I agree that America has lost its way. Personally, I'm not bright enough to develop a cogent plan to get the USA back on track. I do have opinions about why we are where we are, and it's taken decades of making the wrong choices to get us here:
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NAFTA and outsourcing. "Bad jobs will leave, great jobs will come". BS. Jobs in nearly all industries were hit and hit hard. "Made in the USA" is just a tired mantra from the 70's, because American manufacturing is almost nonexistent, and much of the manufacturing we do have is via corporations owned outside of America. Service jobs were dumped overseas... just try to understand the Customer Service Representative based in India next time you have a question about a product you own. Even American-owned companies import all their product from overseas. We just got a brand new DirectTV receiver and remote; both were made in China. We are even outsourcing our high-paying engineer/research jobs, either sending the work itself overseas or bringing foreign engineers, researchers, etc. into the USA to fill jobs here. Electronic giants like Hewlett-Packard and other import all their machines from overseas manufacturing plants. We shot ourselves in the head decades ago, and we've been bleeding out ever since.
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Educational decline. We are now graduating more functionally illiterate students from high school and even universities than ever before. America isn't at the bottom of the "civilized countries educational scale", but we are close enough smell the floor of the barrel.
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Deregulation. This was supposed to cut government bureaucracy, but all it did was yank the rug out from under checks and balances for the use of public funds, allowing huge swaths of local to national governmental agencies to fling taxpayer money into junk bonds, until many cities and counties were nearly bankrupt, and give banks and financial institutions the power to bundle mortgages without oversight, leading to the housing/financial crisis over the past decade. Trickle down... didn't.
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Out of control healthcare and insurance cost. Without pesky controls and mandatory audits, medical and research facilities are basically able to charge anything they damned well please for their services, thereby encouraging insurance companies to do the same for healthcare coverage. It has been systematically bankrupting businesses and their employees for decades.
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Redundant government bureaucracies. These porkers exist for one reason only, to continue the demand for their own existence. What exactly does the Dept of Health and Human Services do besides telling people to eat healthy, not smoke and use condoms? Do we really need a federal Dept of Education to duplicate the oversight of local and state Depts. of Education? Do we really need a Dept. of Agriculture
and a Agriculture Marketing Service
and a Agriculture Research Service? Do we really need 15 Cabinet Agencies and more than 2,000 other federal agencies??
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Extreme Partisanship. Over the past 20 years, our government hasn't been "of the people, by the people". It's been a tag-team football match between democrats and republicans where the good of the nation has been ignored in favor of "our side" winning at all costs, preferably by destroying "their side". Nobody in congress cares about citizens unless they are rich enough to donate chunks of campaign funds or are required ballot-casters at the next election. Other than that, we are the "47%" that nobody gives a fat flying rat's ass about.
Uh.... wow, sorry. I didn't plan this to be a tl;dr rant. I still feel better having gotten some of my frustration out. If you read at least some of it, thanks, I appreciate it. If you didn't, I really do understand, lol.
