The other One Percent

The 1% need our help.

No, not the 1% taking home nearly one fifth of every dollar earned.  They are doing quite well.

This 1% needs assistance to get to college.  They need help climbing up the opportunity ladder.  

Roughly 29,000 students this year will lose funding assistance for AP tests.  Out of 3,000,000 graduating seniors, 29,000 is about, well, 1%. 

“As part of the federal budget agreement last December, Congress cut federal financing for programs that offer advanced high school courses [AP classes] to slightly under $27 million, from $43 million the previous year, with only about $20 million to be used to subsidize low-income students’ exam fees.” NY Times article

How many of these 1% will not get into college? How many will have to pay inflated costs for college credit once and if they get there? Will have to sit in a less challenging class in the meantime.  We’ll never know how many of this 1% won’t get ahead.  We just know getting ahead will be harder, or worse, out of reach. 

We’re told that this is acceptable because we haven’t raised taxes on the other 1%. 

Conservatives, wake up.  You’re destroying America.  1% at a time.

The Google Test

Tim Pawlenty wants to apply the Google test to the Federal government, saying “if you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.”  He wants to kill the Postal Service, Amtrak, and federal home-mortgage agencies.  I say while we’re at it kill national parks, regulatory agencies, health insurance, and schools.  Then let’s kill libraries, sidewalks, and help for the poor.   Kill unemployment insurance and financial aid to college.

When we’re done, we’ll be super competitive.    Growth will be incredibly high and businesses will be humming as we will have fought the “unrelenting trench battle against the overregulation that’s suffocating America’s entrepreneurial spirit. (Pawlenty)”  Life will be wonderful once again.

Don’t have the $30 entrance fee to the national park?  Sorry, maybe you can go next year.

Can’t afford the $30,000 for a private school?  Come on, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Shy of the $10 you’ll need for the internet café because the libraries closed?  Maybe you can ask a friend.

Recently unemployed with 3 kids to feed?  Sucks to be them.  Maybe a church will help.

Can’t afford the lawyer to fight the chemicals in your drinking water from fracking? Walmart sells bottled water.

Don’t have the 20% down payment for a house? Renting is nice.

Yes, government costs money to run.  But the alternative is a place where, like Washington state and its state parks, only the rich can afford anything. 

The cycle of destroying our very social fabric is upon us and my small example is Mackworth Island.  Seems simple enough.  Budget in Portland is in trouble so you suspend payments to the park.  With suspended payments and the need for maintenance on the island, fees are charged.  What once was a nice island for hiking near the ocean with my girls is now a luxury at $3/person and we haven’t returned since.  And you could make a case that I could afford it.  But what about lower income people in Portland?  Mackworth Island might as well be Disney World.  In Tim Pawlenty’s world, we make everything pay per service.  Everything.

For Tim Pawlenty, the Google test represents the awesomeness of limited government.  But for most people, applying the Google test just leads to an empty search bar.

There’s More People out there Like Me

A few weeks ago on a Friday like today I belted out an antithesis to our current malaise which is conservative do-nothing capitalism-rules-above-all philosophy.

While it generated some nice hits, I felt a little bit like its message rippled out like throwing a pebble in the ocean.  This morning I was excited to find that someone out there has the exact same feelings as me and sums it up nicely in this post on Thought Catalog. http://goo.gl/oC1RU

I particularly love these paragraphs:

Is it really true that we assess the economic success of our country via the GNP? But if we’re making more money and getting less and less for it — less education, less healthcare — then isn’t that the sign of a failing economy? Isn’t that obvious, even to one such as myself with no economic training?

San Francisco public school teachers are furloughed once a month. I’m not making this up. Thirty miles from here is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech, and Facebook. And teachers are furloughed. Uh, hmn, doesn’t it seem like corporations are getting away with something — like not paying enough taxes?

How about we say: you can form a corporation but once your valuation exceeds a billion dollars, you have to give the schools in your own fucking neighborhood enough money to pay the teachers and provide a lunch other than mad cow meatloaf?

I wonder out loud … where is this middle class rage going?  I feel like I constantly am reading charts about how wages are stagnant and how the top 1% has reaped all of the rewards of the last 30 years of capitalism and yet the only rage manifesting itself is in cutting middle class programs under the disguise of fixing the deficit.  Boxed up and supported by plugged in business lobbyists and messaged to death by Republican TV talking heads.

My guess is that liberal leaning middle class angsters are actually caused-out.  We’re the ones in the community groups fighting for recycling or street improvement programs.  We’re the ones selling cookies to raise funds for school or in the meetings protesting cuts to community pools and parks.  We have to constantly fight business interests and threats to our environment.

Given  all that, we’re exhausted.

Conservatives don’t have this baggage.  If everything is left to the individual, why fight for anything.  They are the proverbial bullies in the back of the classroom, disrupting everyone but adding no value. 

