I hope someone gets a giggle out of it.  Of course in today’s litigious society, they will probably charge me with terroristic threatening and send me to Gitmo because the envelope says “do not enclose appeals or correspondence”…

Yes, there was the pipes and drums squad up front and they were great, and yes they had that crazy March Madness Marching Band that dresses in wild costumes and puts on a good show.  But every respectable Fourth of July parade needs a fully uniformed, military style marching band bringing up the rear.

I was a percussionist in my high school days.  We all took marching band very seriously and we lived for parades!  We were outfitted in full, old school military style uniforms with cross belts, tails, etc and we loved it!  There is just something regal about a uniformed band marching in crisp lines, bringing up the end of the parade and stopping at attention to close it out right with a Sousa march.

I’d suggest any of the John Philip Sousa classics such as Semper Fidelis (listen), Stars and Stripes Forever (listen) or my personal favorite The Washington Post (listen).  Follow the links and listen to one of these right now and I guarantee that it will get your patriotic juices flowing!

• Change laws so that all federally elected officials will no longer receive pay during a government budget shutdown, the same as military personnel.
• Change the retirement plan for all federally elected officials to a standard contribution match style instead of a defined benefit plan.
• Change the health care plan for all federally elected officials to be similar to those provided by many private companies today, with plans being reviewed annually and shopped around for better rates.  Elected officials must select from a set of chosen plans like most everyone else where a choice of higher deductible versus cost or coverage is weighed.
• Place term limits on senators and representatives so that no one individual can serve longer than twelve years.
• Lower the federal tax rate on businesses from the 35 percent range to a 20 percent range.
• Increase the number of federal income tax brackets to cover personal incomes up to one billion dollars with graduated rates similar to current ones.
• Set limits on the amount of time that campaigns for federal office can be held to a period of months.
• Require that all contributions to federal election campaigns be split 50/50 between the campaign and a fund to back social security and medicare costs, with all contributions recorded publicly and available online.  Require the same of state campaigns for a fund to back Medicaid costs.
• Amend the constitution to provide for a congressional budgeting process that requires a balanced budget each year where spending that outstrips earnings must be made up from one budget line to another within the same fiscal year or from one fiscal year to the next, not allowing a debt to be carried past two fiscal years.
• Streamline federal income tax laws so that individuals should be able to reasonably complete their tax forms in one or two sheets of paper, while requiring that all taxes be filed electronically.  Make similar changes to corporate tax laws in order to eliminate all tax loopholes of any kind.
• Create a medical records clearing house similar to today’s credit bureaus where a certain number of private, government checked companies manage all medicals records.  These records will be stored in a standardized, electronic format so that any medical provider can access and update them easily, with digital security measures in place for access, protection, monitoring, backup, etc.  Individuals will be able to audit their own medical records at any time and invoke a federally managed process to investigate inaccuracies.
• Provide a federal process to the FDA, EPA, NIH and other food and health related agencies to be able to marshal the resources of the federal government to step in for cases of extreme duress under their purview.
• Require by law the reduction of the use of foreign sources of fossil fuels at increasing percentages over the next ten years.  Simultaneously, heavily fund research grants and loans for the development of alternative, sustainable energy sources over the next ten years, with accountability measures in place for receivers of those grants and loans to be reviewed annually.
• Establish a maintenance budget process whereby all states are required to track and plan for the periodic maintenance of bridges, roads, electrical grids and other high value infrastructure items.  The federal government will be responsible for overseeing this process for interstate assets and ensuring that states have funding for proper maintenance and upkeep of important infrastructure.  State and local governments will be encouraged to create similar processes for their own infrastructures in order to foster forward thinking and long term planning.
• Reorganize the federal government departments and reporting chains to optimize efficiency.

I’ve got plenty more on my to-do list, but this batch will probably eat up the first term.