Sometimes I just look at our government and shake my head in befuddlement. Actually, that is pretty much all I ever do with regards to politics. Maybe it is one of my weak points in that I never really take a hugely active role in the system. Sure I vote and everything but you never see me on the front lines arguing for policy, organizing protests or trying to get my voice heard much at all. On some level I guess I have always viewed myself as an observer away from the fray. It really isn’t the best way to handle the situation so I should probably change it.
Right now my biggest beef is with the entire health care debacle and that is really the only thing that you can call it. Every plan is ill conceived and too expensive and massive to be implemented and simultaneously we seem to be releasing standards that vary from nonsensical to unethical. I would never have expected anyone to ever suggest that preventative cancer screening is unnecessary. The best argument (outside of it would save money) is that it will reduce unnecessary anxiety due to false positives. Sure, that might be true but I think that is a small price to pay for what happens when real positives are missed. A month after everyone was focused on breast cancer awareness we now have government saying essentially that it isn’t a big deal. It would be comical if it wasn’t so serious.
Now I don’t think that health care reform will pass and I certainly hope that it doesn’t in its present form for two reasons. The first is that every proposal that I have seen does put us on the path to socialized medicine and once we start on that path we will not be able to stop. I’ve been in an emergency room in England and trust me I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go through that experience. My bigger issue though is even simpler. We simply don’t have the money for a major overhaul right now.
If you viewed the US as a company right now you probably wouldn’t buy stock in it. There is way too much debt, we are constantly running a deficit and our production has shifted from tangible products to things like knowledge and information and “service.” It is a very dangerous change as while people will always need steel they may not always require knowledge and while only certain people can produce knowledge pretty much anyone can work at a mill. I really think it is one of the reasons behind the high unemployment. The blue collar jobs that were the backbone are now gone and those workers have nowhere to go.
This is what is bothering me about the current administration, which I must admit I did vote for and therefore really have no room to bitch for the next few years. In my mind, the immediate focus of the Obama camp should have been secure the economy, get the nation back on growth and fix the foreign policy situation. I can give them credit that the economy is secure in that the Dow isn’t at 4500 like I had feared but I’m still not sure what they did to cause it other than make sure the banks survived. But even with the Dow at 10,000 and a technical end to the recession I can’t see the economy as being in good shape. We have double digit unemployment and an incredibly weak dollar and no indication that either of those things are going to change in the near future. Add in the housing crisis that is continuing to snowball and we have a huge amount of immediate worries that are being pushed aside for a health care fight that really no one wants.
So what would I do if I was in DC? I’d cut bait on health care because it simply will not fly. Yes, it is a political hit but so is six more months of work for a bill that will not pass. I’d make a decision on Afghanistan (and please let it not be one where we half ass it to the point where we send just enough troops to accomplish nothing other than losing a lot of good soldiers) and make our intentions known. And I’d put all my focus and political capital on the economy and the long term finances of the country. Because right now if we don’t fix that part of the equation we are headed down a seriously bad slope.
Am I correct in my view? Don’t know. I just know that in the past year I can’t point to a single accomplishment that I can pin to the Dems and that makes me feel pretty sad given that I voted for them. I was not one who came into this thinking that the world would be transformed into a land of unicorns and rainbows but I thought that we would at least have some forward progress. Right now we are just spinning in a circle with the hope that once we stop that we will be pointing in the right direction.
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