What's Wrong With America?

Lack of patriotism.

Patriotism isn't just about loving your country it's about loving your countrymen regardless of their view points.

When we have politicians bending over backwards to help illegal aliens live in the country while are veterans languish there are simply no ****s given about the country anymore.

When people are called Nazis and white supremacists for saying we should probably put our vets over illegal aliens, that is wrong.

Income inequality isn't relevant and shity health Care seems to not be a big bone of contention outside of the partisan sand box

 

I don't think that either of those issues are our greatest wrong.

I believe that there are two institutions which are responsible for our greatest failing as a society. They have created the divisiveness in America and have done the most harm in that they have hindered the citizen's ability to play their proper role in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The education system and the so-called 'free press' have failed all of us. They are charged with educating and informing the citizenry. Instead of fulfilling this important role, instead of providing citizens with the tools to enable them to assume their role in our system of self-governance, those institutions are cynical operators of opinion shaping.

 

It appears that the OP has abandoned this thread.

Oh well, it was a stinker from the start.

 

So the wave is a 50 year cycle.. which started in 1990 - that puts us near 30 years into the cycle - ouch.

 

Well that was brutally honest! Well said!

 

1.That absolutely IS a finite amount of wealth. It can be diluted. It can be accumulated...but it doesn't appear out of thin air. It is a combination of resources and labor. Both are finite. First world countries have become wealthy by essentially stealing the resources of third world countries. Been going on for centuries.

2. Of course it's a rigged system. The wealthy fight like hell to accumulate more and more wealth...and they use their vast wealth to do that. If that isn't "rigging" ...

3. No one is making that claim. Talking about the incredible inequality is saying just that. The wealthy have been on a 45 year binge...

4.Of course that is one of the roles of government. Is there any other method to address inequalities

 

Wealth inequality is only a problem for the envious. I am not envious; therefore, I don't care about relative wealth. I care about absolute wealth. Further more, I see no more of a nexus between the wealthy and the poor than between the fat and the skinny. It's not obvious, to me, that skinny people are skinny because fat people are fat, nor is it obvious to me that some people are getting wealthier slower because others are getting wealthier faster. I don't see a connection.

Medical care is not healthcare. Healthcare is comprised of nutrition, exercise and rest. Healthcare cannot be hired out or subcontracted. Healthcare is a personal responsibility. Medical care is a service. Most of the medical care meted out, in the US, is a direct result of a lack of healthcare on the patient's part. Those who have been the least responsible for their healthcare are those who feel the most entitled to have others provide them with medical care. I say, tough luck. You made your coffin, now lie in it.

I know many people, if not a majority of people, my age who for years have made the sacrifices necessary to maintain medical insurance. Ironically, what they sacrificed was their health. They sacrificed nutrition, exercise and rest; then when their health declined, they thought themselves prescient for having made that sacrifice. But, because they thought of medical insurance as healthcare, they thought that they had their healthcare covered. Now, they're shot. They're shaped like pears. They're misshapen and in generally poor condition. Quite frankly, those who cry the most about healthcare wouldn't recognize healthcare if it jogged past them.

 

Logic is not your friend

We put a new wrinkle in the game by stealing LABOR from third world nations. First slaves...later Chinese workers...more recently illegals.

Ya see we had resources...we didn't have the labor

 

1) We have the right to alter or abolish government destructive to unalienable rights.


2) If the framers intended for Americans to alter or abolish then they intended that free speech have the ultimate PURPOSE of enabling the peoples unity under law needed to alter or abolish government destructive to unalienable rights.

 

There is not now nor has there ever been a finite amount of wealth. If wealth were finite we'd still be wearing animal skins and throwing rocks at each other. The amount of wealth increases every second of every day. People are better off now than they have ever been at any other time in history. and capitalism not government made that happen.

 

The purpose of free speech is abridged. All of the others things wrong are mostly symptoms of that.

 

I always get a chuckle when people claim that the laws of conservation of matter and energy don't apply to economics.

 

Must be nice to always be able to blame society's ills on the "others", even if it's not so:


Immigrants in SA are only 2.8% of the population, much less so than in the US.

