Skip to main content

There is an Election Coming

"WATCH: Rand Paul Promises 

To Cut Federal Workforce, 

Salaries During Heated Debate" 


Aye, there's the rub!

Here we are, trying desperately to recover from 
a confluence of genuine problems and disasters!
Under the Bush administration, we were attacked 
by Muslim extremists, mostly from Saudi Arabia,
but whose leader--Osama bin Laden--apparently
was hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan.  Bin Laden
is one of the leaders of the movement that believes
that Saudi Arabia--Mecca--for instance, is a Holy Land.

We have heard that before, haven't we?
Jerusalem?  Der Vaterland?  The New Jerusalem
(right here, as it used to be called).  We declared
war on him and his followers, in Afghanistan.
That proved to be a very difficult job, so the Bush 
administration decided it could establish, in the region,
a democratic regime that would be such a shining 
example of democracy that it would divide the 
extremists from more moderate Muslims and, at the 
same time, give us access to an ocean of oil:  Iraq.

We blamed Saddam Hussein, who was a butcher,
but who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
He no longer had biological weapons (we had seen
to that, earlier), and he had no nuclear capabilities.
He huffed and puffed and said he did, but he didn't.

Worse, we did not propose to pay for our new war.
We charged it to some future generation of kids.
The cost was never calculated in our national budget.
The result:  an economic sump hole.  

Worser, the administration kept changing how evil taxes 
were, and how awful government was, but continued
to spend like drunken sailers.  The housing bubble burst.
Banks scammed like Ponzi artists.  They skimmed 
monstrous amounts of money to pay themselves as if
they were the finest economic minds of the millenia.

When Barack Obama came into office, unemployment
was nosediving.  We barely averted a complete depression.
Bush recognized the disaster, and started to pump money
into the economy to prevent a worldwide collapse.
Obama had to continue to invest public funds to save 
financial and industrial and housing meltdowns.
Our health care delivery system was not a health care
system, at all.  It was an insurance company system 
designed to collect lots of money from people and to 
deliver only as much health care as the leftover funds,
after massive skimoffs, could provide.  

Why?  Because if we did not immediately invest public
funds, it would all come down, and there would be even
fewer jobs left, and fewer people in houses, and less of
a car industry, and worse schools, and even more people
without health care, and millions of people without work
and without unemployment insurance.

So what does Rand Paul want to do now?
He wants to cut jobs, and cut salaries, and cut taxes,
and cut umemployment insurance, and cut regulatory
control of the pirates who have seized the ships of state,
and cut Social Security.  

There is the divide:  should we go back to doing what 
sent us diving into this morass, or do we have to reshape
the economy, recognize that we need to do new things,
repair our educational system, rebuild our infrastructure,
find ways to help millions of people who may never regain
their old jobs, insure that retirees will have enough to live on,
and get decent health care, and have places to live?

Ron Paul is a libertarian hardnose.
He has it made.  He doesn't have to worry.
He is not us, any more than Christine O'Donnell is.
He is chanting nonsense, and every economist knows it.

There is an election coming.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more