Comparing America - A few thoughts...

[Guest]

I love my country, and I have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the country that finally got it's act together with "The Great Compromise" (the idea of having a Senate *and* a House) has descended into foot-dragging intransigency. As anothe poster put it, a "my way or the highway" attitude.

It got me to thinking of the arguments we have here. When I heard that Rush Limbaugh, a man I used to respect, would leave the country if the current health care bill was passed (maybe he would pass Susan Sarandon and Barbara Streisand at the airport), I wondered - where would he go?

Anywhere in the industrialized world, they're going to have the things he hates - socialized medicine, cradle-to-grave social services, high taxes (though, upon closer inspection, perhaps not as many) and "soak the rich" attitudes.

A lot of people complain about us becoming like Europe. And that's when it hit me. There are a lot of things about Europe that don't get covered. I used to work in the financial industry - programming systems that managed and reported on mutual funds to be precise.

I *think* it was President Reagan who said that currency is like shares of stock in a country. Think about that for a moment. It's a decent barometer of what currency's relative worth is when you look at the foreign exhange markets.

Keep in mind all of the negative comments towards Europe.

These days, the Euro is the currency for most of Europe - Switzerland excepted. Although the first day that you could walk into a bank and walk out with physical Euro notes was 1/1/2002, it came into creation electronically on 1/1/1999 - meaning you could have accounts in Euros, trade in Euros, etc. All the European currencies had their exchange rates locked in permanently. The original members used the 12/31/1998 rates, newer members according to treaty.

That first day of 2002, a U.S. Dollar would buy 1.12 Euros. Today, that same dollar will only buy 73 Euro cents.

We keep talking about how business follows the money. If we were so great all this time, why did London supplant New York as the financial capital of the world? We keep talking about how terrible it would be to become 'like Europe'.

Would it be so bad?

I've had reason to think about this because of my daughter spending a semester in England and travelling around Europe. My other daughter has been to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Japan in addition to England and France. So far, the only foreign country I've been to since 1970 has been Canada but my honeymoon in September is changing that.

I'm one who loves to put things in perspective. What, precisely, would we lose in 'becoming more European'?

Am I insane in thinking that if we rationalized out tax system so that we paid fewer NUMBERS of taxes, we might be able to come to a more fair assessment of how to pay for our government and services? I mean, in other countries, there are fewer places assessing you, although the individual rates are higher.

I pay Federal, State (even though I live in NH, I work in MA), property, vehicles, gas, excise taxes, sales (when not in NH), meals, hotel room, car rental taxes, etc, etc, etc... In the past I've paid capital gains taxes, transfer taxes, disposal taxes - and more than I can remember.

I'm told we have so many taxes so that we can hike taxes on 'the other guy' without the torch and pitchfork crowd coming out. The politicians can play "divide and conquer" on us.

We complain about our jobs going overseas to cheap labor, and have illegal immigrants coming here to do the jobs we deem 'beneath us' for wages we wouldn't work for anyway - and complain about it.

But I've been reading that the economic crash didn't hurt Europe as bad as us and their manufacturing is recovering sooner than ours.

Oh I grant you - there's some serious Euro-Silly out there - like the arguments on what constitutes a proper "bannana" in various treaties. Maybe they have an idea in that all the worthless politicians are sent off to Brussels to work on stuff that doesn't matter - but they (the politicians) THINK it matters so it gets them out of everyone's hair. (Extra points to anyone who recognizes how very "Douglas Adams" that is)

I tell you - there are services I'd *LIKE* to have here. I mean, people complain about the price of gas/petrol in Europe. But they don't have to drive nearly as much as we do. I mean, I would LOVE to be able to take a train to work. Do you know how much longer my car would last? I mean, it would probably work out cheaper to pay $6 for a gallon of gas when I'm only using my car for recreation or shopping, if I didn't have to replace my car as often because of all the miles put on it commuting.

Hmm.. $6/gal versus going extra years not having to pay $25K-$40K for a new car. But we would scream a LOT about $6/gal - rightly so since we, at the moment, don't have a lot of choices. I wonder if the hybrid owners have to replace their brakes as often? They have regenerative braking that uses the physical brakes less by running back into the generator to put power back into the battery. I wonder if the Chevy Volt, which will have a tiny engine only used to recharge the battery, will have less maintenance because the engine is used less - in some cases not at all because you can plug it in at night.

Yeah, I know I'm all over the map with this.

I guess I'm just wondering about the LONG term thinking here instead of the visceral reaction.

[Guest]

We're all "all over the map" in our thinking, DJ. The old rules about how our country runs best, the old ways we came to expect our government to work, they all seem to be out the window. We're in deep do-do and we all know it. But those that we've elected to get us out of this mess can't seem to agree on where the sun comes up in the morning. And they don't seem to care! All that seems important to them is that they get re-elected so they can argue endlessly even more.

The way we thought our government was supposed to work, what we thought the framers meant when they wrote the Constitution, that doesn't work either. The members of the Congress seem to have put some rules in place, arguably un-Constitutional rules, that have rendered the whole process totally ineffective. And still, they don't care.

Yeah, all those criticisms of Europe have lost traction with me. When I see how the countries of my forebears--Sweden and Finland--operate, I find myself wishing we could be the same. Not only is their healthcare and education better, but their unemployment and levels of poverty are a fraction of ours, and when surveys are run, their citizens wouldn't think about leaving their homeland(s), even if given a chance to come to the United States. No, they'd definitely not want to come to the United States!

