MONEY!

Money! It’s the root of all evil and the one thing you always need to get something done. You want better healthcare; it costs money. You want infrastructure; it costs money. You want better education or a larger military; money! It’s what the Republicans claim they want to save and the Democrats want to spend but a tax bill that benefited only the rich was the only serious legislation passed during the Trump administration and it will put us a trillion bucks in debt… and, oh yeah, the only president that has left us with a surplus in the last 50 years was Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

When progressives talk about all the things they want to do for the country, the GOP screams. “We can’t afford any of them.” And that my friends, is pure, unadulterated bullshit!  The fact of the matter is, there is plenty of money. In fact, more than we need to do most of the stuff the progressives want to do, but it’s being stolen, wasted and otherwise pissed away by a government laden down with incompetent, non-functional bureaucrats and crooks… from both parties.

The Pentagon, which spends the biggest chunk of your tax dollars, has never had an audit. How is that even possible? These are guys who spend ninety bucks for a pencil and order tanks and planes at over a million bucks a throw that we either don’t need or that will be obsolete before we ever get to use them. And then we store them in the desert so they won’t rust too fast.

Even as we throw money away on almost everything the military buys, our kid’s teachers have to buy supplies out of their own pockets and Vets are squeezed out of all kinds of programs they desperately need simply because the billionaire weapons and military supply manufacturers are paying off everyone they can hand money to, just so they can sell enough overpriced death to buy a third yacht.

Trump wanted to spend millions on a wall that everyone but him seemed to know wouldn’t keep anyone out of the country. The pharmaceutical industry sells medicine to Americans at many multiples of what it costs our neighbors in Canada while insurers make twenty to forty percent profits on the fact that Americans get sick, and all the while the GOP tells us that we can’t afford better because they say there isn’t enough money to pay for anything except tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

Well, if you believe them you are as dumb as a Trump.

This is the richest nation in the world with a GDP that is the envy of every economist that ever graduated from business school. We have plenty of money to do all the things that reasonable and logical thinking people understand we should do in order to make people’s lives the most livable in the world. All we have to do is stop wasting it and control how it is now being stolen because right now at least 60% of our spending is being done in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons

I was watching a TV show a while back when someone said that capitalism was killing us. That’s just not true. Capitalism is the best economic system ever invented by man. What is true is, certain specific capitalists are definitely destroying the country through their greed and opposition to policies that are absolutely necessary for the good of the populace in general.

The capitalist system based on the entrepreneur is an almost completely American phenomenon. Yes, there are a few examples of it in Europe and the rest of the world, but in just about every place except America, wealth and industrial leadership have traditionally been based on birth into a certain class, which was accompanied by the inheritance of enough wealth to create business empires, or by successful revolution and war. Americans, unburdened by caste or a legacy of bloodline, have been free to strike out on our own, free to take the chance that can lead to great wealth or financial disaster. It is the men and women who made that entrepreneurial thrust that have created the capitalist system we have in the world today.

But all entrepreneurs are not capitalists. Many, through guts or clarity of vision struck out into uncharted waters and succeeded in reaching their immediate goals but did not have the organizational skills or the discipline to capitalize on that creative spirit and build an empire from their entrepreneurial success. It’s just the same with those who have what it takes to be successful capitalists but not the vision or the guts to take the flyer that leads to the creation of the assembly line or the process that makes steel.

To a great extent our capitalists today are second- generation rich kids who have no concept of what it is to actually work for a living. Their goals do not include creating anything but money. They do not have a vision of a nation where everyone has a shot at living a viable life. And why should they? Their ex-president is exactly what I have just described and provides only a horrible example of what we should be.

Even as I write this, one of the most successful companies in the world is being pursued to create policies that will work to make this a better country in which to live. But it’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, the entitled yuppie scum who created Facebook as a way to get laid and subsequently stumbled into a massive fortune, has no higher goal for his company than to make more money.

Now, when Facebook is the conductor of massive amounts of deliberately false information, Zuckerberg is unconcerned. He will continue to ignore the problem until it becomes so unsustainable that legislation will be created that will cripple his company. So it is with the barons of the fossil fuel industry and those of our weapons, pharmaceutical, insurance and banking industries.

The biggest problem currently facing our country and the world is human induced climate change. Every reliable scientist knows this and so do the barons of the fossil fuel industry but they don’t care. They are more interested in short-term personal financial gains than in the health of your children or the life of the planet. If they ceased opposing renewable energy and instead put the millions they are now wasting on keeping it at bay into converting to it, the planet would be better and so would the people that inhabit it. And as a sidelight Russia, Saudi Arabia and many of the Gulf States would be forced to operate in a diminished capacity, allowing us to dominate the search for international peace while spending a fraction of the money we do now.

But let’s take a look at just a couple of the programs and places where we are currently wasting millions, if not billions, in taxpayer and commercial money that could be spent for far better purposes.

