I ran into an influential Republican the other day and asked him why so many presidential wannabees are testing the waters. He responded without hesitation: "They saw what Obama did, an obscure politician from Chicago who came from nowhere to become President of the United States. Most think they could do the same thing."
I admit to being taken aback for a moment. Are the R's so unaware of Obama's extraordinary intellect, political judgment, analytical ability and natural diplomatic skills that they think they could easily duplicate his success?
I held my tongue but I wanted to say, "Are you kidding me? None of them is worthy to tie Obama's shoe laces.
All of them remind me of the drugstore cowboys I knew in my youth who would sit around the drugstore or local cafe solving all the world's problems and concluding with, "They ought to send me up there; I'd fix a few things."
The answer is: No you wouldn't. You have no idea what you are talking about. You have no idea how complex the issues are. You have no idea what the government does every day. You think it should be smaller and taxes should be lower. It is a big government because you and I have demanded a lot of services, from Medicare to defending the shores, from emergency response to natural disasters to keeping the food safe, from research the private sector won't do because it doesn't have a profit line to delivering the mail. Altogether now, repeat after me: "We have a big government and we like it that way." Say it again, especially those who say they don't like big government.
And we pay taxes in order to pay for the services provided by the big government we have and we like. Lowering taxes every time the R's assume power is not the answer to every problem. It is NOT. Neither is a blanket raising of taxes. It's complicated.
As with most problems we face as a nation, the answers are not simple tag lines for an election. The answers are as complex as the questions. We need to find gifted people with the skills necessary to address the complexity of the issues we face and put them in office and commit to honoring, not denigrating their service.
Wouldn't it be great if the R's decided to give it a try.
Don't hold your breath. They enjoy, no, prefer, to just carp around the edges of debate. It's where they're most comfortable.
2 comments:
My naivety slaps me in the face each time I research the circumstances surrounding today's most talked about issues usually because I have succumbed to conventional wisdom, but in doing so leaves me with a little more discernment and a little more wisdom than I had "pre-slap".
In researching the size of our government, where we spend the majority of our dollars, and why we spend the dollars where we do, the point that you make in this piece, "It is a big government because you and I have demanded a lot of services,...", becomes glaringly evident.
Where: The two departments in which we spend the most money each year are the Dept of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Why: DoD because we demand national security as we should. Just need to focus on eliminating waste.
Why: DHHS. The components under this department's purview are much more complicated, under a lot of fire right now, and growing exponentially. To keep this a little more macro, lets just lump them together as social programs as I am not judging the individual merits of Medicare, Medicaid, etc, but rather the human conditions that have necessitated their existence and thus the existence of the big government it takes to administer them.
Throughout our nations short history and particularly since 1900 there have been circumstances, some within a individuals control, like personal choices, and some outside of their control, such as macroeconomic forces, that have thrown large portions of our citizens into a state of poverty to the point that many did not know from where their next meal would come, i.e. The Great Depression or the aftereffects of slavery. When a human being is backed into a corner that way they have only two choices, fight or die. For most the survival instinct kicks in and they start to do whatever is necessary, lawful or not, to ensure their survival and that of their family. In any event it is a recipe for a national disaster, one that if it is not checked can cause enough chaos to bring down the entire nation and this is the condition we found ourselves in during The Great Depression. When this great need presented itself someone had to come to the aid of the people or the nation would most certainly have been lost and when no private groups, philanthropies, religious groups, and the like, stepped up in a big enough way to mitigate the need the government did. They did so knowing that their would be consequences, namely that their would always be from then on a segment of the population that would be content to exit on those government handouts, but that was a risk worth taking. Many have argued that they could have just waited out the depression and not created such burdensome social programs, but they did not know if, when, or how this depression would end and certainly didn't know that we would be pulled into WWII, so I think they made the correct decision.
Now many today are saying to do away with the programs, but the problems that would create would again be catastrophic for out nation. There are to many people still dependent on those programs, no humane way to take them off, and too few other organizations coming forward offering to take this burden from our government, actually zero organizations coming forward.
This is our reality as I see it today and I don't see that it is going to change anytime soon so any discussion of eliminating programs that do not include a detailed plan of by whom, when, and how the people that depend on the current program will be supported if it is eliminated is not worth discussing. That dependent group of people will always be a part of our nation no matter how much some wish they weren't and if religious and philanthropic groups aren't willing to step up then government will continue to be called upon to supply that demand.
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