Like you, there's not much I can do to influence change--my lousy single vote isn't even considered when compared to the lobbyists wandering around the Capitol with wads of money. Also like you, I'm pretty sure I know what the outcome will be, and it's not a pretty picture.

But there's little I can do about it.

[Guest]

djplong---- As usual the MSM got it wrong. Rush never said he was going to move out of the US. He said he would go to Costa Rica or some other place for medical care. He said if Obamacare passes doctors will be setting up practices off shore. Those who can afford it will go there.
I have lived in the Far East and Europe. The cost of living is very high. They are taken care of from the cradle to the grave, but they pay for it dearly. Their standard of living doesn't compare with the US. My husband worked for a Dutch company. Usually when an American got transferred to Europe they came home as soon as their time was up. I can't tell you how many Dutch friends we have who got transferred here and stayed. Say what you want, I'll take our health care system any day. If it is so terrible why does the Mayo Clinic have Arab TV stations in the hotel rooms? I think maybe it is becasue they come to the States for their medical needs.

[Guest]

Kahuna - My feelings is that the Fouding Fathers created those parliamentary procedures for good reason. But, now, the idea in D.C. is akin to a sports tournament. It's not what's best for everyone (or even the majority) but "who wins" - that's the primary goal now.

Sally Jo - Thanks for the clarification. When I heard that Rush said that, it just didn't make sense to me.

I wonder if part od our problem with creeping socialism is that we have such bad examples in this country. I mean, all you have to say is three letters, "DMV", and everyone knows what you mean about lazy, do-nothing employees. Again, it comes from the law of unintended consequences. Civil service rules were put in place to prevent things like favoritism, nepotism, etc. They were originally designed to protect workers in a fair way - but like so many good intentions, they've run amok. Kind of like how welfare was originally intended as help for war widows and look what it became.

[Guest]

...I wonder if part of our problem with creeping socialism is that we have such bad examples in this country...

I'm not so sure that it's "creeping". If one was to step back from all the politics and look at the system of government we have here in the U.S., I think it's fair to conclude that we are already well along towards socialism. The problem is that we won't admit it, as well as admitting that the system we have is very inefficient and expensive.

The framers wrote a Constitution with a weak central government with well-focused responsibilities--national defense and the maintenance of a rule of law...little more. The states were set up as the most powerful governmental entities; they were the "closest" to the people and that's the way the people who wrote and signed the Constitution wanted it.

So what's happened in the intervening 234 years? The federal government has been permitted to become all-powerful, almost omnipotent. The states have willingly ceded their rights and their responsibilities in exchange for benefits provided to their residents that they don't have to worry about or pay for. All that "good stuff" provided by the central government is funded by taxes, and more recently huge amounts of debt. The states don't have the option of issuing debt to pay for increased benefits, projects, entitlements, programs, etc. that Washington has willingly provided in exchange for increased power.

For all intents and purposes, we have become a socialist state. We haven't yet completely met the definition of socialism--a system wherein either public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources is the basis of the economy. But neither have many of the countries that we disdainfully call "socialist". Most of them still have largely private ownership of the resources and means of production. Even China has a fairly substantial elelment of privately-owned factories and resources.

We call our system a "democracy", but if one really sets out to prove that that's our system, I really think we'd be hard-pressed to prove that's the system we actually have. We elect representatives democratically, but then they govern with strong central control, paying little attention to the citizens who elected them. We are clearly more socialist than capitalist.

What we have done is to permit a large system of centrally-controlled regulations, programs, rules, and assets (like roads and railroads and bridges) and taxes, that are no longer under the control of local people and local governments. The problem is that those centrally-provided things grew as a hodge-podge of benefits and entitlements, unlike the firm central control of what looks and acts like a socialist government. A major difference is that a true socialist government doesn't have to run for re-election every couple of years and can govern with more consistency and co-ordination. We're seeing how such firm central control creates consistency of central programs and the economy when we look at China. What we have is a very inefficient quasi-socialist system--whether we want to admit it or not.

The problem--as I see it at least--is that there's probably no going back to the system of government envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The central government has become too embedded in every minute of our daily lives to think that in any way we could disassemble what has happened, particularly over the last 100 years or so. Particularly since the enactment of a federal income tax, which has permitted the central government to "buy its way" into our daily lives. If one thinks about what would be required to go back to stronger local government control over those things we expect from government, I think that would have to be admitted. And maybe the changes in how we live would prevent it anyway. We no longer travel by horse; we no longer communicate with paper and pen; our economy is no longer local; our kids no longer stay at home to work when they've finished their schooling; and so forth. I suppose it could be argued that we really need stronger central government just to address the needs of how our lives have changed since 1776.

So what we're left with is a very inefficient, unwieldy and uncoordinated system of quasi-socialism. We're also left with a problem that I can't begin to recommend an answer for--if we really can't go back, how do we make our government better, more efficient, less costly, more responsive to the desires of our (rapidly changing) population? How do we get a government to be responsive to the needs and desires of local residents? The needs of cityfolk and farmers, English-speaking and others for whom English is a second language, the wealthy and the poor, Christians and those who follow another faith, the healthy and the sick, all kinds of different segments of our population--they're all different and have different desires and expectations from their government. How do we re-create a more responsive and affordable system of government?

I don't have a clue.

[Guest]

If you were really listening to Rush, he actually didn't say he would leave the country as in move to another. He said he would leave and go get his health care in Costa Rica.

For those of you who still think this, just go back to his archives on his site. He also went over it again in subsequent shows.

I quite agree with Rush on this point.

[Guest]

Unfortunately, everything you said, VK, is true. We are well on our way to complete socialism. If health care passes it will be another nail in the coffin.