Those Fundamentally Different Paths

I'm going to make this quick (I know, bullshit, but one must try), since I have a woodpecker banging on the side of my house that I need to go outside and shoot, before I pick up my mower from its annual physical, and maybe go sell some gold to pay for my health insurance premiums, which have recently gone down, considerably, though I no longer have "behavioral health" coverage (which some of you might find astounding, or at least unwise, given certains tics and tendencies you've observed in the author's recent posts), and am currently waiting on my refund of the difference, which, well, if you want to see an insurance company dilly-dally, and flat out lie to you, ask them when you can expect your refund (hint: not in time to pay your American Express bill, chumpie).

So not only did I watch Obama speak to the DNC last night, but I saw him again today addressing some "folks" in Portsmouth, NH, essentially repeating the same speech as last night, though this one had a little more humor in it (joking on making Bill Clinton the Secretary of Explaining Stuff).

I don't care what anyone says: he's an incredible speaker, doing just exactly what he needs to. Unlike his opponents, he's cool, self-deprecating, and yet ... he's quite ... presidential.

Anyway, that fucking bird is going to have a hole in our cedar big enough for a bear if I don't get out there (he sees me even peek my head out on the deck now and he flies away, that's how scared he is of me), so let's get to the matter at hand ...

In short, what no one tells you, is that the consequences of continued tax cuts, or further concentrating the wealth among the wealthy while cutting programs (to finance the cuts) that overall serve to stabilize the fortunes of the unfortunate, is going to be a lot more strife. You can run a professional sports team on the principle of Winners Only. You can run a Gulag or a Concentration Camp on the principle of Only The Strong Survive (to do more work, for those running the camp). But if you aren't willing, or don't have the stomach, for such strong, highly un-Christian measures, then you need to accommodate the entire population. Which is to say you need to govern a society, and not pretend that you're fielding a team of olympians and when all is said and done there will only be beautiful and talented people using the 15,000 condoms provided for the Olympic Village.

No ...

There will be people with no athletic skill at all, who don't fuck well or maybe don't fuck at all, but who will nonetheless be stealing the condoms because, well, fuck those pretty, talented people because I'm not one of them ...

This is not going to change by making these people exercise more. Not everyone is, or ever could be, an olympic athlete.

Is this not obvious?

Similarly, not everyone is going to "win" at capitalism. Not everyone who gets a big line of credit is going to behave sensibly with it. And we can let those people go broke, and bitch about how unfair it is that our tax dollars have to pay for these fucks ups and all that, but unless we take them to a ditch and shoot them—and everyone else who fucks up, who doesn't have a respectable Win/Loss record—then we have to deal with them. As scripture says: The poor will always be with us.

So, all matters of decency, and compassion, Christian charity and all that, aside ... would you rather leave it up to these folks to wisely use a grossly indequate voucher to sensibly buy their health insurance in their dotage, from unregulated (or far less regulated) for-profit insurers, or should we make sure that we do what we can to keep Medicare funded?

Should we ... spend more money than the Pentagon is even asking for (and not on soldiers, but to make happy the various pigs at the trough of the "Military-Industrial Complex" Eisenhower, a Republican, warned us of over sixty years ago), and take it from Medicaid, from the real losers in the system, many of whom don't even vote, and then, what ... make them go out and get jobs? Where? And what about when Dad's money runs out and it's either Medicaid paying for his nursing home or you bringing him home and setting him up and, well, that's going to do wonders for the disposable income you could otherwise use to stimulate the economy. Though it might be good for you as a person. Or it might not. Maybe some pretty ugly things inside you might come out, things you might have kept inside and never been made aware of until Dad was asleep in his grave. Though you would have the consolation of knowing the wealthy had gotten wealthier while you were learning these things about yourself rather than, say, going out to eat from time to time, or taking a vacation, or maybe even paying for your son or daughter to play hockey.

The game with Republicans, since St. Ronald, has been, in theory, to choke the beast—government—though, as Clinton's numbers (verified by Bloomberg News the following day) indicated, they've done a terrible job. Government has grown, considerably, under every Republican administration including St. Ronald's—one could say St. Ronald took the idea of growing government to new levels, levels never seen before. And yet our new disciples sing his praises.

What they did was give the tax dollars to different people. That's all they did. And it seemed to work out all right while the economy was in a generational expansion ... which is to say, a natural leg up, and the stock market we were all encouraged to buy into was going up, up, up.

But what goes up, must, at the very least, take a breather, a pause; these pause, when you measure them closely, last about as long as the legs up. Politicians hate them, since during these fallow times difficult decisions need to be made that don't sit well with the people doing the voting.

The endgame to the Crisis of 2008 has always been whether we would end up getting suckered out of programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and probably VA benefits, so that the wealthy can continue to make respectable year over year gains in the stock market at a time when the market should, in a free market environment, be selling off, getting cheap, until a new cycle begins, or whether we embark on a different sort of arithmetic, one less the calculations of the gulag, and more the calculations of the neighborhood. Woodpeckers and all.