Alright, you had a whole 8 hours to bask in the joy of becoming President. It's a bright new day. The honeymoon's over. Now, the hard work of the marriage of the President to the Country begins .We have high expectations. We expect for you to fulfill all of the promises you made during your extended courtship of America, and even more. Now GET TO WORK!
We need JOBS. Around here, all those "Help wanted" signs we used to see have been replaced with "NOT hiring. Don't waste your time or ours by trying to apply." signs. And, unlike under Bush's idea of "job creation", just any $6 per hour, 25 hours per week job won't do. We want GOOD jobs that pay enough to buy a car and pay the mortgage, not just enough to buy a pound of beans and a loaf of bread. Many of us were making $25 per hour, working 40 to 50 hours per week and had health care and retirement benefits when Bush took office. Now the former construction and factory workers are pushing carts at Wal-Mart 30 hours per week for $6 an hour. Just because they changed the way unemployment is counted doesn't mean that the people whose unemployment ran out, or the people who are working part-time for minimum wage because they can't find a real job,or the people who just completely gave up looking aren't still unemployed. U6, the REAL unemployment rate, and the way unemployment was counted during the Great Depression, is now over 11%. That's WORSE than in 1930 and part of 1931, the first 2 years of the Great Depression. The Bush League philosophy that "A job is a job" won't work. Replacing a $1,250 per week full-time job with benefits with a $150 per week part-time job just doesn't work for us anymore.
We need HEALTH CARE. And not a system that costs $1,000 per month for insurance through a HMO whose deductibles and copays will stick us with enough of a bill that we will still have to go bankrupt if we get sick and won't allow us to pick our own doctor or challenge them when they say we really don't need to be treated for congestive heart failure or kidney disease.
We need to feel SAFE. That means killing Bin Laden and breaking the Taliban. Who cares if Iraq is run by the Sunni or Shia? Let them figure it out; they had nothing to do with the bombing of the trade center, and we are much better off buying their oil than making enemies on both sides by taking it. Iraq was never a threat, and our soldiers shouldn't have to die for the sake of Maliki and his propped-up governmnent. The Shia and Sunni have been fighting for over 1,400 years. They won't play nice with each other if we stay there another 100 years. They are a threat to each other, not us. But there are plenty of REAL threats out there. And most of them have one thing in common:
We need to stop depending on imported oil. This really should be our #1 NATIONAL SECURITY concern. That is the reason why we are in the mideast and terrorists worldwide all have a bullseye on us. The $15 billion you're proposing to fix the problem is like spitting in the ocean, when we buy $700 billion dollars' worth of foreign oil each year, mostly from countries that hate us, and whose governments we have to keep propped up in order to keep the oil flowing. It's one of the biggest drains on our economy, too. We are going to spend more than $1 TRILLION dollars on our military this year: $636 billion for the defense department, about $180 billion for the wars, $93.7 billion for the VA, $58.2 billion for Homeland Security; there are a few dozen other programs that cost less than $50 billion each, and I don't feel like listing them all. If we spent half that much on energy independence, we could build enough wind and solar power plants to provide the entire nation's power supply for the next 100 years. Cheap, renewable energy for everyone without polluting the environment vs. trying to maintain a world empire and continue an unpopular war halfway across the world and having to spend $700 billion dollars per year buying oil from countries that hate us, like Iran, Iraq and Venezuela, all just because we need their oil . We really have to think about this one?
We need to fix our INFRASTRUCTURE. Over the last 8 years, TOTAL military spending has increased from $290 billion per year to over $1 TRILLION. Spending all of our money on the
military for 8 years has allowed our roads, bridges, levees and
electrical grid to go to hell. The netherlands have levees that can
withstand a once in 1,000 years hurricane. The levees here can't
withstand a once in 10 years tropical storm. If we want to remain a
world power and an industrial powerhouse, our roads and bridges have to
be world-class, not third-world jokes.
And, speaking of industry, our INDUSTRIAL BASE has been falling apart since Reagan. We need to rebuild our industries; a service economy is a NOT healthy in the long run. We need to build things that we can sell to each other and the rest of the world. If we don't rebuild our industrial base, we won't be a world power in 30 years. We need to encourage factories to return to America instead of encouraging them to outsource their production facilities to the third world.
We need to BREAK UP THE MONOPOLIES that have caused many of the problems in our economy today. Monopolies and oligopolies are the antithesis of free enterprise. Paulson talks about them as "too big to fail". In reality, they are too big to survive. Instead of letting a moron like Paulson convince the sinking banks to buy more banks and make themselves even bigger, we should be breaking any bank that becomes that large into several smaller, competing banks which can't do massive damage to the entire system when they fall. No business should be allowed to become large enough that if it fails, it can destroy the entire economy. The deregulation that allowed banks, insurance companies and investment firms to intermingle may very well force the entire nation into another Great Depression, and maybe even to the brink of bankruptcy. And even massive duopolies like ATT and Verizon, Coke and Pepsi, etc. whose failure wouldn't destroy the entire nation are not good for customers; without competition, there is very little reason to reduce prices and create newer, better products. The consumers are hurt badly by these non-competitive industries.
That's enough for one day. After you fix those, we can get started on education, global warming, the homeless, 1/3 of whom are disabled veterans, the housing and mortgage crisis, banking regulation, raising the minimum wage, stopping illegal immigration and making a fair, responsible path to citizenship for legal immigrants, the drug problem, fixing Bush laws that destroyed our rights, like privacy and free speech, against illegal search and seizure, etc.
By day 3 you might be asking for a recount. I can guarantee that this is going to be one of the hardest jobs in the world, and the country hasn't had this many problems at once in the last 70 years or more, if ever. Bush left you with a real train wreck, at least as bad as that which Hoover passed on to Roosevelt. Let's hope that you are worthy of Roosevelt's mantle as a transformational figure in American history, and capable of taking this country into a bold new direction and facing great challenges with determination and confidence in the future of this great country.