"I'm not running for my husband's third term, I'm not running for Obama's third term, I'm running for my first term, but I'm going to do what works.
"We have an understanding of what works. The wealthy need to pay more, I'm sorry to break it to you," Clinton said.
Imagine: people whose primary skill is lying to get elected rewrite a sixth of the economy, organizing primarily around ideological narratives, and it doesn't work out. What a surprise!
The real problem, as those same people are only too eager to tell you, is that they were held back from doing what they really wanted to do by those evil Republicans. If only we had just done away with the market altogether and let government run healthcare, all would be well.
After all, the government has done a stellar job with poverty, reducing rates from 15% in 1965 to 15% today at a cost of only $3 trillion.
And the economy is doing really well, too (if you overlook those people who want to work but have given up looking for a job).
Government has also done really great work managing education--more and more students are getting college degrees, even if it's costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars (oops, us) and they haven't learned anything. Those evil companies will train them.
We need completely new ideas only outsiders can bring. One would be to cut the budget down to one-third to one-half of what it is now. That's eminently doable if we go back to the government of limited powers the Founding Fathers had in mind.
And how it's done is by privatizing most of what the government does currently, including Social Security and Medicare, both of which are insurance programs easily managed by the private sector, and managed far better than they currently are, especially Medicare and the VA.
To get there, however, we need the new kind of thinking only outsiders not vested in the current government can bring to Washington.
No comments:
Post a Comment