Submitted For Your Perusal....

I wrote this editorial last year.... As you can see, Americans stood up to the plate and hit it out of the park for change, and for a better way to the future....
Only 376 Shopping Days Until A New House and Senate
For the politicians who wage it, war has proven to be all too easy. You don’t have to figure out how to pay for a war. The public seems willing to accept deficits for such fights for freedom, even if a large portion of the deficit was caused by other administration policies unrelated to the war. For those same politicians; healthcare reform seems too daunting a task for them to seriously consider. Ironically, work on healthcare reform and so many other things suffers because the Iraq war is not costly to these politicians, even when they avoided their own generation’s call to battle. As many of them did their best to avoid active duty in Vietnam, so to will you rarely find their children going off to fight these wars today. Our officials wage war with faulty intelligence, poor planning and false claims of last resort, and before finishing the job in Afghanistan, but come election time have so far found they are not held accountable. They have also not been held accountable for anything else they have failed to do. Ineffectual, divisive, misleading government isn’t new. It just seems so much worse in the last five years that I’ve come to think of this as the “DoNothing”* Congress, Senate and Administration. It’s not that they don’t do anything, it’s just that so little of it is meaningful. They didn’t even attempt to tackle terrorism until it was thrust upon them on9/11. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had the means to create a government that remembers it is made up of civil servants---elected officials that actually know they work for We—The People? Actually, the architects of our great nation gave us the tools 229 years ago but someone has to remind our politicians today. Maybe it’s time we show them they will be held accountable daily for doing a good job just like the rest of us are in our own careers. Imagine what would happen if we could tell them that they would be fired in a week if they didn’t create a solution for affordable healthcare. But we can’t. We can only fire them come election day. Then we can vote in responsible people who not only say we can accomplish anything, but are also ready to try and prove it. Reform healthcare? Instead of talking aboutMedical Savings Accounts and other methods of simply shifting more of the burden upon the backs of the beleaguered middle class we should seriously start working on fair and meaningful reform. That requires figuring out both how to do it and how to pay for it. Expand coverage by giving tax credits to businesses that put in health plans and add a couple of points of taxes to those that are profitable but don’t put in plans. Help taxpayers afford what they are already doing by reducing the 7.5% threshold for taking medical itemized deductions on your tax return to the2% applicable to other kinds of deductions. Pay for it by reinstating the estate tax that is not really adouble taxation, but rather a first tax on years and years of untaxed capital growth. Help provide coverage and increase competition by giving incentives and assistance for affordable health plans to be tested and offered by municipal hospitals and non-profit medical centers, for the uninsured, that can do the job that the insurance companies have abdicated. Pay for it with a small increase in the long term capital gains rate or rolling back the most generous tax cuts for the top 10%. There will also need to be changes to Pharmaceutical Marketing, Physician Management and a host of others too numerous to go into here. I am not saying every change will be offset dollar for dollar, but it’s a start. We have seen hundreds of billions in deficit spending over the years for arms build ups, wars and tax cuts. We certainly can spend some money to achieve affordable healthcare for everyone. Shouldn’t government work like our own lives do; responsibly, sharing the burdens and the rewards for the good of the entire nation? Instead we have this insular culture that bred an administration that’s forgotten who it works for, and that We, The People, are watching. With a big election day approaching only 376 days away...don't just send a message with your vote…send in the right people to do what needs to be done.
Now of course, it remains to be seen if America has voted in the right people. But they have attempted a start for change...and that is a good direction to be travelling in.... *I would like to point out that i termed this a "do nothing" congress before all those other pundits jumped on the bandwagon!