The Wicked Rich - The Endless Poor

By TRB

It doesn't take a lot of thinking or math calculations to figure out where the United States will be or what it will be before the end of the century. Our politicians are bought and paid for to represent corporations whose sole purpose in life is to rip us off. How do you think that deal is going to work out? These are not opinions I am putting to paper. This is the daily condition of our nation.

Our education system stinks, yet it is the most costly in the world.

Our healthcare system stinks, yet it too is the most costly in the world.

Our banking system is unregualted and routinely steals from our 401ks and pensions with no legal consequenses.

Our tax code is unrealistic, the most unrealistic in the world. The very wealthy, both invividuals and corporations pay little or no taxes at all. So, you ask, where do we get our revenue? How do we make the money to fund the programs used by the poor, the mentally incompetent, the sick and the elderly. These funds are drying up. Services for these unfortunate people are decaying.

So along comes Rep. (R) Eric Cantor of Virginia with his "solution," which is quickly heralded as a way out of this burning barn. But of course it isn't. It is a way out for very few people, mostly millionaires and billlionaires. The rest of us can burn as far as Eric Cantor is concerned.

When Rep. Eric Cantor pretty boy politician from Virginia announced his new finance plan to save the United States last week there were many greedy souls on Wall Street who loved it. The basics were this: make tremendous cuts to all social programs, some small cuts to the defense budget. And, by the way, give another one trillion in tax cuts to the super wealthy. Still, even some in the lap dog news media thought it was at least worth a try.

That is how uneducated this nation has become over the years. They will consider any plan, no matter how obvious its weaknesses.

What the U.S. has to do is raise taxes, not lower them. This is the reason we have fallen behind in almost every indicator used to establish whether a nation is healthy or not, i.e. quality of health care, education, deaths at birth, life expectency, etc. It is because we have been lowering our revenue from taxes for more than thirty years, lowering them to the point where the government can not help anyone - kids caught in a rotten public school system, consumers who were defrauded by a local bank and are losing their house as a result, the elderly whose medical treatment is declining. We can't help these people because we don't tax the rich and the corporations to create the revenue stream we need to maintain these programs.

We have the oldest nearly unchanged tax system of any civilized nation. And because of that, we have the least revenue. And it shows.

Cantor is correct when he says that we have to limit some domestic spending. Some of it isn't needed. In fact it is a joke. But our cuts to Defense have to be in the 40 percent range, which means war as an extension of diplomacy or just war for the hell of it has to stop.

We have to reform the nation's tax code. It leaks like a sieve. General Electric hired a few hundred tax lawyers, studied what GE owed in taxes and found a loophole in the tax code to escape every tax debt. How does a corporation making billions in profits get away without paying taxes, while the under paid teacher in your child's classroom pays dearly? The Tax code needs to be fixed.

Taxes should be raised immediately on everyone making over $250,000 a year. They just don't pay them now. Instead they receive tax breaks, as though they needed the money worse than the old woman who lives in the nasty nursing home down the street who doesn't even remember her own name. Sooner or later, it becomes a moral question. Are we a nation of uncaring greedy people?

Is that the reason for these problems? And is that the reason for our nation's downward slide in the world? All of this to enrich a group of people whose numbers wouldn't even add up to the population of a single state?

That is the very definition of a class war. Anyone who believes we are not involved in one is not paying attention.

Look at our health care system, which works off a kind of employer-based monopoly model. Why is the employer even involved? This is the only nation in the world where the employer is involved in the health care system. That involvement just makes health care more expensive, and actually slows down services to the patient.

Obama wants to raise the debt ceiling next week. According to whom you speak, the U.S. is anywhere between $12 and $20 trillion in debt right now. The law states that the nation has to stop paying bills if the debt goes beyond a certain limit. We have almost reached it. It was reached on seven separate occasions during the Bush II Administration and the Congress, which for part of that time had a Democrat majority, allowed the ceiling to be raised every time.

But this new Republican Tea Party Congress says they won't allow an increase this time. Why? Because they don't like Obama. Why? Because he is an African American. The truth deserves the most resentment as they say.

We hear a lot about the deficit and deficit spending. But someone was saying the other day that the deficit is just the symptom, not the problem. The problem is much worse than the symptom.

We are living in a corporate-ruled nation with a corrupt health care system, a damaged beyond repair education system, a dishonest and unharnessed banking and financial system, and an energy policy that is at least a century old.

The changes that have to come to this nation in order to set it back up on its feet are revolutionary in nature. One of the first things that has to be done is to take the corporate money away from our elected representatives.

That is our only path back to a representative democracy.