Good Foundations
“Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.” I Tim 6: 17-19
Sorry for being away for a while. I was on vacation in Northern Michigan at a spot that didn’t have very good Internet or phone service.
I, like everyone else, was shocked and saddened by the highway bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
I had an opportunity in my “disconnected” state to wonder how something like this could have happened.
Isn’t it the job of government to build and maintain our infrastructure for the common good?
So what happened to government that built this infrastructure?
I’m sad to say that the government of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon is gone. Those were the administrations when our current national infrastructure was built. When we made the commitment to freedom and opportunity for all citizens. When we made the investments in world-class public education for everyone. When we went to the moon. When we promised our kids cleaner air and water. When we first began to discuss the concept of energy independence and publicly financed elections.
When you think about what this administration has accomplished in it’s past seven years, it’s disturbing. Instead of making something, they have spent most of their time “unmaking” what has gone before. They aren’t alone. We’ve not only let them do it, we’ve encouraged them. We now have a check book government which came into office promising to make government smaller, but in fact has turned out to be the most fiscally irresponsible in history.
Here are just a couple of examples
Estimates put the cost of fixing all of the nations bridges at $9.4B/year for twenty years. Sounds like a lot? The last five years Congress approved and the President signed an estimated $55B in what are euphemistically called earmarks. That’s just another name our elected representatives use for stealing from the public treasury to benefit friends and relatives.
Worse than that, we have already spent $500B on the war in Iraq and estimates are that it will cost us another $500B before we are out.
Got your attention yet?
Here’s a final one for you to think about.
The President’s tax cuts for the rich are costing the country roughly $200B per year. Yup, that’s right. The money to fix all of the bridges in the country was given away last year to the richest people in this country in the form of reduced taxes.
Fixing bridges isn’t sexy. Paying teachers a living wage isn’t what conservatives like to talk about. Neo-cons don’t care if poor kids go to college. They feel poverty is the appropriate punishment for some past sin. Trying to be a good steward of the environment is portrayed as just another example of soft-headed liberalism.
The governments that our parents elected did care. They gave us the best public education system in the world and we broke it. They gave us the best transportation system in the world and we’ve allowed it to decay. They gave us a country that could put a man on the moon and we outsourced that skill to India and China. They gave us a country that knew how to heal the wounds of segregation and war. A country dedicated to world peace. We turned it into a country more deeply divided than any time in recent memory. A country which started a war that it now does not know how to finish.
Clearly we have some work to do.