Skip to main content

We have hard work to do!

Want an easy, cheap way to solve our economic problems?  Say, "No new taxes!"

Want a stupid, lazy way to solve our economic problems?  Say, "No regulations.  No tax revisions!"

The easy, cheap, stupid, lazy way assumes that all we have to do is fiddle with the cost of a muffin here, or a debt ceiling deadline there, and things will work out.  No problem!  Just don't raise taxes!

Our previous President, and Congress, spent money like drunken sailors, fighting insane wars, refusing to raise a cent to pay for them, cutting taxes--especially on the rich, who were going to have leaky pockets allowing money to trickle down to ordinary human beings--turning health care over to insurance and drug companies, and giving the huge amounts of money to run it, and cutting back regulations on the banking and financial industries in order for them to fleece everybody, while paying themselves monster bonuses and salaries.

Our expenditures have been out of whack, not because of paying unemployment benefits, or paying teachers, but because of wars, financial industry thieves, and because we pay twice as much as anybody else for health care so that health insurance companies can skim the flood tide, and deny health care to people who cannot afford it.  We are fiscally out of whack because our tax code is absurd.  Our national wealth is amassed in the hands of a few, who are taxed at a lower rate than plumbers and teachers and bank clerks and snow plow drivers.

We have hard work to do to get things straightened out!  We have to revise the whole tax code, establish what is worth doing and paying for, and put the whole country to work educating itself, rebuilding itself, taking care of its, and our, health, and provide for the common good.

Hard work!  Not easy slogans:  "No new taxes?"  Our Belle, Michele, apparently thinks no one should pay taxes!  She, apparently, is willing to work for free!  After claiming just a few farm and business subsidies on leftover money, she and Marcus can charge people for praying the gay away.  Get rich the old-fashioned way!

The people who think that fiddling with slogans and waging free wars will take care of everything that is wrong are pretending that there are no real problems.

Pay no attention to them, except during the next election!  We have hard work to do!

Comments

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

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. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...