Of course we are spending money foolishly! We are engaged in two wars, and ought to get out of them as soon as we can!
We are spending money foolishly on our health care system; not on health care, but the system we use to deliver it! Everybody knows that a single-payer system, a non-profit system--delivers health care much, much more inexpensively than insurance-company, for-profit systems do. More: we have laws that forbid government to buy drugs at as low a cost as it can. "Not fair!", the drug companies say. Not fair? When did buying in quantity to obtain the best price become "not fair"?
How did our tax code become the upside-down system it is? It became so because we convinced ourselves that if we concentrate the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few at the top, everybody will be better off. Even some of the few at the top agree that what we have is neither fair, nor sensible. We need to rewrite the tax code to simplify it, and make it moderately and honestly progressive. Of course if you are incredibly rich you should pay not only more than anybody else, but within a system that does not create and perpetuate enormous financial inequity! There is nothing wrong with having rich people, unless it requires poverty to support it.
We are in the middle of a global economic transition. Put most simply, the old industrial world that made us wealthy is moving to parts of the world that are like what we used to be: in transition from agriculture to industry, and technology. That is where the cheap labor is, just as it used to be here, and in England, and Germany when we took all those people from the farms and put them to work in factories.
We don't need to cut our budgets to the bone! We need to invest in an educational system that will prepare people for a post-industrial, technological, scientific economy, and everything that comes with such a huge transition. We need to rebuild our cities and transportation and information systems. Once we thought we should have freeways and cars and trucks everywhere. We need alternatives to fossil fuel energy! We need fiber optics everywhere! We need people who can read blueprints and manuals, and who can program electronic networks. We need people who can speak more than one language.
What Congress is doing is pulling in its horns. Congress is utterly baffled, frightened, and angry about what it does not understand. It authorizes wars without paying for them, and when the bills come due, it says it will not pay them. Congress is supposed to put a national budget together, but cannot bring itself to tell the truth about needing to raise the money to support its foolish spending. So it pleads to us that we need a constitutional amendment to force them to do what they are supposed to do, but cannot, or will not.
Lord, love a duck! We elected them!
We are spending money foolishly on our health care system; not on health care, but the system we use to deliver it! Everybody knows that a single-payer system, a non-profit system--delivers health care much, much more inexpensively than insurance-company, for-profit systems do. More: we have laws that forbid government to buy drugs at as low a cost as it can. "Not fair!", the drug companies say. Not fair? When did buying in quantity to obtain the best price become "not fair"?
How did our tax code become the upside-down system it is? It became so because we convinced ourselves that if we concentrate the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few at the top, everybody will be better off. Even some of the few at the top agree that what we have is neither fair, nor sensible. We need to rewrite the tax code to simplify it, and make it moderately and honestly progressive. Of course if you are incredibly rich you should pay not only more than anybody else, but within a system that does not create and perpetuate enormous financial inequity! There is nothing wrong with having rich people, unless it requires poverty to support it.
We are in the middle of a global economic transition. Put most simply, the old industrial world that made us wealthy is moving to parts of the world that are like what we used to be: in transition from agriculture to industry, and technology. That is where the cheap labor is, just as it used to be here, and in England, and Germany when we took all those people from the farms and put them to work in factories.
We don't need to cut our budgets to the bone! We need to invest in an educational system that will prepare people for a post-industrial, technological, scientific economy, and everything that comes with such a huge transition. We need to rebuild our cities and transportation and information systems. Once we thought we should have freeways and cars and trucks everywhere. We need alternatives to fossil fuel energy! We need fiber optics everywhere! We need people who can read blueprints and manuals, and who can program electronic networks. We need people who can speak more than one language.
What Congress is doing is pulling in its horns. Congress is utterly baffled, frightened, and angry about what it does not understand. It authorizes wars without paying for them, and when the bills come due, it says it will not pay them. Congress is supposed to put a national budget together, but cannot bring itself to tell the truth about needing to raise the money to support its foolish spending. So it pleads to us that we need a constitutional amendment to force them to do what they are supposed to do, but cannot, or will not.
Lord, love a duck! We elected them!
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