Actually, I’m in. You’ve registered. I’ll listen. I’ll attempt reasoned discourse.
My experience in dealing with self-declared *political* liberals is that I get very little in the way of principled positions, or fact-based arguments. My experience is that political liberals are among the most intolerant and irrational among our truly diverse populations. So, having written all that ...
So, I’ll give you your shot. I am ready to listen.
Tell me,
(1) what are the top three ‘changes’ you expect from an Obama administration, and
(1.1) what are the indicators of success of those top three changes, and
(1.2) what is the price to be paid of NOT making those changes, and
(1.3) what is the price to be paid to MAKE those changes, and paid by whom?
And
(2) What, SPECIFICALLY will be better for you because Barack Obama is going to be our PResident?
I’m afraid you expect a little too much inconvenience from someone who just helped elect The Oaf of Office.
Well, you sort of missed my point in that I’m not real wild about Obama, but you are by far the most open-minded person to post, so I’ll go along with you. Also, I’ve met some of those “liberals” (they’re all over Kos, unfortunately), and I dislike them as much as you could hope for.
1. The top 3 changes in an Obama administration:
A. Multilateral foreign policy
B. Fiscal conservatism
C. Pragmatic approaches to problems
1.1 Indicators of success
A. A multilateral foreign policy will improve our ability to combat terrorism and human rights violations worldwide. For example, I believe that our refusal to have direct talks with Iran and North Korea has hampered our ability to negotiate an end to their nuclear weapons programs, while alienating much of the respective regions, making it harder for us to garner support against Al Qaeda.
B. Like it or not, a policy of consistently spending more than we accrue in taxes, for whatever reason, is crippling our nation. With a national debt of over ten trillion dollars, just paying the interest is costing us more than all entitlement programs put together. The current tax rate for the highest earners in the country is less than 35%, when is was over 90% under Eisenhower, just 50 years ago.
C. A pragmatic approach to problem solving means looking at results, not just ideology. A good example is abstinence-only education; granted that, ideally, our children would all wait until they get married to have sex, but our parents didn’t, we didn’t, and they won’t. Safe-sex education prevents unwanted pregnancies, reducing the number of abortions. Isn’t that the ultimate goal?
1.2 Consequences of not changing
A. This amounts to continuing our policy of dictating to other nations. I would suggest that walking into someone’s home and telling them how to live is not a good way to make friends, and a more humble approach might yield better results.
B. Continuing our current spending habits will eventually result in the interest due on the national debt exceeding the national budget. In other countries, they call this “bankruptcy”.
C. Continuing to base decisions on ideology rather than reason will simply exacerbate all of our current problems. Science is neither conservative nor liberal, it is science. If it tells us that something isn’t working, maybe we should consider alternatives.
1.3 Price to make changes
A. I’m not exactly sure who would suffer for this. To me, it seems like common sense, a return to Nixon’s detente, a policy that served us very well.
B. The price of fiscal policy is a limit on maximum profits. There are two sides to this: on the one hand, it inherently limits growth, but at the same time, unlimited growth often exceeds the capacity of the market to accommodate it, as we are seeing now. In effect, rich people are going to pay higher taxes. That includes me, and that’s OK, because it’s the only way it’s going to work. To put it another way, it’s cheaper for me to feed the guy down the street than to build a prison and pay someone to keep him locked up.
C. The people who won’t like pragmatic approaches will be those who are deeply religious and feel the need to impose their beliefs on others, including me. While I respect your right to believe whatever you want, that respect has to go both ways. I won’t impose on your beliefs as long as you leave mine alone.
2. For me, health care is a big issue; to me, record profits for insurers and drug companies while millions are losing their houses and going bankrupt over medical bills speaks to an injustice that must be addressed, and while I don’t like Obama’s health care plan in its entirety, I believe that he will improve things.
As an example, my asthma inhaler recently went from $7 to $42 dollars, because they had to change from CFC propellant to non-ozone-destroying chemicals. You might blame the environmentalists, if they hadn’t had 30 years to make the change, which required minimal retooling and cost, and they waited until the last minute to keep the patent longer. This is the 7th most prescribed medicine in the country that the price increased by 600%, for no other reason than to improve corporate profits.
Sorry for going on so long, but you asked a lot of questions.