The first thing that comes to mind is the only piece of real legislation that was passed by the Trump administration. I am referring, of course to the tax bill that enriched the already rich at the cost of a better life for the poor and middle class.  It’s a bill that added a trillion dollars to the national debt by reducing taxes on the super rich and on corporations that already pay little or no taxes despite billions in profits.

Put that trillion dollars into infrastructure and we can create hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs rebuilding our rail systems, highways, water systems and the grid. Those would be jobs that are now being eliminated in manufacturing by the incursion of robot technology that is necessary to compete with our low cost international rivals.

Back to climate and fossil fuels for a second. Why do we pay oil, gas and coal producers a subsidy when they are already enjoying huge profits even as they poison the atmosphere and destroy our water systems? Those subsidies represent billions that should be going to clean up the damage that those companies do to the land every day. Anyone who has had the misfortune to tour the strip mined mountain tops in West Virginia or Kentucky and observed the decimated landscapes or fouled streams and waterways has to wonder why we are supporting these dirty industries.

Elizabeth Warren, who the Right likes to brand as a socialist, has proposed a wealth tax in which those making over $50 million a year will be taxed 2 cents on every dollar over that $50 million threshold. Now, if you can’t make it on $50 million a year, plus 98% of everything over that, then you aren’t fit to breath the air being used to keep you alive.

We know Warren kept it at 2 cents because it makes a great sales pitch. Who can complain about 2 fucking cents? But it could be 4 or five and it still wouldn’t hurt. Those 2 pennies represent $2.75 trillion bucks in income over ten years. That should give you some idea of how much money these people actually make and how little even 5 or10 percent of it will mean to their lifestyles. But it can mean everything to struggling parents with a couple of kids to educate or an illness to overcome.

That 2 cents will provide education for every kid in America in pre-school and toddler care programs plus paying off all former student loans, plus paying for every young person who wants to go to college or some form of advanced education to prepare them for life as an adult.

And it’s the same in almost every category. The power that can be had by expanding the power of Medicare to cover every man, woman and child in the country will not be in money but in the muscle that will allow the government to force the drug, medical supply and insurance companies to reduce what are sometimes 1,OOO% or more profit markups. There is absolutely no reason why our medical costs should be more than twice as much per person as other countries when ours doesn’t currently cover everyone and the system delivery is certainly no better than in other civilized nations.

The scurrilous question that was asked by a moderator during the Democratic debates, “Do you support free medical care for illegal aliens?” is exactly the kind of baseless GOP bullshit on which this discussion proceeds. In this country and in fact all over the world, anyone who cannot afford medical care regardless of whether or not they are a citizen of that country can get it free. It’s that way now in this country, as it was under a Republican administration.

The real question is why do we allow drug companies to markup the prices of their products, sometimes more than 1,000%, when people are dying for lack of those medicines? How can we allow insurance companies to have the say over what treatment their subscribers can get when we know their only criteria is how it effects the profit margin rather than how it effects their subscriber’s health. The money is more than there in healthcare. As stated above, we spend twice as much per head as any other country for care that is barely equal and often much less than what other countries provide. We just have to decide to spend it in the right places and the right manner. It’s all about controlling how we spend our hard earned taxpayer dollars and to what lengths we are willing to go to protect that money.

And then there’s the military. More than half of our national budget goes into the military. Why? It’s hard to disagree with the Right when it whines about throwing away our taxpayers money on protecting foreign countries; until their leader pick the wrong place to use as an example and stabs an ally in the back. But there are certainly places where we can save more than half of what we are spending by not having American garrisons on foreign soil. Why the hell do we have thirty thousand American troops in Japan, fifty thousand in Germany or God knows how many in South Korea? Is the Pentagon rally expecting Holland or Java to invade?

We know that we are building unusable weapons to support the military industrial complex and we know that we are paying outrageous sums for these useless weapons because money has changed hands all over Washington. In fact it has been going on since WWII and most likely before. Ike Eisenhower coined the phrase “Military Industrial Complex” as a warning against the danger they represented to world peace and the “treason” they have continued to commit ever since.

I call it treason, knowing full well the connotation that phrase carries with it, because while encouraging our nation to spend money in order to line their own pockets, those in charge of the Military Industrial Complex have caused us to come up short in the weaponry that we really need to fight the next war, the cyber war. That’s where we should be spending our military dollars, not on useless tanks, and planes that cannot fly.

With close knowledgeable supervision, the Pentagon could cut its enormous budget in half or better and still have more than enough money to improve every aspect of its obligations to this country.

The original question was, is there enough money?  There’s more than enough money. We just have to do something we have never done. We have to take care of it. We have to spend it judiciously and we have to use it in the most advantageous ways to benefit the lives of everyday American citizens, not to fill the bloated pockets of the already too rich.