The Stench Is Strong

The first thing I read this morning was the sad story of the shooting in Wisconsin and I decided that maybe I should read something else since it was so depressing. That was how I discovered that George Will had gone off his rocker once again. Like most people who don't have to worry where their next meal, much less their next check, is coming from, he displays how extremely capable he is at playing with numbers and not reality.

In the 102 quarters since Ronald Reagan's tax cuts went into effect more than 25 years ago, there have been 96 quarters of growth. Since the Bush tax cuts and the current expansion began, the economy's growth has averaged 3 percent per quarter, and more than 8 million jobs have been created. The deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product is below the post-World War II average.

Oh George, please stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes. In the eighties I made more money than I do now and I had benefits. In the nineties I made minimum wage while studying for my Masters and was able to live on it. Not very well but I could survive and still go to the movies. Now I have said Masters and make more than minimum wage but I can't pay all my bills and I certainly can't attend the movies because the price of the ticket is ridiculously high. I can honestly say that the only thing that has increased in the last 25 years is my level of debt and my inability to pay it off. It isn't that I'm still paying for a meal that I ate in 1989, I'm paying for the schooling that was supposed to improve my ability to earn money but is instead an anchor pulling me to the bottom of the debt sea.

By the way, after 26 weeks people drop off the unemployment rolls but that doesn't mean they are employed. Eight million new jobs. Wow, I wonder where, Wal-Mart or Burger King perhaps? I can drive around Silicon Valley and find continuous blocks of business centers that are standing empty with large For Lease signs on every corner. We have skills but the jobs got outsourced to India and China. A radiologist has plenty of skills that are needed, but now the hospitals can and do have someone from India look at the X-rays over the internet, so that expensive education is more of a liability than a help because the student loans still have to be paid off.

Extreme poverty has increased in this country but he conveniently doesn't mention that. Or that food insecurity thing either. Of course some fine upstanding Republican will say that if they would get an education and apply themselves they wouldn't be in that position and to that I say, get a grip on reality. How can one get an education, especially a well-rounded one, if the budgets are so tight that the schools can't afford to buy modern equipment to train the students for the future? How can one get an education if you are working two jobs that replaced the one that used to pay the bills, to keep food on the table and a roof over your head? It is so easy to sit in an ivory tower and think you and your friends have all the answers because your privileged world looks so perfect, that you are so much better than everyone else. Paris tried that and look where she ended up.

Oh and by the way, John Edwards isn't unemployed, he has a full-time job running for President and unlike most of the other candidates the government isn't paying him a salary while he campaigns. Which is quite different from a previous VP candidate, since he didn't run for a Senate seat at the same time he ran for a higher office, but hey that's a positive and you can't mention anything like that, can you?

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