Once away from the daily news and blogosphere frenzy, what
becomes clear is that we as a nation are running without adult supervision.
Trump is certainly a loose cannon, but those who want to unseat him have
nothing better to offer. Indeed, in retrospect it seems to me Hillary and her
inner circle, with their elitist contempt for much of the nation and obvious
incompetence, would have been just as much a disaster, though in different
ways. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to have any idea of what
is really important to the nation and the world, and politicians in both
parties are so engrossed in bitter trench warfare over trivial issues and
trying to score points against each other that they are largely oblivious to
the serious issues the nation faces.
What are these serious issues? Well, the outsized and still growing national
debt is one, as I outlined in a series of posts some weeks ago. Not only can we
not afford new programs like single-payer healthcare or free college tuition
for everyone, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren propose, we can’t even
afford the programs and the government services we have now. There is no way we
can keep adding another half-trillion dollars every year to the national debt;
there will be an accounting someday, and it won’t be pleasant for us.
The disruption of the American work force by
ever-encroaching automation is another serious issue that is largely being
ignored. Trump may manage to bring some manufacturing back to the US, but such
factories these days will employ only a few very highly trained people to tend and
program the robots – they certainly won’t provide the mass of well-paying middle-skill
assembly line jobs that factories used to provide, nor even very many of the
white collar managerial jobs that used to exist. A political class that was
paying attention would understand that this is a serious issue that could
completely destabilize the nation – indeed, has already begun to destabilize
politics - if not attended to.
And a related issue is the increasing income inequality in
the nation, as the top 5% get richer and richer while the rest of the nation
loses ground economically. This is not sustainable in the long run – the resentment
is already obvious and it will get far worse if the issue isn’t addressed.
Yet another related issue is that of education – especially the
quality of K-12 education across the nation. We have an outmoded educational
system, still geared toward producing 19th century factory workers. In today’s more technological,
decentralized, automated world that produces a woefully inadequately prepared
work force. So far neither party has the vaguest idea how to approach this
problem beyond impractical ideas like free college for everyone (including all
those people who never learned basic reading, math and study skills in grade
school and high school?). And what few innovating ideas exist are being steadfastly
opposed by politically powerful teacher’s unions.
There are more – a few minutes thought and the reader can probably
add another dozen such serious issues to the list. Meanwhile Congress spends its time investigating
whether there was Russian hacking (duh!) and politicians argue about where
transgender people can or can’t go to pee! Talk about rearranging the deck chairs
on the Titanic……..
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