Alicia Lyons
Alicia Lyons’ debut novel, The First Woman President, takes the form of a biography written twenty years after America’s first female Commander-in-Chief left office. Part satire, part allegory, it does a wonderful job in succinctly illustrating the shortcomings in America’s political system and the ills that plague western society from a future perspective.
Lyons covers a wide scope in this short novel; tackling issues such as war, terrorism, poverty, campaign financing and her relationship with the media. Some might think her radical approach to the world’s problems is somewhat idealistic, but to see this novel in such terms would be to miss the point. The underlying message of FWP is that America was built on idealism, and it will take an idealist to rectify the problems that have beset the nation ever since.
Even if you do not agree with FWP’s political doctrine, Lyons (a Libertarian) takes an extremely novel approach in highlighting the issues that concern us all, and she offers a breathtakingly alternative strategy for tackling the most difficult issues facing modern America. Best of all, she manages to achieve this with her tongue firmly set in cheek, and the satirical undertone of this work is used to great effect to make what is actually a very powerful social commentary on the world in which we live.
Why I Was the Most Popular President Who Ever Lived
I abolished the income tax, castrated the IRS, created the National Sales Tax and brought an end to parasitic government by using statistics.
None of this is true, of course, but I get the credit for it.
The truth? The goodbye-IRS grass roots movement had been educating and popularizing this new hope for years. To be fair, I did have a few ideas that helped. For example, the National Sales Tax Elective (yes, I know, NSTE—verbalized “nasty” – I liked it). I was also responsible for enthusing the US banking industry, using a study proving how much more quickly they could make much more money with a National Sales Tax.
The “nasty” part was easy. A repeating message of my campaign had been my pledge to sign only laws granting greater freedoms. Nasty was the perfect appetizer for my taste. Anyone who wished to do so could elect out of the Income Tax. It made more sense to me to have a 10% national sales tax instead.
By 2010, all transactions were conducted using plastic, and these were automatically set up to pay 10% directly to the U.S. Government.
Of course, you remember what happened. Success was sweet. Thousands of jobs were created, and a whole new industry emerged to implement the system. All with private money, of course. One point – during my administration, the new measure of Presidential competence became the percentage of Americans employed in non-government jobs.
Convincing the banks was, inevitably, a difficult task; they were looking at numbers that scared them. Luckily I had some real experts who took the loopy numbers, tied them in knots and then showed the banks how the dollars would really fall. The approach they took was to let the marketplace decide. Taxation would adopt a self-regulating, cross controlling new dimension. In the age of BFD, this was an easier task than we ever imagined. Government bureaucracies could no longer get funding without revealing how much, for what, to what result.
