Reaching Out

Yes, Senator Kerry lost, but its not the end of the world.

Iraq is not as bad as the mainstream media portrays. Its not a cakewalk, sure. What we’re doing in Iraq is tough. Its one of the toughest things we’ve ever done as a country. Senator Kerry was absolutely right that we need an honest assessment of where we’re at in Iraq. To do that, we need not just more forthrightness from President Bush, but we need the mainstream media to abandon its “local news” style coverage of Iraq. We need real coverage in Iraq. I’m not one of those people that thinks that the media has a liberal bias, but rather that they have a conflict bias. I’ve had it confirmed by professional journalists that they skew news to make it more interesting. Unfortunately, that’s a disaster when we’re trying to do something as complex as the war on terror.

So despite what you may have read:

• President Bush didn’t plan to invade Iraq all along, he was boxed in by the perfidy of the UN and France. [*]
• Iraq will not be a quagmire, just expensive and hard. Expensive is relative, given that 9/11 cost about 1,000 billion…
• There won’t be a draft, but perhaps “give us 4 years and we’ll pay for college”. Drafting someone for 2 years would give us the wrong type of soldiers for today’s wars. We need policemen, not tanks these days.
• Bush is not the worst environmental president ever. Environmental policy is tough, and its part of the big picture along with the economy, energy policy, trade policy and foreign policy.
• Bush is not selling out America to the Energy companies. Energy costs are higher mostly because China has become much more affluent, and Halliburton was limited to between 2-7% profit on their no-bid contracts by law. Halliburton is a construction company more then an energy company anyways.

Moving along, Health Care is going to continue to be a tough issue. President Bush’s plan is a step in the right direction, but we have a ways to go. Some things to resolve going forward are:

• Making Health Insurance available to small businesses.
• Equalizing billing. It makes no sense for a cash customer to pay 3 times what an HMO customer pays.
• Streamlining paperwork.
• Bringing cost back into the loop. One of the reasons that health care costs so much is that there’s nothing to make it cheaper, because people don’t pay their health care bill themselves. If you do pay the bill yourself, you get screwed because the HMOs have succeeded in shifting costs from their bill to yours.
• Medical Malpractice has become a huge problem for doctors. $100,000/year for an insurance policy?
• Medical Malpractice lawsuits wouldn’t be necessary if the doctors did a better job of policing themselves.

As you can see, there’s lots of work to be done there.

Social Security is another issue:

• When 70% of the people are retired, and only 30% working, we have a problem.
• When Social Security started out, it was a 2% tax, now its a 15% tax. If we took that 15% that everyone pays and simply forced them to put it in T-Bills, most people would come out ahead of Social Security, even though Social Security does the same thing.
• Big Business employees have access to a 401K plan of $50K max, Small Business employees have access to an IRA of $3K max. That makes no sense.
• Most people change employers 3 times, changing retirement and health care plans when you change jobs makes no sense in the modern workplace.

Let’s work together on these tough issues, instead of worrying about an election that’s over.