This morning I read two columns, one a blog entry called "The Left Wing Circus Comes to Town" by Dennis Byrne on Real Clear Politics and the other an opinion piece in the Washington Post called "Not My Grandpa's Democrats" by Richard Cohen. These two were slugging away one from the right and one from the left with the Democrats getting creamed from both sides. Byrne was attacking the Democrats' performances at the YearlyKos Presidential Forum, while Cohen was criticizing the Dems for not standing up for the little guys losing their homes in the subprime market while Hedge-funders pay taxes at the low capital gains rate. While the pundits slug it out, we need to see our Party in this fight and in it to win it!
Byrne feels that Hillary Clinton was the only honest one in the bunch at the YearlyKos function, when she said that lobbyists represent real people, including corporations who employ millions of Americans. He felt others, like Edwards were just pandering to the base when they criticized the lobbyists' influence in campaigns and politics in general. Of course lobbyist represent real people, as Byrne points out, even "...teachers, who have shackled public education with their job protections and lush retirement benefits" (You know I'll take issue with that--as a highly educated professional who is underpaid and has a longer job description than even the Internet can hold). But let's face it, the energy lobby is going to out-bid teachers every time. And, let's face it, if teachers had as much say in Washington as the hedge funds, I'd be paying only 15% in taxes, too. And my students wouldn't be taking three bench mark tests a year in order to be ready for the real standardized test that the entire fate of my school and district is based on. Rather, we'd actually spend those countless hours teaching them something. Hey Edwards, pander away man!
All of you Democrats, pander, pander, pander. Seriously, though lobbying has reached insane levels. Do you know how many working people could be insured with the money the health care companies and pharmaceutical companies spend each year in lobbying alone? How much lower could our premiums be? Maybe if they stopped spending so much money on our elected officials, we'd actually do what every other industrialized country in the World--every other industrialized country in the World--does and provide health care. I actually know uninsured and under-insured people, citizens, of the United States who have had medical and dental procedures done in Mexico.
Cohen on the other hand thinks that we are not making enough noise about the lenders who helped poor, working people buy homes they couldn't afford and about wealthy hedge funds who pay almost no taxes or pay at the capital gains rate of only 15%. Luckily, I have heard several candidates talk on this issue--and it is a real issue.
The concentration of wealth in this country is getting to be a problem. The middle class is getting squeezed. College is incredibly expensive and it is not a guaranteed road to riches, anymore. I carried an educational loan out of college and not only was it scary to start my real life in the hole, but it affected the type of career choices I made. That was in 1994. Many kids today are graduating with loans that would make mine look small by comparison. And, it is my belief that a lot of ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy in this country is crushed under the great weight of the health insurance burden. If you have any type of pre-existing condition, leaving a job with a health benefit can be dangerous--not just risky, but dangerous, because while you can get some skeletal health insurance plans for relatively little, a comprehensive plan if you have any sort of chronic illness can cost a fortune that few Americans can lay their hands on every month. And what if you have a child with an illness? You cling to that job, man. You cling.
Iraq is incredibly important, but so is the American Dream. We may or may not be able to get out of Iraq soon. Where we are in Iraq is in the hands of this Administration until January 2009 and the soldiers can't just click their heels together three times and come home. We can't just say if we didn't spend money in Iraq, we could create a Utopia. Hello, there is a debt to pay back, too. We need to find ways to make this work. The tax code has to be reasonable. Education and health have to be front and center. Democrats, we need to put them front and center. Edwards has put these issues on the radar, but we need to keep pushing them through the noise. We cannot destroy ourselves from within. A few terrorists, as horrible as they are, are not going to bring this country to its knees.
I have lived in the Third World. I have seen disparity of income. Once you get out of the cities, the middle class is hard to find. We do not want to go the way of the Third World. Get in this fight!
Click here to see Richard Cohen's column
Click here to see Dennis Byrne's blog entry
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