I am Philip DeFranco, Random Notes I jotted down

Random Notes I jotted down

While at the RNC you hear a lot about stances and it makes you question your own if you have an open mind. Many don’t but I try to be because I know I’m not perfect nor do I ever expect to be.

I started thinking what my stances would be if I ran for office and I started jotting things down on the big 20 issues. This is how far I got this morning when I had to stop and switch over to making todays PDS

Abortion
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I believe a woman should have the right to an abortion although I would never want the woman I love to have one. The right to the option should be there.
Only late term abortion allowed if life is threatened.
But lets focus on reducing the number of abortions.
Focus on prevention through Education and Birth Control/PLan B

The economy
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Get our troops out of other countries. Why are we defending democracy in the world? We can’t be the white knights when our castle is burning to the ground.
Cut/Freeze military budget or at the very least move more into Veteran Services to fix the damaged men/women we have created. Why are we so many places?

Civil Rights
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Gays have the right to marry BUT the government does not have the right to force a church to marry a same sex couple.
Same sex couples will receive all the benefits of their heterosexual counterparts.
Call it whatever the hell you want. You’re going to be misereable after 10 years anyways.
Black people have to give me a cool nickname. In return I promise to never embarrass myself by playing basketball in public.

Crime
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I believe in the Death penalty in the cases of 1st and 2nd degree murder BUT we need to refocus our prison system to ACTUALLY rehabilitate offenders.
Give tax benefits to prisons that have the lowest reoffender rates.
And a refocusing of who we lockup. The fact that we lockup people for possession is ridiculous.

Norway focuses on rehabilitation and their reoffender rate is 15% while in America the rate was last listed between 43% and 51.8%.

Legalize and tax drugs. Specifically legalize marijuana and decriminalize the others. This would hurt the cartels in Mexico, provide a new income source, and save us a lot of money.

(2005 - prisons & drug offenders - federal & state - drug offense population) “The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense.

It costs 47k per year to house a prisoner. The rough number is that it would save 235 billion per year. Part of these savings can go to programs to keep kids off the streets and reward prisons with low reoffender rates.