Austerity measures

Since it's the silly election season, there's no avoiding the steady drone of politicians. Forgot my MP3 player at home so was trying to find something good to listen to on the radio. Radio is fine while they are playing music, but the commercials drive me crazy.

At that point the radio was quickly tuned to the local public station. As luck would have it, (bad luck) they were interviewing a politician. He was going on and on around "fiscal responsibility, and budge cuts."

Okay . . . what what exactly did he mean by that? Turns out he basically wants to gut what's left of the social safety net, in an effort to balance the budget.

In a more perfect world maybe there'd be no need for a government social safety net. The Libertarian part of my brain says that unleashing government controls would allow people the financial freedom to construct their own safety net. Good theory. Libertarians always have great theory.

The primitive tribal part of my brain, (a disturbing large part for a so called modern human) says the tribe will take care of its own.

Usually around this time I try and bring the various parts of my brain back under some control. Given half a chance, I could drift so far off into theory and "isms" that reality would disappear over the horizon.

Here's how I see it. People are hurting out there. Now is not the time to radically change things to the point where there is no safety net at all. It's an imperfect system, but if things like food stamps keeps little kids from going hungry, keep it functioning. If fuel assistance will keep grandma from freezing in the dark, let's go with it.

Over and over I hear politicians and business leaders rail against these programs that cost the government so much money. Yes, it is expensive to take care of people. Yes, there are assuredly better ways of doing it. However, big business has its safety net. If they were so "capitalistic" the "too big to fail" companies would have failed. There actually exists a mechanism to deal with companies in trouble. It's called bankruptcy. In a capitalistic society, the companies that make bad decisions would fail and those that made good decisions would prosper. "Too big" doesn't enter into it.

Somehow there's always money to kill strangers in far away places. Yet, now we can't take care of needly Americans? At a time when government policy has contributed to many of them being needy? How weird is that? Why the obsession with death instead of life?

Yes, the system needs to be radically restructured. Maybe some sort of austerity measures should go into effect. It really doesn't make any sense to start with the little people when so many fat cats are riding on the government gravy train. Let's start at the top where big money can be saved. It's the moral thing to do. Even if big business's governmental supports are cut off, the CEOs aren't going to miss any meals -unlike the kids who's single mom is losing food stamps.

-Sixbears