1. Spiraling health care costs
2. Oil, period.
Current expenses of the US:
War on Iraq: $1 trillion
Future Combat Sytems: $1 trillion
Imagine if we spent $1 trillion on fixing health care and $1 trillion on reducing oil consumption by 75%....
For all 3 of you who read this, you know one of my obsessions is my loathing for Future Combat Systems, a massive pork barrel project that has yet to produce anything other than a black hole for US taxpayer dollars to be sucked into. As I noted previously, FCS provide billions for such a diverse range of Congressional districts that no one wants to shut it down. The 25% or so members of Congress who are riding the gravy train are undoubtedly employing the mutual back scratching technique, and with so many people involved, it's gained a momentum all its own, despite repeated warnings from GAO that the program is more likely to fail than not, given the failure of the program directors to follow best practices. Bottom line: over the course of the next 10 years we're flushing about $1 trillion in change down the toilet on Donny Rumsfelds toy train yard fantasy. Give his track record of total and complete abject failure, it's amazing he still has a job. The fact that we're still spending money on his pipe dream fantasies is distressing to say the least.
2. Oil. We all know about this. Buying oil from the middle east allows dictatorships and corrupt regimes to stay in power from Iran to Saudi Arabia. We're going to spend another $1 trillion on our failed efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to get our own oil supply. In the meantime we're pumping less oil in Iraq now than we were pre-war. Pathetic.
Now, supposing we did something totally different:
1. Spend $1 trillion dollars on nationalized health care instead of fighting in Iraq
2. Spend $1 trillion dollars to reduce oil consumption by 75% instead of building Rummy's toy train collection
What would you do?
1. DARPA invented TCP/IP, the protocol that makes the Internet go round, over 30 years ago. It's held up pretty well over time. Government is capable of producing excellent results when it wants to. I'm confident that given a trillion dollars, some smart fellows could come up with a "health care internet" that created a unified simple medical record data interchange format. It's got to be possible to create a universal interchange data format. If you want Medicaid money or whatever, you'd have to use it, essentially creating a forcing function for a country wide standard for data interchange. For everything from medical records to billing information. You could reduce the 33% of money spent on health care that goes to filing insurance claims and use that money to insure everyone. Imagine the benefit to American business. Imagine the growth and pork available to Congressional districts everywhere. Everyone ones.
2. Oil. I don't want to get into one of those "ethanol costs more energy than you get" arguments. I don't know the answers. But I know if you threw $1 trillion at it, you could come up with a cost effective way so calories in is smaller than calories out. Whether it's some kind of bio-fuel or something more pie in the sky like hydro cells, get us off oil, now. Then, if we want to blow up Iran, we can do that. If we want to tell the Saudis that they can pay for their own goddamn army and go fuck themselves in the meantime, we can. I am so sick and tired of the world kow-towing to these repressive dictatorships, and the assholes like Donald Rumsfeld that think they will ever be democratic societies. These are ancient cultures that only believe in honor and revenge. They have no concept of respect or fealty (Afghanistan, anyone?). I don't give a rat's ass about them. As far as I'm concerned, the middle east can go fuck itself in its entirety, and the sooner they go back to killing each other instead of us, the better. The sooner we stop buying oil from them, the sooner we can leave them alone to rot in hell. This includes Israel too. As soon as we stop caring about what happens in the Middle East, the less we need a "bulwark" against the Islamic states. Israel is a bad-ass country and they can fend for themselves. We need to let them free to do what they need to do and stop thinking of them as a potential landing strip for an invasion we don't have the backbone to ever launch.
Controversy baby... I'm going redneck out here in Washington State!
No comments:
Post a Comment