I've no time to make a full response (it's family wedding weekend), but I enjoyed reading all three comments and believed them thoughtful and well intended. Thanks!
No business folks have any business running a government, for the reasons you stated. We keep electing them, however. I think the first step in helping to check this is to create a "level playing field," by which I mean money cannot play a role in getting qualified people to run for office. Really, the first step would be in the overturning of the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It would go a long way in preventing people like Elon Musk from buying a presidency, or any position that is an elective office.
It's interesting that the biggest opponents of regulations are the biggest polluters. And shouldn't there have been some government regulations about building on a floodplain in Texas?
OK, we disagree. I am against big government”, but everyone is for effective government.
The private sector is a washout at caring for the poor and needy, providing for common defense, and managing emergency response services. Left on our own, we conservatives would ruin the climate and starve with everyone else while we die of skin cancer and drown in hurricanes & floods due to global warming.
So someone needs to remind us… again & again because we are as stupid as the rest of you, that taxing & spending and regulating corporate and private behavior are necessary (evils) because everyone benefits… poverty means crime and disease has a nasty way of spreading…propping up foreign economies keeps foreign people at home (if that should be a priority, which is at best debatable), etc.
We are seeing what happens when a government that does not give a damn about the consequences pretends it is toeing the ideological line by firing people to reduce the size and cost of government and cutting healthcare benefits without regard to the consequence for weather. The modest taxation required to make the country better for everyone really deprived any of us of things we need.
Fingerprinting in or at Texas doesn’t do anyone any good, but you cannot escape the reality that what happened there is what happens when people are, as grandma used to say, “Pennywise and foolish“ and, sadly very literally, throw the babies out with the bathwater.
My question is whether we are going to learn anything from it. De Tocqueville brightly pointed out that the greatness of democracy is not that America does not make mistakes, but that it can correct them.
The coming measles epidemic, the deaths we will see overseas because of the demise of USAID and domestically because of the cutting of Medicaid, a foreign and economic policy that is, charitably, peripatetic and more accurately, totally inept, one missed step after another, causing us all to fall down the stairs….
We have plenty of opportunities now to prove him right!
I've no time to make a full response (it's family wedding weekend), but I enjoyed reading all three comments and believed them thoughtful and well intended. Thanks!
No business folks have any business running a government, for the reasons you stated. We keep electing them, however. I think the first step in helping to check this is to create a "level playing field," by which I mean money cannot play a role in getting qualified people to run for office. Really, the first step would be in the overturning of the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It would go a long way in preventing people like Elon Musk from buying a presidency, or any position that is an elective office.
It's interesting that the biggest opponents of regulations are the biggest polluters. And shouldn't there have been some government regulations about building on a floodplain in Texas?
OK, we disagree. I am against big government”, but everyone is for effective government.
The private sector is a washout at caring for the poor and needy, providing for common defense, and managing emergency response services. Left on our own, we conservatives would ruin the climate and starve with everyone else while we die of skin cancer and drown in hurricanes & floods due to global warming.
So someone needs to remind us… again & again because we are as stupid as the rest of you, that taxing & spending and regulating corporate and private behavior are necessary (evils) because everyone benefits… poverty means crime and disease has a nasty way of spreading…propping up foreign economies keeps foreign people at home (if that should be a priority, which is at best debatable), etc.
We are seeing what happens when a government that does not give a damn about the consequences pretends it is toeing the ideological line by firing people to reduce the size and cost of government and cutting healthcare benefits without regard to the consequence for weather. The modest taxation required to make the country better for everyone really deprived any of us of things we need.
Fingerprinting in or at Texas doesn’t do anyone any good, but you cannot escape the reality that what happened there is what happens when people are, as grandma used to say, “Pennywise and foolish“ and, sadly very literally, throw the babies out with the bathwater.
My question is whether we are going to learn anything from it. De Tocqueville brightly pointed out that the greatness of democracy is not that America does not make mistakes, but that it can correct them.
The coming measles epidemic, the deaths we will see overseas because of the demise of USAID and domestically because of the cutting of Medicaid, a foreign and economic policy that is, charitably, peripatetic and more accurately, totally inept, one missed step after another, causing us all to fall down the stairs….
We have plenty of opportunities now to prove him right!