Malik Hasan, and Robert Bales were either currently enlisted or military veterans. The rate of suicide by veterans is at an all-time high. As the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, what specific steps would you take to deal with the mental health crisis affecting our soldiers and veterans?
4) In your job as POTUS, you will be responsible for managing one of the largest annual budgets in the country. I am curious how you would manage one of the smallest. Pretend for a moment that you lived in Oregon where the minimum wage is $8.80/hour. Imagine that you are working full-time for minimum wage. Your annual income, before taxes, would be $18,304. This would give you a monthly salary of $1525.33 (again though it would probably be less as no taxes have been deducted). If you were so lucky as to find an apartment for $650/month and rode the bus to and from work everyday, that would leave you with $787.83 for ALL of your expenses. How would you manage that budget? What would you do, if anything, to get assistance?
NYC_SKP
(68,644 posts)13) How do you explain the disparity in incarceration rates for non-violent drug offenses between minorities and Caucasians? Is it a matter of police misconduct, a symptom of more widespread inequity or are minorities inherently more likely to comment felony drug offenses than other races? On a related point, the U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners. Are American citizens more likely than other populations to commit crime? If not, how do you explain this?
17) President Reagan cut taxes and quadrupled the national debt. President Clinton raised taxes and began running a small surplus by the end of his administration, which could have been used to start paying down the national debt. President Bush cut taxes and doubled the national debt, again. President Obama extended those tax cuts and has proposed to keep most of them in place (except on the very rich), while the national debt doubled, AGAIN. What makes either of you think that tax cuts won't make the deficit continue to increase exponentially?
28) How can you justify our military spending (greater than $680 billion for 2010) and engagements (U.S. troops in over 150 countries) given the lack of any sort of existential threat to the U.S.? Can you justify stationing US troops in wealthy countries like Japan, Germany and South Korea? Aren't those countries rich and responsible enough to manage their own defense?
gkhouston
(21,642 posts)I would have gone with "good for the country, but unlikely to be passed by Congress."