Card #1: Legislation to alleviate the public's worry of a housing bubble. The Stock Market has rules in place to prevent panic selling called circuit breakers and collar rules. The Housing Market should have a similar set of rules keeping in mind, the stock market is extremely liquid and housing the opposite. The stock market deals in slowing down the financial hemorrhage in terms of hours and days, the housing market should be in months and quarters. Nearly all citizens have an interest in preventing a housing collapse. A major point is that it couldn't hurt to pass such laws, but the prevention of a drastic loss of home value (which is most Americans main investment) is an issue that cuts across all political boundaries. Republicans have not been good at preventing disasters. Their polices are nothing more than a gamble on good times lasting forever. These Sunnyside Republican don't believe in the government saving for a rainy day but only for a tax break right now. Real leadership comes from hoping for the best but planning for the worst.

Card #2: Tie corporate taxes to job growth! Bush gave the corporate world a huge gift years ago allowing them to repatriate their profits without a tax bite. At the time, Bush was hoping for this gift to trickle down in the form of more hires. The opposite happened. Companies took this extra cash and bought up the competition, sacking jobs in the mergers. They also bought back their shares in the weak market, not exactly job growth. Companies that sack jobs and send them overseas deserve higher taxes! Those that create jobs (not McJobs) deserve lower taxes. How many people have felt the trickle down? Fat cats don't share the wealth, which’s how they got rich in the first place. When you get to the fiscal top of the heap, you play it safe. Allowing the rich to have "safe" investments, such as T-bills, guarantees a permanent upper class. There should be no safe haven for such magnates' money. If they had to take chances with their investments like everyone else, maybe then there might be a trickle down.

Card #3: Kill the National Debt Now. The National Debt is a beast that both Democrats and Republicans are nearly powerless to hold back. They feed it at every opportunity. Like a credit card that's gone far beyond what can be repaid from a realistic household budget, even minimum payments are getting painful. Republicans will never allow the country to operate with a surplus, it will always be tax-cutted away as a way to buy voters. So much for supply-side economics growing us out of the debt. Democrats will never have the spine to raise taxes to make a surplus to pay the debt, with Republicans sniping them as tax and spend liberals. We can't simply moneterize the debt, i.e. simply print 9 trillion dollars and pay it off. Runaway inflation and devaluation of the dollar would cause global unrest. No one knows this better than South American countries, but luckily their currency wasn't the backbone of world finance. Not to mention Bernanke and the other fed bankers would go hari cari in a heartbeat. The real answer lies in an unlikely place: the Dark Ages. Back then the taxman didn't just collect on yearly income. No, it was often an asset tax. He collected based on how much you had, and was not averse to simply taking your stuff if you didn't have cash. The country as a whole got to enjoy the benefits of this enormous debt: better roads, schools, and pure pork give-a-ways. It seems only right that everyone should pitch in to set things right. A One Percent Asset Tax, a one time only 1% tax of all personal and corporate holdings, i.e. land, autos, cash, stock, bonds and items over $10,000--all the stuff that is hard to hide. A one time ouch and then no more debt or interest payments which amount to $120 billion a year and rising. Heck we could actually afford a tax cut then instead of all those we couldn't afford in the past. People, companies and countries that held the debt would be paid, but everyone would have had to shoulder the cost, so on a macroeconomics scale it would be a wash. There would be little inflation, so no global upheaval would occur, especially if the public had a year or two to prepare. Consequently the public would also be less likely to let government build up debt like that. This ties in with denying the wealthy a safe government investment mentioned in above. Note to Congress, borrowing is, in the end, just a deferred tax increase. The longer deferred the worst it'll be.

Card #4: War should not be the gift of freedom. The next Democratic President should state this: "War shall be declared by the Congress and it will be war. No rebuilding, no occupying, the enemy will be beaten. A simple order for the public to leave the war zone will be the only effort made to avoid unintended casualties. If this leads to more warlords rising up in the defeated countries, we do it again. Americans will not bear the cost of GIVING freedom through endless occupation. Freedom must be earned and fought for by the people that cower under repressive governments. It's the only way they will cherish it like we do."

Those that point to the rebuilding effort after WWII should keep in mind that was mainly for our allies (who did fight for there freedom) and enemy countries that admitted defeat. I don't recall any admission of defeat in the Middle East conflicts, just early claims of victory. Seems to me that I remember Bush claiming several years ago that the rebuilding of Iraq would be paid for from oil revenues. He's been awful quiet on that payment plan in recent years, maybe to avoid the "war for oil" protesters. Maybe it's cause Bush loves positive stories out of Iraq, but there's been no progress on that particular one. The most reasonable excuse is that, just like he's going to leave the leadership to come from the next president regarding Iraq, he going to leave the next president the task of delivering the bad news: The new Iraq government is free to stiff us on the rebuild cost or that terrorist can stop oil flow so often that Iraq won't even be able to cover the interest on the repayment. Asking those that wouldn't fight for freedom to repay the cost of giving it to them smacks of faith-based wishful thinking.

Card #5: Putting the brakes on terrorism. Terrorists depend on journalists to disseminate the fear to the world and nearly all media companies are drooling to assist them in their goal. After 9/11, civil liberty groups were quick to point out the loss of freedoms due to increases in security checks, such as at the airports. They were also quick to complain about the censorship of coffin footage of returning GIs. The real censorship should be of terrorist acts in the non-internet media. Even censorship is the wrong word: delayed coverage would be more appropriate. Government should allow media to only do terrorism stories once a week so that terrorism becomes less effective in changing polices worldwide. Terrorism should be boiled down to simple stats, just like drunk driving fatalities or homicides. Up against those examples, death by terrorism is actually a trivial statistic. As a trivial statistic, fear mongering by Republicans, in order to bloat the Defense Budget, would be far more apparent to the American public. Those that really want to know day-by-day bombings would still be free to check the Internet for stories. Put an end to free terrorist advertising and you'll be over half way to ending terrorism.

Is this hand a Royal Flush? Probably not, but a Full House would beat a floundering bunch of Republicans easy. There are a lot of other good cards out there if we need to draw on the pile. Now is the time to stuff the deck with leadership cards that Democratic candidates can take to the great Political Poker Party that we call Election Day.