Much of the friction and divisiveness among the U.S. electorate is often the result of most Americans choosing to be either uncaring, uninformed, or uninvolved. For example, in the 2016 presidential election only about 135 million Americans bothered to vote out of an adult population well in excess of 200 million. It’s now estimated that for the upcoming 2018 Congressional elections there will be a 40% drop-off from the already weak numbers of 2016. In the computer age when a wealth of information is literally at ones finger tips, most people can’t be bothered to access such data that’s often critical to their lives and well-being. Instead they prefer to make crucial decisions based on trite slogans written on a baseball cap or a hand-made sign sticking out from a crowd. Back in the day, when I was actually young, one had to literally trudge to the library and search out hard-copy (if it existed) in order to become informed. Now that the process has become so much easier, most people are too busy with other stuff to really care. Yet, even though political and social ignorance and uncaring is so prevalent, the actions of our elected officials often have profound consequences for all too many people.
You want proof. In the presidential election of 2000, George W. Bush supposedly carried the state of Florida ( a fact still being disputed) by a few hundred votes out of millions cast, thus giving him the presidency. His opponent, Democrat Al Gore, won the popular vote nation-wide only to lose access to the White House because of the idiocies of our Electoral College system, and a disputed vote count in Florida. (Sound familiar regarding our 2016 election?) The primary difference between the two men? In 2003 Bush decide to invade Iraq in order to depose Saddam Hussein, admittedly, a really bad tyrant and despot. That war continues in one form another to this day 14 years later. Al Gore, had he become president, would have never initiated such an invasion. During the Iraqi war 6000 U.S. military and civilian contractors lost their lives, and about another 25,000 Americans were so severely wounded that their lives were effectively over. Brain damage, blindness, loss of limbs, that sort of thing. Ask a veteran of that war who’s blind or a quad-palegic whether elections have consequences.
The relevancy of an uninformed and generally uncaring public will once again rear it’s ugly head when Congressional Republicans, for the umpteenth time, try, once again, to repeal and supposedly replace Obamacare, as the nation’s health care system. It’s once again time for the Republican health care bamboozle. In the Senate, the Republican effort is primarily based on lopping off over 20 million poor from Medicaid, in order to provide tax cuts for the rich. It’s Reverse Robin Hood time, as I wrote in a previous piece. And, of course, the proposed legislation has the solid backing of Donald Trump, who really doesn’t care what’s in the details, as long as he can claim that his administration did away with the supposedly despised and socialistic Obamacare. Good for the ego and that sort of rot. Especially for a pathological narcissist like Trump. So, since Republicans are so adamant in their opposition to socialized medicine, I thought it would be useful to cite some relevant facts in that regard, that dispute the fact our medicine is un-socialistic.
The reality is that we already have a large degree of socialized medicine in this country. Here are the facts. TRICARE, a comprehensive medical plan that’s available to active and retired military and their families for a nominal fee, already has 9.5 million participants. The Veterans Affairs system, also for the military, is free, for those that don’t participate in TRICARE, and counts another 9 million members. Medicare, a type of socialized medicine with nominal premiums for seniors, has about 55.5 million members, while Medicaid, which is free health care for the poor, adds another 76 million to its membership rolls. Throw in CHIP, which is Medicaid for poor children, and you have another 4 million participants on the governments dime. Call me crazy, but my math is saying that about 154 million Americans are already receiving subsidized or socialized health care support from the government. It’s true that for Medicaid participants, the quality of the health care they receive is often poor or low-grade, but that’s because of government stinginess in reimbursing doctors for health care services provided to poor people.
It also should be considered that another 156 million Americans receive their health care coverage from their employers. This is also subsidized by the government since those same employers are then allowed to deduct the costs of providing that benefit from the income taxes they owe the government. So, although the various health care arrangements in the U.S. may be convoluted, there’s little doubt that the government participates in providing socialistic type coverage to about 310 million Americans. That leaves about 15 million people in the U.S. that are left dangling in the wind when it comes to protecting their most valuable asset, namely their health.
The sane solution to all of this would be to scrap all these various arrangements, and institute a universal, single payer health care system that’s prevalent through the rest of the world, especially those with advanced economies like ours. But, of course, that’s way too sensible and would not allow our Republican President and Congress to demagogue the issue as they plan to do this week. It will probably take another couple of centuries of evolution before the sanity of universal health care will be allowed to prevail.
realityincorporated 
DEPRESSION AT ITS ROOTS
I thought that, for a change of pace, we would discuss a really fun topic like depression. No not the mental breakdown type, but the fiscal meltdown type instead. Although if you have a financial breakdown, it’s sure to cause a plethora of the mental type, so maybe we’ll wind up talking about both. They say that money can’t buy happiness, but tell that to the homeless guy sleeping in a cardboard box in a back alley or under a bridge somewhere. Or to the recent winners of the mega-millions jackpot as they were popping the champagne corks. It’s hard to imagine any individual or family where money doesn’t play a central role.
