The United States of America
Because we do not have universal healthcare coverage, Americans pay more for healthcare and get less, our car industry (and other industries that compete globally) are kept at a disadvantage to foreign car companies, and the effects of poverty are more severe on our poor.
And it is only going to get worse until we overcome the conservatives who are the enemies of the good economic policy and moral obligation that is universal healthcare:
U.S. health care spending seen doubling in 10 years
WASHINGTON – U.S. spending on prescription drugs, hospital care and other health services is expected to double to $4.1 trillion over the next decade, up from $2.1 trillion in 2006, a government report released Wednesday found.
Despite relative stability in recent years, nearly 20 cents of every dollar spent in 10 years will go toward health care, National Health Statistics Group economists said in their projections looking at 2006 to 2016.
Last year's health spending should make up about 16 cents for every dollar spent, they wrote in the journal Health Affairs.
I do not know why conservatives want to continue down this path of fiscal irresponsiblity rather than support universal healthcare. They must hate America and our troops.
There is no reason we cannot afford to have it. In fact, I do not think we can afford not to have it.
Here is some interesting information on how the government
Socialism is Evil
The military budget for 2007 is $462 billion. That does not include an additional $120 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But we cannot use a small percentage of that to provide health care for sick children. Because that would be socialism, and socialism is evil.
The United States spends more money on the military than China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Italy, Australia, Brazil, and Canada combined.
But we cannot use just a fraction of that money to make sure World War II vets have the medicine they need to stay alive, because that would be socialism, and socialism is evil.
The United States shipped 363 tons of hard cash into Baghad, where it promptly vanished.
But we could not ship one single dollar into the streets of Detroit, where tens of thousands of auto workers just lot their jobs. Because that would be socialism, and socialism is evil.
Over 40% of our income tax goes to military spending.
But allocating just 1% of our income tax to helping the poor would be socialism, and socialism is evil.
We are spending almost half a trillion dollars on defense each year! We outspend China (62.5 billion) and Russia (61.9 billion) each by more than 350 million dollars. We could cut our defense spending in half without any other country coming anywhere near close to what we spend. Additionally, the grand total of what we spend on the war in Iraq could be ONE TRILLION DOLLARS before we leave.
This fiscal waste is sheer madness, and it is immoral considering the tens of millions of Americans who do not have health insurance or are living in or near poverty, the dramatic amount of debt we have accumulated, and the horrible living conditions of those who live in third world countries.
Speaking of poverty in America, that is getting worse also thanks to Bush:
"Severe" Poverty worst since '75: How's that B**h plan workin' out for ya?
This McLatchy Newspapers article appeared in today's Charlotte Observer. For those of us who've been paying attention, there are no surprises here.
But why aren't more people SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER?The analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent between 2000 and 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to urban counties.
Then there is our national debt which has gotten a lot worse under Bush:
United States public debt
As of the end of 2006, the total U.S. public debt was $4.9 trillion. This does not include the money owed by states, corporations, or individuals, nor does it include the money owed to Social Security beneficiaries in the future. If intragovernment debt obligations are included, the debt figure rises to $8.6 trillion.
Living conditions in third world countries hasn't gotten any better, and it has actually gotten worse in some places like Iraq. These bad living conditions is a big part of what fuels terrorism which has increased under Bush (despite what he says):
Iraq War Creating More Terrorism, Report Says
(CNSNews.com) - Far from reducing terrorism and the number of terrorists, the war in Iraq has led to more terror attacks around the world, according to researchers from the Center on Law and Security and the New York University School of Law.
Their report, scheduled for publication in the March/April issues of the left-wing Mother Jones magazine, asserts that Islamic terrorism has increased 607 percent worldwide since the March 2003 invasion of Baghdad, leading to a 237 percent increase in fatalities from terrorist attacks.
