I haven't written anything in a long time. I guess I could say there have been personal issues in my life that kept me extremely out of the mood to do anything even slightly creative.
I don't want to take my life's frustrations out on politics but i must say... I am goddamn sick with our government. I am sick of all of these corrupt and/or incompetent Democrats who make the left out to be one huge hypocritical joke about limousine liberals who don't even pay the taxes they enacted on their own limousines. Hypocrites that AT BEST criticize the rich (those they claim don't pay their fair share) while potentially hiding the fact that they are also rich and all wish to stay that way, regardless of how much they tend to pander to the poor and working class. Meanwhile, they help enact taxes on the rich that they themselves try their hardest to evade (like Charlie Rangel evading income tax and John Kerry evading state taxes on his yacht... yeah enough said).
Meanwhile, on the other side, what do you find? Most likely you will find a group of highly misinformed Americans spouting nonsense about how tax cuts fix everything and the free market is the only way to go (meanwhile it is the free market that is causing some of the most troubling of problems for the American people).
I don't care how "American" the idea of a "free market" is, it is not very American in my opinion that what we are finding ourselves in a caste society devoid of any social mobility whatsoever. In this country, there is the mass upper class... well-educated (private/or good public high school and private college), with fairly high-paying secure jobs (though in a sense, this recession has effected both); and a mass underclass... with an education that most likely ends at high school though might continue into a public college. The mass underclass these days is plagued by the rising costs of education and the stagnation of their family income. They are therefore much less likely to be able to pay for a higher education or are more likely to have an enormous household debt, which is never good.
Such is the problem that plagues American society. Oh, but it doesn't end there. You see, I could give the garden variety left wing argument that there should be some kind of equalization in America, but that would not fix the problems that we tend to have. Like it or not (and the left tends to not like this part), our problem is not only in our economy but in our culture at large. Let's say the government did somehow take lots of money from the mass upperclass and give it to the mass underclass through wealth redistribution or something of the sort. This would not sort out the problem of culture that plagues America. Our problem, to some extent, is that we are in fact Americans - and that no matter how much money we really have we feel entitled to act like Americans.
Americans, regardless of income, are obsessed with the life that is being "middle class," even though a mass middle class hasn't existed for decades. Americans, though of course not all of them, take vacations when they can't actually afford them, buy TVs and other modern pleasures when they don't need them. They spend money that they do not have on things that they do not need, rather than spending that money on things that make sense like paying down that mortgage or financing their child's education. I hate to sound cynical about Americans but it wouldn't surprise me if the world the Left created, a world that in many ways mimicked the 1950s (with mass unionization, high taxes on the highest tax brackets, "wealth redistribution," etc), was not very much unlike our own in the sense that legislatures could not change culture. The wealth that would be spread through left-wing agendas (though i agree with them in principle) would not change how people spend their money. Many families might use their higher wages to buy more useless crap rather than finance their child's education.
If that is the country that we live in, will any drastic change in our politics really alleviate that pain?
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