Does government work?

Does Government Work?

Let’s discuss this question. The first conclusion one can come to is obvious – under a Republican President for 8 years and a Republican Congress for most of this time it doesn’t work. Why should anyone be surprised by that conclusion? The answer is simple: Republicans have shown they know how to win elections, they just don’t know how to govern.

What do you expect when you get a governing party whose stated principle coming from their hero Ronald Reagan is, “government isn’t the solution, government is the problem?” They have lived up to their principle – government is the problem if led by Republicans!

They have doubled the national debt.

They’ve gotten into two wars, one of which has merit. And, these wars have been so poorly managed that we are still there fighting after 5 years. The infrastructure of these countries is destroyed (I’m talking water, sewer, electricity, roads, schools, medical care, etc.); we’ve killed thousands of civilians; we are spending $10B a month; they don’t want us there; and we take videos of vegetable markets surrounded by bombed out neighborhoods and pass it off as progress. We should be using video contrasting before the war to now to understand why they don’t like us.

They’ve deregulated everything they can to let the “market system” loose to do its thing. The problem is that “its thing” is greed, corruption, and poor judgment when there are no controls. It has led us to unprecedented economic collapse and a massive government bail-out.

They’ve promoted their “trickle-down” economic theory and created an environment where wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the privileged few leaving the rest of U.S. to fewer, lower paying jobs. It is an environment that if we aren’t careful could lead to class warfare.

They pushed an education program of “no-child-left-behind”, didn’t fund it, and then complain that more money doesn’t give us good education. It sure doesn’t under their leadership. Our student population is falling behind the rest of the world with terrible future consequences.

They have stood behind the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical industry creating a situation where 45M people have no health insurance and are at the mercy of someone’s good will for treatment. We have higher infant mortality rates, lower longevity rates, and poorer general medical treatment than most of the advanced countries of the world. It is interesting that most of them have universal health care and their citizens are not using up all their life savings to treat serious illness.

We’ve had two catastrophic natural disasters; and, other than efforts by non-profit groups like Habitat for Humanity and money from Hollywood stars, too little has been done to provide re-building of these areas. And, contrary to some people’s opinion, these two groups are not private enterprise. The private enterprise efforts have come about through poorly managed bureaucracy resulting in “no-bid” contracts and corruption with little accomplished.

Jobs are disappearing with our present economic crisis. But, even before this, they were being eliminated through out-sourcing abroad and workers being forced to accept jobs that don’t pay enough to provide a decent middle-class living: jobs that pay so poorly that the only ones who will take them are illegal immigrants. These immigrants are hard working people who will work for less because it is better than their own countries can offer and they hope that they can work themselves up to something better.

I could go on and on as many of you can. But, it is pretty obvious, the Republicans attitude that government doesn’t work is a self-fulfilling prophesy. The good news is that it can work if you have the right people running it. Oh, it won’t be easy and probably won’t be accomplished quickly. Mistakes will be made and will need to be corrected. It would be nice to move to something similar to what we experienced in the 1990’s where we had unprecedented prosperity, close to full employment, and a balanced budget with a surplus. Let’s give the Democrats a chance. The Republicans have told us that government won’t work and they’ve lived up to their word.