Originally Posted by Eric5273

From what I have seen, you have your liberal democrats like Nancy Pelosi, and then you have your more moderate ones. Many of the newly elected democrats seem to be more moderate, so I have no idea what their agenda is. The liberal agenda of the leadership (Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi) would be the following:

1) Immediate withdrawal from Iraq

2) Suspend Bush's tax cuts for the top tax bracket only

3) Increase the minimum wage

4) Pass an addendum bill to last year's medicaid bill allowing the government to use collective bargaining with the drug companies just as the private insurance companies do, instead of having to pay full retail price for all drugs as the current law states

5) Pass some sort of national health insurance plan. I've seen many ideas here, so who knows what they will decide to do. I haven't seen any concrete structure to what this would be.

6) Large cuts in corporate welfare including all the no bid rebuilding and military service contracts for Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans. (#4 also overlaps into this corporate welfare category)

#2, 4 & 6 alone would yield enough savings to balance the Federal budget and probably give a healthy surpluss that can be spent on some sort of national health plan.

And then there is foreign policy which needs a complete overhaul. I won't even discuss that here....