Jane Austen lived in an era when women could not vote, during the same timeframe as the Boston Tea Party. Only white male landowners could vote during this period in our country’s history, the same period a current political party is referencing to try to sway our patriotical fervor. A period when corporations received the benefits of personhood before women and African Americans. One tea partier, Rand Paul, has even stated he wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act.
It’s election time.
I’m only talking about it this once. Here are some points I would like to make:
1. The trickle down economical theory doesn’t work. This is what a Republican senator was referring to in a recent statement that increasing taxes on the wealthy is not a good idea in this bad economy. The idea is that by not taxing the wealthy (for income over a certain amount), and paying certain individuals large amounts of money, that they will “trickle it down” to those beneath them by hiring more staff or buying more things, thereby making sure that people have jobs. This doesn’t happen, however. Instead, an increasingly smaller amount of the population has an increasingly larger amount of the wealth.
Why? Because a lot of the untaxed income simply gets invested. In the stock market, which requires huge growth from a company for its stock to do well. And the only way to keep this kind of growth has been to reduce jobs, lower pay, and increase responsibilities. The true trickle down would occur if everyone paid taxes on all their income, thereby ensuring that education, healthcare, and other programs can be funded adequately, ensuring that jobs exist in middle class occupations.
2. No one needs a 20 million dollar bonus. The American dream is not about greed. One argument against taxing the wealthy differently is that taxes would cause people to not work as hard or to their potential because they would not keep all the money they make from working. Good. Let the massive bonuses be distributed more equitably throughout the organization, so that the CEO then doesn’t have to pay as many taxes. Which leads us to the next point…
3. People aren’t happy about the bailout of corporations, especially when immense bonuses are being handed out at the same time. I get this. However, if these companies had not been bailed out, especially the financial ones, a lot more people would have lost jobs and money and the economy would be even worse. How much worse we don’t know, because the bailouts occurred. I have seen commercials from GM stating they have paid the money back. True or not, these were loans, not handouts.
4. We need healthcare. Desperately.
Before the recent healthcare reform, 46% of Americans did not have health insurance. There are no figures yet as to how much that may have improved, because some of the reform is not in place yet. To put this in perspective, almost half of us do not have access to affordable healthcare, which means that basic, preventive healthcare does not occur. Half of the country has to wait until the medical problem is serious, thereby costing the system even more money.
5. Even with all these issues, and factoring in the environment, etc., some people I know will still vote for the big R because of the big A. I’m only going to say this: out of all the people I’ve met in my life, in 20 states and 3 countries and several jobs and colleges by this point, I only know one person who has for sure gotten the big A. Throw in a couple of other people who wouldn’t admit it, and that’s still only about .05%. And if they had access to affordable healthcare, and may therefore have been able to discuss birth control options with a doctor, they may not have gotten pregnant in the first place. And the politicians wanting to outlaw it even if the woman was raped? Show me the children you've adopted from women in this situation. Contrast the .05% with the 46% that don’t have health insurance. What is more important?
So that's it. Next month is National Novel Writing Month again. That should be way more fun.