Adding value is hard to do.  Much harder than being a bully.

Things worth Keeping

Cut, cut, cut.  This is a pretty stunning chart showing the madness of conservative thought.  Cut $11.2 billion for childhood programs but keep the same amount in tax cuts for millionaires' estates. Cut $4.6 billion in teacher training and afterschool programs but keep the high-income itemized deductions.  And so on … great comparison.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/tax_breaks_infographic.html

Thinking Big

Wow, I just got really passionate on Facebook about something political, something that will surely bite my ass.  But it really chaps my ass even more that conservative policies over the last 30 years have put us here.  In a place where we’re cutting programs that help people.   In a place where we’re shutting doors to new ways of getting around, repealing health care solutions, and giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to millionaires.  Seriously?  This is the US everyone wants to live in?  And yet we keep electing conservatives.

Oh conservatives.  Why their appeal? The Goldwater-Reagan-Buckley conservative movement started out as an idea in the 1950s, not a party platform.  It was neither Democratic or Republican at the time.  Its appeal is that it’s a thesis.

When crises hit, people needed a thesis they could believe.  Inflation in the late 1970s, the Soviet Empire, 9-11, our current budget malaise all give conservatives the crisis they need to turn their thesis into action.  They continually take a very simple idea – no taxes – and just keep yelling it over and over again. Need to solve health care … no taxes.  Need to solve energy and car dependence issues … no taxes.  Need … well, in a desert if you can’t find true water people will drink the sand.  Conservatives are pimping sand.  Because what other vision has been presented since Reagan?  Where is my antithesis?

It’s no accident that of the last two Democratic presidents, both have been triangulators, centrists.  Gallup says there are 23 states where over 41.1% consider themselves “conservative”.   Why 41.1%.  That’s the highest percentage anywhere in the US of people claiming to be “liberal”.  Washington DC.  Vermont is next at 30%.  If conservatism and liberalism are brands, conservatism is Coca-Cola and liberalism is Pepsi (literally, out of this brand survey Coca-Cola is #1 and Pepsi is #23) Both solve your thirsty-I-need-a-beverage problem, but really, they’re in two different worlds.

What people (notice I don’t say Democrats) need is an American antithesis to conservative philosophy.  It has to be born out of today,  strong and timeless so that it doesn’t wane with the ebbs and flows of the news or political cycles.  It needs to be Buckley-an in that it needs to start in one decade and grow stronger and stronger until nobody can remember when the antithesis wasn’t the thesis. 

You would think middle class plight is strong.  Not simple.  And not big enough.

Education? Progressivism? Trains? Energy?  All passing trends.  Today’s trains could be tomorrow’s jet packs. 

Conservatism says government should be small.  It should not tax it’s people.  It’s goal is to minimize the regulation on the free market to allow entrepreneurialism.  Capital reigns.  Freedom from your government.

What we need is an antithesis.  Socialism?  Yeah, that’s about as American as … well, Kalashnikovs.  Conservatives like to go to the Constitution, let’s go there. It’s hokey, but hey this is antithesis building.  We need to go big.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Funny how it says nothing in here that lower taxes were given on high from God to George Washington.  But anyways, I need to get to the antithesis.  To promote the general Welfare, and form a more perfect Union, we need to build a City on a Hill.  No less than perfection is our attainment.  For a city on a hill cannot be built solely by the work of individuals.  And a city on a hill rises above the fray.  Would anyone say that Rome was the sum of its merchants? Of course not.  Health care doesn’t matter because it costs money or helps with a job; it matters because to build a city on a hill everyone must be healthy.  To be healthy for no other reason than to be healthy.  Profits are important, entrepreneurialism critical, but to the end that says this world is better, not wealthier.  It’s vital that we fund roads and libraries and schools, that we end violence, that everyone has a job and self-worth.  Otherwise, what is all this capitalism buying us?

The new liberalism must be a city on a hill.  The Blessings of Liberty cannot be attained if we are all shackled by the till.  Our Posterity needs a new thesis.  A thesis where everyone’s well being isn’t built on the wealthy acquiring capital. Where the metric of success isn’t the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but the success of Mr. and Mrs. Jones.  No less than a perfect civilization should be our goal.  It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with thinking big.

Clean air, great infrastructure, efficiency, access to knowledge are our goals, our blessings of freedom. Let government not be the end, but the means to the end.  Like our Constitution itself, a tool to build great things but not the only tool. 

If America is exceptional, let us be exceptional.

Let us align with the churches in the US who pray for a society Jesus would be proud of.

Let us align with the hipsters in the cities who protest for bike lanes.

Let us align with the seniors who want time with their grandchildren.

Let us align with the business people who can build this world.

No less than a ism will eradicate this funk called conservatism and save our country.  

Well shit, there goes an evening.