Essentially, Bush's War on Terror is increasing terrorism, the opposite effect of what he intended (I assume, but you never know with Bush). So while Dick Cheney makes idiotic statements like this:
With respect to Iraq, I think he's dead wrong. I think, in fact, if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we'll do is validate the al Qaeda strategy. The al Qaeda strategy is to break the will of the American people -- in fact, knowing they can't win in a stand-up fight, try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.Cheney, Bush, the neo-cons, and all those who supported the war in Iraq are the ones who are helping al Qaeda. Hunter at DailyKos has a detailed analysis of this point (click the link to read the whole thing):
How Dick Cheney Helped Al Qaeda
[...]Al Qaeda had several major goals, if you believe most non-neocon experts, in their terrorist attacks on America, and primary among them was to provoke a widespread war with the United States in the Middle East. Such a war could act as a focus for Arab nationalism, a tool of jihad to rally the religious, a recruitment device for building a larger al Qaeda, and in the end a nexus point around which Arabs could build bin Laden's particular religious and nationalistic vision of a dominant Muslim state.
Iraq, of course, was exactly the kind of response they dreamed of provoking. And it worked in spectacular fashion, and through U.S. incompetence worked better than they could have ever hoped. As Dick Cheney has pointed out over and over, bin Laden especially believes that Americans can be defeated as the Russians were, because America is not willing to commit the kind of resources to the Middle East that would outlast nationalistic Arab fighters. Cheney and Rumsfeld proved his point, more than any other Americans. They proved that the U.S. administration did not have the willpower to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan; did not have the attention for it; would not commit the resources to it; would not take the necessary actions to prevent an al Qaeda and Taliban return. This will be, if we face a new generation of al Qaeda-based terrorism, the primary legacy of the Bush administration.
[...]Here, then, is the most damning condemnation of administration policy in Iraq, and why Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, Feith and others have no cause for presuming any Americans have been of anywhere near the assistance to al Qaeda that they themselves have been. In Iraq, we have chosen to fight the fight al Qaeda wanted to fight. In Afghanistan, we were fighting al Qaeda on their own doorstep, dismantling their own bases of support and safe haven. Even before the last shots fell to the ground at Tora Bora, though, our own administration lost apparent interest in the outcome.
It is the height -- the height -- of military fiasco to withdraw from a fight at the gates of the enemy's core base and turn your attention to fighting them in a proxied war of attrition far away from their infrastructure and vital networks of support. No military commander worth the polish on his shoes would propose such a thing: anyone who actually executed such a bungling move would be removed from the ranks of leadership forthwith and put back to captaining a laundry ship. And yet America and the neoconservatives have chosen exactly that proxied war, a war destined to do the core of al Qaeda and other extremists little possible harm and have myriad possible benefits for them, and have bungled even that.
You could not have done al Qaeda a better favor if you had actively tried. The neoconservatives have walked, entirely on their own accord, into handing terrorism two separate victories: the victory of making an attack on American soil a survivable achievement, for a terrorist movement, and the victory of subsequently engaging the terrorists in the very action they had been attempting to provoke.
Many Bush supporters might, at this point, respond by saying that we aren't creating terrorists and fueling terrorism by being in Iraq because 9/11 happened before we invaded.
And to that I say:
IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11!!! Seriously, how many times do we have to say that before you will stop conflating the two! AAAAAAH!!!
Apart from that, yes, terrorism existed before we invaded Iraq, but our bad foreign policies existed before the invasion as well. They helped create the horrible living conditions in other countries that inspired terrorists and terrorism. To suggest otherwise is naive.
To explain the title of this post, "a stitch in time saves nine" is a phrase we use to emphasize the importance of addressing issues early before they get worse. If we have universal healthcare coverage, we will end up spending far less on healthcare overall by giving everyone access to preventative medicine which prevents more costly medicine and surgery. Likewise, if we use our resources to improve living standards throughout the world, we will prevent the conditions that aid terrorist recruitment which, in turn, will prevent acts of terrorism.
By thinking ahead on these issues and others, we could prevent so much pain and, additionally, save so much money. The total cost of healthcare would be significantly less, and spending money on reducing or eliminating poverty in the world would cost exponentially less than what we are spending on defense and on the War on Terror.
This is what can and must do to improve our lives, our security, and our world.
...oh, and never electing idiotic presidents again would be a HUGE help also!
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