Reply #19: Social Security is easy, Medicare a little harder, War the hardest... [View All]

[ProudDad]

As others have said a removal of the cap on FICA (in the words of Steve Forbes, make it a FLAT TAX instead of a heavily regressive one biased to favor the rich) would take care of Social Security well past the time when the ice caps melt from catastrophic global climate destabilization and cover half of the Earth's cities...and finally render the Earth uninhabitable for large air-breathing mammals...(about 100 years)!

Medicare for All -- everyone in, nobody out -- no insurance company PROFIT (only not for profits need apply) with strict price controls on Medical Services, drugs and equipment (like the ENTIRE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD ALREADY DOES!). That would take care of that. It'll be too bad about the millionaire Docs and their for-profit "clinics", the insurance corporations execs and drug pushers, they'll have to struggle along on $250,000 to $500,000 per year like the rest of us...

War's the hardest. The entire phony house of cards laughingly called "an economy" in the USAmerican Empire of 2010 MUST HAVE "permanent war" to survive. This was the unstated decision of those who restructured the world economy at Bretton Woods in 1944. They realized that if they went back to the status-quo-ante, the Depression would return with a vengeance with catastrophic results for capitalism. So, to buy some more time for that end-stage-disease called capitalism, they invented the "Cold War", engaged in constant military build-up, fought numerous "small wars" to keep people's jingoist tendencies active and, in the case of the Empires (U.S. and European Union), used the exercise to rob the Earth of the majority of Her resources for a small minority of Her population.

This is not sustainable, folks!

Either prepare to survive the Great Die-Off or join it... www.transitionus.org
Begin by changing our idea of an ecomony... Steady State - not capitalist war economy http://steadystate.org/

Begin by changing our idea of "society" and what it's for...

On Edit: the basic question is, "What is the human community?" Is it, as the corporate Dems and repukes would have it a dog-eat-dog world where everyone is "free" to grab however much they can -- no matter how that effects the community as a whole? Or is it a community of equals who share the bounty of Earth (yes, SHARE!) while preserving Her as a hospitable environment for our posterity.

We were programmed by evolution to be the latter, it's only in the last 10,000 years or so of an experiment in dominator hierarchy that we've lost our way.

We don't need the twin goads wielded by the dominators; those of money and fear in order to be inquisitive, creative and "innovative" creature. We are those things at BIRTH!

It's time to find our way back to our true natures.