Throughout American history there’s been at least a dozen major depressions, or panics as they were sometimes called, starting as early as 1807. There was also a few milder recessions thrown in for good luck. (Ronald Reagan used to say that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you are thrown out of work. Not a bad definition.) But the depression I would like to focus on is the one back in the thirties. Not the 1930s, but the 1830s, or 1837 to be exact. It’s hard to believe they could have a depression back then when the entire U.S. population was only about 17 million. But not only did they have a depression, it was just as severe and destructive to people’s lives as the 1930s joyride. Those that are such strong advocates of capitalism somehow never get around to talking about capitalism’s failures, and how numerous they have been.
The U.S. government in 1837 was a modern day tea party’s dream come true in that it hardly did anything and hardly spent any money. It had a small Army and a few ships they called a Navy, a State Department that conducted a limited amount of foreign affairs, a small Attorney General’s office, and perhaps something that looked like an agriculture department to help out farmers. Even then people recognized that food was too important to deny at least some government involvement to help offset the hardships that droughts or flooding rains may have caused farmers. But outside of these limited functions there was little government activity. Revenues came primarily from tariffs on imported goods, so tax rates on rich or poor was a non-factor.
In November of 1836, the only man in U.S. history to be elected from the House of Representatives directly to the White House, Martin Van Buren, became president in the following year, succeeding the the 8 year presidency of Andrew Jackson. Economic times were good at the start of the Van Buren presidency, as land values started to sky rocket in value because of increasing numbers of people pushing west. One might say there was a growing real-estate bubble, not unlike the one that has led to our current economic down-turn. Banks were eagerly encouraging people to borrow money and invest in real estate to keep land values rising. Sound familiar? However, with all the cheap money flooding the market, inflation started to soar, and the government, in its infinite wisdom, declared that outstanding debt would have to be repaid in gold or silver, which made all the paper money on the market almost valueless. Instantly, there was widespread panic, as people rushed to their banks to withdraw their life’s savings while they could. Almost overnight, 40% of the banks in the U.S. had to close their shutters, since they were unable to meet their financial obligations. Financial destruction and ruin ensued on a massive scale in most people’s lives, from which they would never recover.
Since governments in those days didn’t do much of anything outside of defense and foreign affairs, Van Buren was clueless as to what remedial actions the government might take to alleviate the hard financial times. So in the end he did nothing, and the unrelenting depression dragged on for 6 years until finally the economy started to improve in 1843. The depression caused Van Buren to lose his re-election bid in 1840, and he probably went to his grave insisting it was not government’s role to bail out the economy. Sort of like today’s far right, who are still monumentally upset that the current administration bailed out General Motors and Chrysler in their time of need, instead of letting them go out of business, with a few hundred thousand more jobs going down the drain.
What is the relevance of the 1837 depression to our current world affairs? It’s not that capitalism is bad. Indeed, it’s probably the only real workable economic system at this stage of man’s evolutionary development. Even Communist China recognized that when they went to a market economy. But capitalism does have some deep fault lines that are ripe for exploitation by the unscrupulous. For example, when my wife and I bought our first house, people acquired real estate primarily for living purposes. We were required to put 20% of the purchase as a down payment. But early in the 21st century the fast-buck artists felt there was a quick killing to be made by constantly inflating real-estate values through convincing potential home-buyers to secure mortgages they could ill-afford with virtually no down payment. Real-estate prices could only go up, they told dubious buyers, before the crash came and all the foreclosures with it. And all the people now sitting in their homes with mortgages that are under-water. The 1930s depression was caused by the same-type of fast-buck artists that were exploiting the stock market, causing ever-increasing and unsustainable stock prices until the crash came.
So in the end it doesn’t matter whether it’s capitalism or socialism, or any other ism. What matters is the honesty and integrity of the people participating in what ever system is put in place. What’s important is to have the safeguards necessary to prevent the dishonest, the unscrupulous, and the out-and-out scammers from perverting whatever the chosen system of economics is. One final note. Mitt Romney has secured the GOP nomination, but during the primaries he referred to himself as a “severe conservative.” I wonder if that’s like a severe depression. Maybe it’s just a severe mental breakdown.