RE: We're doomed
No, it's not Obama's fault. It's the collective fault of everyone who has been in power for the last 50 years.
What Obama is at fault for is that he's trying to force some things to happen short-term that will only serve to make the long-term worse.
We need to balance the budget, now. The Bowles-Simpson (or Simpson-Bowles) recommendations are a good start. We should enact them tomorrow and start from there. I understand that there are about 20 centrist Senators, led by Webb (D, VA) and Chambliss (R, GA) who are sponsoring legislation to do this. But that needs to be a start. I've outlined what else I'd do in detail before.
We need to make America a good place to do business again, now. To Obama's credit, he's at least starting to talk about this, but his proposed solutions have been designed by academics who don't understand real world problems, and therefore they are doomed to fail. I think that means, among other things, flatter taxes over broader tax bases (including a national consumption tax), balancing the budget, adopting a pro-business national industrial policy (as my European socialist friends say, you can't be pro-jobs without being pro-business), streamlining regulations--you know, the stuff Ross Perot was talking about 20 years ago that we keep forgetting to do.
We need a REAL health care plan, not Obamacare, now. Obamacare basically takes the worst aspects of three bad systems--ours, Canada's, and UK's. What we need to do is look at the GOOD systems (France, Germany, Holland) and emulate them.
We need to reform welfare into a broad-based safety net instead of the myriad of silo programs we have now, and that means providing services like health care to the broader population instead of the republican fascination with "means testing" (which provides jobs for bureucrats, jobs that cost more than we save).
We need to quit micro-managing the rest of the world. We can't solve our problems, and we sure can't afford to take on theirs too. You respect our citizens' life, liberty, and property, and we'll respect yours; you don't, and we'll blow you to smithereens.
Those would be starts. Unfortunately, except for the Webb-Chambliss initiative, nobody in either party seems to be talking about what we really need to get done.
I know there's lip service to cutting spending and balancing the budget. But that lip service leaves us a few hundred billion a year short of where we need to get. And to paraphrase Everitt Dirksen, a hundred billion here, a hundred bilion there, pretty soon you're talking about some real money.
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