It would be comforting, in my opinion, if we could actually see some reform in our political structure.
Reading the paper makes me crazy. Here we have a president, an overwhelming popular choice, having to woo the members of congress to pass real reform. We need to change and reform health care. Anyone who doubts that only has to look at the projections that show that a big part of our GDP will have to support an every increasing burden of medical costs, especially as the baby boomers move into their fifties and sixties.
Medical reform is just one topic, but the question here is why can’t the congress make the tough choices that are truly good for America. Could it be the special interest groups? Could it be the infatuation with power and prestige? And isn’t it obvious that the level of our business ethics have tumbled because of our fixation for profit.
Deferred maintenance in a peanut plant costs some Americans their lives as they eat peanut butter, of all things. Lead paint is found on children’s toys made over seas. The the reason for both is because our business owners have needed to squeeze every last dime from their costs to maximize profit.
The culprit here is us. Perhaps the financial instrument most responsible for our current financial crisis isn’t credit swaps, or bundling home loans, it’s our 401 K plans.
Because of the insatiable desire and demand for more retirement income, so that we can continue a lifestyle of consumption, in our senior years, we now follow our stocks as our parents followed their favorite baseball team. We try to position our investments so that we can out maneuver the other guy. We want to sell high and buy low, but the truth is, we seldom do that. Most of the time we buy high and sell low, because we have little patience and panic when things seem to be coming apart.
We are short sighted and have not the time or the temperament to do a good job of managing our portfolio. We engage our brokers but are they really helping us or their bottom line?
And so, because we crave instant gratification, we elect clones of our own twisted desires and appetites, and give them the impossible task of doing the right thing, no matter how unpopular, while also getting along by going along, and all the while having them accept money for their campaign war chests from those who did not elect them, but own them.
We need change and morality. We need to look in the mirror and then tell our elected officials at every level that we have to start paying as we go, and looking further than the next election to plan for the future. It would help if all of us would start accepting delayed gratification too, but perhaps that’s too much to expect.
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