The Failure of Capitalism Means American Lives
Death and Taxes
Let’s chat about our current issue with taxation. Americans have a hatred of taxation. It is so deep that we compare it to death as a boding inevitability (death and taxes). We dislike it so much that we would rather continue to pay nearly twice to private corporations for less than what can be achieved democratically, as outlined in this article by Dr. Ed Weisbart. Healthcare is the blindingly appropriate example here. But over time Americans and American companies (if that’s a thing)have been paying less taxes.
I have a mantra, if the Heritage foundation loves it, it’s probably a bad thing. The below graphic is from Heritage.com.
Where the graphic says “savings,” I see “crappy schools, or shitty roads.” We aren’t saving anything by sapping every dime from a crumbling infrastructure. To further drive my point home about public spending on infrastructure, I found another sexy graph.
The way I read the graph is that we are building less and less new stuff. We are just paying for the existing system. So what Heritage calls savings I call out-dated and inefficient. Why don’t we have bullet trains in America? I think it’s because our social system is massively based on money and class. If you can drive a nice car on private roads, why would you want to pay for the poor’s fast and efficient transportation? I know that there are other issues that alter the high speed rail discussion, but this is America god dammit, figure it out.
Some issues are able to break through the class barrier, enter COVID-19.
Question:
A wealthy business-guy travels to Italy for a ski trip on March 1st. He spends more than a bartender makes in a few months on lift tickets, drinks, food and maybe a prostitute. He then returns home with COVID-19 and stops for a drink at a bar. Despite the bartender’s best efforts in cleanliness she contracts the bug and has to stay home for a month. How hard is she allowed to slap that well off business guy?
What I’m pointing out is that viruses are an individual’s problem that affects a community. So we must have a community answer for these problems.
We have a bed problem in America, hospital beds as outlined very well in this article in USA Today. (pardon my links, I can’t do all the work for you). My favorite part is when Dr Kaplan says “We are being creative.”
If we were prepared, we wouldn’t need to be as creative when it comes to the health of millions of Americans.
As mentioned above, Americans would rather spend twice to private companies than what we could spend democratically on healthcare. This distrust of the spending habits of a government that is owned by the people has led to a profit driven industry to forsake preparedness in exchange for profits. Socialists like myself and Bernie Sanders have been pointing this out for a while now (Bernie longer).
We knew a bug was coming. COVID-19 isn’t even that bad considering how terrible a viral outbreak can get and our lack of safeguards is tearing us apart. If we make it through this one, will we learn from our mistakes? Or will the next deadly pathogen tear our nation apart?
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