We Want Our Country Back

We want our country back. What an interesting mantra.

Exactly where (or when) do we want our country back to?

Do we want it back to where Blacks had to drink from a different water fountain?

Do we want it back to where there were no usable roads?

Do we want it back to the good old days when 11 year olds were forced to work 80 hours a week with no rights and little pay?

How about all the way back to when everyone "owned" at least a couple of other people?

What is it that we want back?

Do we want back the days when even adult workers had no rights? How does an 80 or 90 hour workweek with no overtime pay, no minimum wage, no sick time, no holiday pay, and no weekend sound? When the owner of a company could keep his employees under his thumb by paying them very little, and then extending loans to keep them working there? That song "I owe my soul to the company store" wasn’t just a song.

Oh, I know. Do we want back the days when everyone had to carry a weapon because there weren’t enough police to keep order?

Or do we want it back to where woman couldn’t vote, and could barely get a job?

How about we do away with all those costly government programs. We don’t need any federal agency to police our food and drugs. Those companies that provide that stuff will police themselves adequately. Just like the peanut butter folks a couple of years ago. Or the Vioxx folks.

Where, or when, is it exactly that we want our country back to?

How about the days when a person could be turned out of a hospital ER to die on the sidewalk just feet away because he had no insurance or cash to pay for treatment?

What DOES "We Want Our Country Back" mean, exactly?

Redistribution of Wealth

I listen to a lot of talk radio, and I hear a lot of people lamenting the idea that President Obama intends to redistribute the wealth in this country. Apparently the concern is that he will change the way we already redistribute wealth.

Ronald Reagan’s supply side economics, otherwise known as trickle down economics, worked quite well for this purpose.

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

In 1981, the top 1% of Americans controlled 24.8% of the wealth in the United States, and the rest of the population controlled 75.2%.

After nearly 30 years of trickle down, in 2007 the top 1% of Americans controlled only 34.6% of the wealth, while the remaining population controlled a whopping 65.4%.

Maybe it is just me, but this distribution seems to indicate that these folks are not using their gains to create more jobs.

Apparently if we give bigger tax breaks and incentives to the wealthy, they will indeed pass something along to the less well off. What they pass along is, however, in question. Money it ain’t.
Write to your elected representatives and let them know that you do not want them to change the way things work.

Let us continue the redistribution of wealth exactly the way we have been doing since Ronald Reagan was elected, rather than turning it around and passing it back to the folks who merely work for a living.