Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post wrote a column yesterday that is bound to cause controversy!
He stated that the American electorate are acting as “spoiled brats”!
Wow, what a charge! Is there any justification to this accusation? Obviously, Robinson says YES, and the author would tend to agree with him, which requires explanation!
Robinson says that we want quick easy solutions to complex problems that have been built up over many years, and cannot be resolved in any one presidential term or one two year congressional term! He is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT in that assertion!
We have so many problems, as Robinson points out, including:
1. Restructuring of the economy which has been outsourced over the past thirty years (since Ronald Reagan), and with manufacturing having disappeared because we all want cheap Walmart CHINA goods, and don’t want to support American made labor goods!
2. We have an infrastructure which needs a major investment, including the rebuilding of roads, bridges, canals, and other public works, but don’t want to make the investment because it might cause taxes to go up, which we hate as a concept, expecting everything to be done without paying for it!
3. We need to recognize the importance of reforming entitlements, but even to suggest it is to cause hysteria and panic and anger, as again the thought is that we don’t want to sacrifice, but make sure you don’t cut anyone’s future expectations of gaining benefits without paying appropriate level of taxes!
4. We need to plan a 21st century economy based on weaning ourselves off foreign oil, and must face the fact that fossil fuels are not the long term answer, but corporations and politicians continue to promote an outdated idea of how our future energy needs can be met!
5. After years of paying very low or no taxes, the wealthy keep on complaining about paying more taxes, even though there is no way to maintain enough revenue without their participation in the tax structure, but the attitude is “NOT ME!”, and selfishness and greed rule! When one percent of the population earns 23 percent of the income, to say they should not pay more taxes means no solution in the future to solving our economic problems is possible, and instead it forces bigger and bigger budget deficits which can lead us to losing our status as a world leader, which is already under attack as it is!
6.We need to develop an education system to sustain the future, but have failed to keep pace, and again it requires willingness to sacrifice, which no one wants to do!
7. We need to realize that immigration is part of a plan for an economic future, but instead we just make immigrants and people who have different cultural backgrounds seem to be the enemy and a threat to the future of the country!
8. The country has an unsustainable burden overseas, trying to be the world’s policeman, and therefore, we need to redefine our role in world affairs in such a way to make it manageable, as now our defense requirements are overwhelming our ability to sustain it financially!
As Robinson says, we want quick and easy solutions without pain and suffering, and so we are ready to “throw out the rascals” and try the other party in power, but not understanding that the GOP has no solutions either, and that likely, after they have a try at power, they will be thrown out in 2012!
So we are acting like “spoiled brats”, like children who have a “temper tantrum”, and take irrational steps that will do nothing to deal with the reality of the future!
That reality is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any magical solutions, and we are going to suffer through five to ten years of trouble to undo the damage done in the past 30 years, all of it except the BIll Clinton years, under Republican Presidents who made life better for the wealthy, and miserable for the middle class and the poor!
So it is time for the American people to “grow up” and stop expecting quick, easy solutions, as they are not going to come, whether or not one party or the other controls the White House and the Congress!
We are, unfortunately, in for the toughest decade we have suffered through since the 1930s! To believe anything else is to believe in the “tooth fairy” and “Santa Claus”! 🙁