 

I think 1990 was the mid point of the cycle, not the start. That puts us 5 years past the 25 half-cycle point .

While I think the general concept has merit, the frequency of the cycles probably has a very large standard deviation associated with it.

 

Bill Gates.

Worth over $100 billion based upon selling what commodity? What goods? What resource did he steal from a 3rd-world nation to build his wealth? Whose wealth did Bill Gates take in order to build his own wealth?

Not only did Bill Gates' "product" not exist on the day he was born, it was a concept that was, for all intents and purposes, inconceivable in 1955.

Bill Gate generated a fantastic amount of wealth basically out of thin air, by selling an essentially intangible product that could hardly even considered imaginable just a mere matter of decades ago.

 

I always find it funny that people think we have the same amount of wealth now that we had 2000 years ago.

 

First- wealth and money are not finite commodities where it is necessary to control their distribution so that all may participate. Wealth is the result of productivity, good judgment and decisions, prudence and a variety of personal choices in life. People born with great disadvantage can become fabulously wealthy in America. THAT is the equality we offer, opportunity. While the nature of it varies with the person and time- nobody is excluded; anybody can participate. Thus- "Wealth inequality" has nothing to do with human equality- it has to do with human behavior and motivations. Most of the time- people are poor because of poor decisions, poor motivation, and they belief that somehow wealth is accidental rather than earned. Opportunity is everywhere- and most Americans walk past it many times everyday, either without notice or with the belief that there will be an easier way around the corner.

Paying people for living by those beliefs by redistributing the wealth of those who have earned it is the promotion of apathy and dependence- not the promotion of strength and achievement. Nations that erode into dependence invariably fail. Then- everybody loses, and the existence of opportunity shrinks. So long as the opportunity is open to all, and we don't create classes of people like the birthright nobility that gave rise to revolutions in history, we have a sound system. Yes, we have winners and losers- determined mostly by the character and industrious nature of the person. But this is not like a race where there can be only a few winners. The competition that must be beaten is more within ourselves- and anybody, yes even everybody, can be a winner. Only fools want to destroy that and make everybody equal losers.

I think everybody can agree that our healthcare system is a mess- but few look into the reasons why; they concentrate on coping with it instead of fixing it. This is like treating symptoms of a disease to make it more tolerable instead of curing it. Politically- as our population has become more dependent and less mature in our values, we keep endorsing the idea that somebody else will fix it- IF we give them more power over everything. That is one of the stupidest choices that a society can make.

The problem is not the affordability of health insurance- because the cost of insurance is a symptom of the underlying disease. One of the more obvious indicators of the disease is to isolate some part of a medical bill that we can relate to. When you are given a Tylenol at the hospital- it shows up on the bill at about $15.00. When you buy that exact same Tylenol at a Wal-mart, it costs $0.07. You don't have to be too smart to see that medical are packed to the brim with excess charges. Why? What is different about our system that is behind that abuse? Some say profit.... No. It is costs- not actual costs to provide medical services, but costs to pay for the extreme expenses of malpractice insurance, which is fueled by not only the judgements but the costs of defending the hailstorm of litigation that comes from the tort law industry. If you pay watch television and consider how many of the advertisements are for legal firms promising to get you money (so they can take half or more of it) you get some idea of the size of the problem. America leads the world in lawyer saturation- We have 287 lawyers per 100,000 people. Japan has 7. In America- a great many of those lawyers spend all their efforts on tort law in the fields of medicine and pharmaceuticals. Prior to the late 70's, the Canon of Ethics in the legal profession did not allow advertising for "victims", also known then as "Ambulance chasing". However, some creative lawyers eyeing the potential gold mine of the health insurance industry managed to get that changed as a first amendment privilege. Now- they tell anybody that will listen that if anything has happened or might have happened to you, somebody owes you money and you are entitled to get what you deserve. They don't tell you that they will get more than you, without doing the suffering.

Every dime of their fees (generally $300- 400 per hour), every cent they spend on national advertising for "victims", all of their expenses- are being paid for with settlements from the health care industry. All of the premiums that doctors, nurses, hospitals and pharma companies pay for insurance against lawsuits, all of the settlements made, plus the cost of the lawyers that the insuring company pays to defend themselves and negotiate settlements- Wind up in your health insurance bill.

