The United States should reduce it tax rates on US businesses to 15% and bring home all American troops. As somebody said--I believe it was US Representative Ron Paul--let our military personnel secure our own borders, and spend any money they have back home.
Let our foreign friends see if they can support their own military capable of defending themselves. Let them see if they can build defense systems capable of protecting themselves from Iran's nuclear weapons. Let they pay their fair shares to support the UN and other joint ventures, where the US bears a disproportionate share of the burden because we once had the wealth to do it before these friends starting siphoning that wealth unto themselves with low tax rates. Let them see if they can do all of these with the low tax rates businesses are paying them so our businesses and jobs can be relocated in their countries. It is no longer in America's best interest to police the world, while the world steals our wealth and jobs.
If these nations are indeed allies, then there should be agreements with them to have uniform or equitable tax rates on businesses. If this is a bad idea, then our friends should be able to explain why what the present rates of taxing is good for the United States, given our present condition. It's obviously good for them. How can they be friends on the battlefields but enemies on the field of economics?
I remember during one of my social studies classes in school, we had either a chapter or chapter section entitled "How a bill becomes a law." And until recently, I remembered the title much better than I remembered the process. I'm even more in the dark, now, about how our laws regulate our relations with other nations, and who determines what those laws are. I know they are wrapped up in agreements and treaties of various sorts. But do they work--for Americans?
NAPTA sounded like a great idea in concept and on paper: send low paying jobs to third-world nations, build up their standard of living so they can buy products of higher paying jobs back in the United States. The products of higher paying jobs would be products of more highly educated Americans who presumably would not need the low paying jobs being sent to other countries. It was as if there would be no people left in the United States who would not ever qualify for jobs that required anything more than basic skills and understandings.
I don't recall any questions being raised or debated about these people who needed and could have performed these low level jobs. I did not question it because I was caught up in the hope that all American children would be given such a high quality education that they would qualify for these highly innovative, highly skilled, high paying jobs.
But suppose we had saved those low paying jobs for our lowest skilled citizens and paid them minimum wages to do them, would our citizens have taken the jobs? Would they have been as enthusiastic about these jobs as third-world workers who would consider working for even less than the American minimum wage as placing them, where they live, among the middle or upper economic class? I don't know.
What I do know is that our economic system is on the decline, and part of the reason is that the system has allowed too much wealth to flow into too few hands.
But unequal distribution of wealth is less a reason than it is a consequence of other actions that are more fundamental to the American heritage. Those fundamentals are embodied in the religious faith of the American people for whom life has no more important aspect or purpose. America's failure to address its present economic problems grows out of a weakening of that faith in the lives of many Americans, and resentment by many others of faith that the practice and foundations of that faith have been abridged by the Supreme Court.
Removing prayer from schools rather obviously was not the intent of the 1st Amendment. Prayer in schools was not the result of any law established by Congress. But by denying student the rights to pray and hear prayer, the Court did prohibit "the free expression" of religion. Schools and school districts are not Congress. When a Christian, a Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or a Hindu pray, they pray to the same god, who is God. And they pray for the same kinds of things. The Court took a sense of God out of the lives of millions of children for whom the school was their only contact with Him.
The second action that impact the American culture is the Supreme Court decision to legalize abortions. For many seriously religious people, killing of an innocent, defenseless baby--be it born or unborn--is reprehensible, and no one has the right to do it as a matter of necessity or personal convenience. Punishing an unborn child for the deeds of some adult seems unfair.
The third reason is gay "marriages." Many seriously religious Americans, who might accept civil unions, believe--as a foundation of their faith--that marriage is between a man and a woman. They believe that one can no more call a union of two women or two men a marriage than one could call one member of such couples a husband and the other a wife, or one member of a lesbian couple a man and one of a gay couple a woman.
Whatever the merits the arguments for such decisions may have, they breed deep-seated resentments by many who are seriously religious, and they provide the political wedges which have divided Americans on moral issues like fairness, decency, honesty, stealing, compassion, sexual behavior, etc. Most religious Democrats have been reluctant to express disapproval of these practices, even as they accept that the rights exist so long as the Supreme Court says they do.
Democrats have been morally right on issues of compassion, fairness, and honesty, and many other issues. But they will continue to lose the moral high ground and the votes of Democrats, Republicans and independents of faith who otherwise share their values. These judicial wedges challenge religious faiths and are the reasons why our conservative Supreme Court has not--and will not--overturn those rulings.
These challenges to faith are the sources of American problems, problems which Republicans will not to fix and Democrats dare not try.
Ronald C Spooner
Email: rcspoon@earthlink.net
Blog: ronaldcspooner.blogspot.com
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