I might screw around a little but I am not a whore

I first heard this expression while on recruiting duty decades ago. The principle still applies to the quasi-business world, and politics, where decisions are seldom black and white. Some have or have done or will do with “ a load of compromising on the road to their horizon”.

Perhaps this is how we may muddle out of our present financial and political mess in the USA, sooner rather than later. Most will think, and some may say, we have had a bout of poor leaders in the last few decades. This may be unfair given hindsight, but that is how things are thought of today. And we voters have been selecting fellow Americans at all levels during these decades, local, state, and federal. And some have been better than others, depending on the vagaries like locales, voters, education of the electorate, and social standards. Now many suggest our present candidates for federal President, all volunteers by the way, are a weak group compared to some earlier standard they think of. Like beauty, standards are in the eye of the beholder. My standards include saneness, basic honesty in explaining things to the electorate, and experience. Intelligence and education comes in a poor second, especially given another old time expression of “educated fools”.

All this leads into a concern, an “antenna” going off, that today’s financial (and political) problems are being addressed by a combination of Americans, and some non-Americans, who do not have our best interests in their mind. They for many reasons are still status quo. Mostly, it is Americans using their education and politics trying to solve the recent decades of problems using 1920’s history and lessons learned. That today’s America and things are different from the 1920’s is obvious to most, and so should our solutions be. Again, some “antennas” say this is not what is happening.

Most hope the present efforts to rescue Wall Street and the whole crowd succeed. Historically, the efforts are to keep a recession from becoming a full blown depression, and in this theory this benefits us all. That some political efforts are also on going to make sure if all this fails, then we taxpayers assume the losses with our taxpayer monies, is just another reminder that the status quo is alive and well. Some just don’t get it!

America is still full of political ostriches that put their head in the sand as too many ancestors have been doing for decades. At all levels, local, state, and federal, politicians have been getting elected for decades by we voters who support more and more retirement and medical benefits for their government employees. As a voter and taxpayer, it is difficult to find a source that “compiles” all these promises to sum up the implications, locally. Well, the implications are too often locally enormous, as in make the present Wall Street problems seem minor, or so the “antenna” senses. And all this, including the worst case local governments and their politicians and their voters, may drag us down in the end.

There are practical solutions still available that do not need another band-aid form of government. One is to make all governments from schools boards to cities to counties to states to the federal government have to conform to basic business accounting practices. This idea should show the awesome compiled implications of what we have wrought. Then at least, we have more information to vote on, and what we want to do about the problem. Right now it is too try increase taxes, reduce benefits (promises), or default. Among these terrible choices, can we voters have a voice. In this is our future.

There is a Plan B, called the status quo. It will probably pull apart our American social fabric, and much of the World’s social fabric when many begin starving in this Plan B. Already there are reports this is going on in the rest of the world, and our unelected environmentalists who have led to starving for the most idealistic and altruistic reasons will now come to the Court of Humanity.

None of this is by accident. It is all on purpose. How typically human.