Only interested in "What's in it for me?"
This must stop.
Ask Colorado Springs, now I'm not a particular fan of Colorado Springs, it's filled with Jesus Freaks (don't hate 'em, just wish they'd stop shoving their moral righteousness down my throat)and though I've been there many times I've never been enamored of the place even before the ungodly moved in.
But they are turning off their street lights.
They have to they can't afford them anymore.
And I'd be willing to bet that the dummies there will vote this fall for all the Republicans on the ticket because they oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, ENDA, the repeal of DADT and the like. Never once thinking about the fact that these Republicans want to make permanent the very tax cuts that are depriving them of the basic services that this country was literally built on.
We don't share. We don't want to give anyone else anything, we don't seem to have any concept that "Treat others as you would be treated." is a good thing. It's all divisiveness and hate, and the decline of a civilization that once stood proud together against the world.
We used to be a nation, and yes I know I'm an old guy lamenting the passing of what's familiar, that presented a unified front to the world. Now we travel the world openly distorting the truth, encouraging other nations to discriminate and even kill on the basis of religious disparity.
How can we once again become the nation we once purported to be? What will finally turn the tide toward outrage and allow the people to finally see that they've been hoodwinked?
Personally, I know I've got a relatively short 25-30 years left on this plane of existence, if I'm lucky. A time during which my relevance will be ever-decreasing, and that's ok. in my mind it means that I'll be freer to do the things that are important to me without interference, but ideas, ideas that matter, that promote the growth of people and the nation, that's all we can really leave behind and I'd like to see us, as a nation, embrace that notion.(you wanna make the hold hands and sing kumbaya joke go ahead)
We're not leaving behind much otherwise.
Take a look at what Paul Krugman said recently on the subject in the NYT.
Paul Krugman-NYT
The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.
Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment.
It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.
That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.
But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.
And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
Unlit unpaved roads, what does that image bring to mind? A third world country, not the leader of the free world. Is that to be our legacy?
And so it goes:
