For every year since 2013, I list actions that need to taken to improve lives of citizens and to improve our country. The list for 2015 can be found here.
Author: Joseph Sparks
Ennoble the rich first
Apparently, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence believes cutting off food ennobles people: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence: We’re ‘ennobling’ poor people by cutting off food stamps.
One of my friends had a much better idea for ennoblement, “How about we cut off all the corporate welfare and ‘ennoble’ the rich first?”
Fossil fuel corporate welfare
The United States spent $5.2 billion for fossil fuel subsidies in 2013, yet some politicians tried to cut food assistance. We should take all this corporate welfare and apply it to food assistance.
Trickle-up Economic Stimulus and Investment
The economic news has been contradictory in the last few weeks. Bad news started the cycle with real gross domestic product decreasing at an annual rate of 2.9 percent. Good news followed with solid job growth and the lowest unemployment in five years, 6.1 percent.
Regardless of whether the economic news is good or bad overall, many people think the economy is stuck in low gear. While people at the upper end of economic ladder have seen their incomes substantially increase, those in the lower- and middle-class have seen their incomes stagnate for the last several decades.
If we want robust economic growth for both the short- and long-term, then a bold plan is needed that combines stimulus with investment in physical and human capital. The right plan would lift everybody, especially those people who have not seen economic benefit for decades.
The country anxiously awaits leadership that will provide such a plan. Neither party has produced this.
Bureau Chief Not Informed On Health Care: Part 2
In my previous blog entry, I quoted Michael Scherer, the Washington Bureau Chief for Time Magazine. He said, “Health care, especially in this country, is an enormously expensive laborious undertaking, and… no one’s figured out how to do it economically and efficiently.” As I also said in my previous blog entry, this is just as true as the “earth is flat” or “the sky is red.”
In response to Scherer’s statement, one expert, Neil Buchanan, had this comment, “Yeesh. ‘No one’ has figured out how to do this, as long as you exclude every advanced nation on the planet other than the U.S.”
Buchanan is an economist and lawyer. Tax policy, budgeting, deficits, debt, Social Security, and health care reform are included in his areas of expertise, and he supports a single-payer system.
It is time to set the record straight and realize that we can have economic and efficient health care with a single-payer system, and to realize we do not need to live in a world where the earth is flat or the sky is red.