The practice of medicine has never been and never will be an exact science- there are far too many variables for that to ever happen. Thus, outcomes depend highly on factors that doctors can't control and often can't even know exist. This allows the assignment of responsibility to be highly argumentative, which is exactly what tort law thrives on. It has become a legalized extortion racket.

IF we are to improve our health care system- we are going to have to start by making the costs of the care itself reasonable. That's where things can be changed- and we should find ways to make medical service affordable rather than find a way to fund the extortion.

There is a thing called "Medical Tourism". This provides medical treatments in other countries- high quality care. Governments don't subsidize foreign patients, so their charges relate to the services directly.
You can go to Spain, get a knee replacement. Included in the package will be round-trip airfare, hotel and hospital charges, all surgeon and staff charges- at one price. That price will be about the same as your deductible with American insurance.

 

What's wrong with America?

We are quickly approaching our "sell by" date. The American Experiment has been a failure, and like most empires, the experiment is about to implode. Too many scams, too much scorn and abuse heaped on the founding document.

 

If it's on your own dime, more power to you, go to the doctor as much as you like. But it isn't.
There's also extremes. When I was a kid, my mom and aunt did NOT bring us to the doctor when we had ear aches. I'm OK. My cousin has a speech impediment caused by this issue (effected his hearing and therefore his speech). When do you go and not go? My mom had me rush her to the emergency room. At the hospital, I found out she had swollen ankles. She often sleeps in a chair. Doctors said don't do that as it will cause an old lady to accumulate liquid around her ankles. If you need to sleep, get to bed. Nonsense reason to go the the Eroom to me. So this week she calls and says she is having trouble breathing. I pick her up and she sounds full of it. Her breathing is not labored. But she misdiagnosed herself. She was having heart failure and is now in ICU after getting a pace maker.

 

The problem with the wealth inequality stems from an OBSESSION with GREED! The WORSHIP of the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR over and above all else has corrupted America to the point where it has become TOXIC to the survival of our nation.

66% of hardworking Americans can no longer afford the American Dream because the pittance they are paid nowadays is a DIRECT RESULT of the GREED that takes every cent that should be paid as BONUSES and INCREASES and funnels it into the OFFSHORE bank accounts of the WEALTHY ELITE.

There is a SOLUTION and it begins by taking BACK our nation from the GREED OBSESSED. Then we form FOR PROFIT worker owned businesses that compete with the existing corporations. When all of the workers are BUSINESS OWNERS and CONTROL their own wages and bonuses the problem resolves itself.

This solution also deals with the healthcare issue because worker owned businesses can choose to provide affordable SINGLE PAYER healthcare for themselves by REJECTING the GREED OBSESSED corporate healthcare alternatives.

The BENEFITS of this worker owned alternatives is a STRONGER ECONOMY because the money REMAINS in the hands of those who EARNED those PROFITS. They then spend their money LOCALLY which benefits their local communities with more jobs and less crime.

The only OBSTRUCTION to this solution are the GREED OBSESSED and those who have been DUPED into believing that an obsession with greed is "good for America" when the indisputable fact is that it is HARMFUL to We the People.

Yes, there is going to be a PEACEFUL revolution to resolve this problem because anyone who attempts to STOP this peaceful revolution is going to make the alternative inevitable and that never turns out well for the GREED OBSESSED.

 

You can post greed in caps all you want but that doesn't make it meaningful or factual.

 

Kneejerk denialism does not refute the GREED OBSESSION that is destroying our nation.

Do you have any other credible explanation as to WHY 66% hardworking Americans are no longer able to afford the dream of owning their own home?

And please don't regurgitate that DEBUNKED Blame The Victims drivel. It only harms your own credibility.

 

Too many homes are too expensive because they are oversize and too elaborate. They need to get back to building basic houses like when I grew up.

 

Not even those basic houses are affordable any longer because wages are insufficient to make the mortgage payments.

 

The mean medium income in the US is over $59K. If they cannot build a 1500 square foot basic house with that kind of income, they have a bigger problem than just money. Zoning and Home Owners Association restrictions on home construction is a major part of the problem.