My philosophies:
When a politician tells you that “The American people are smarter than that,” it is probably preceding or following a lie or deception. After all, no con man tells you how dumb you are while trying to swindle you. It is often easier and more advantageous to tell you that you are smart but leave you ignorant than to actually smarten you up.
Beware any politician who tells you that he will fix major problems using “simple, common sense solutions” unless they are able to specify what they want to do. If the answer was truly simple and common sense, it likely would have been fixed a long time ago. Somebody who says complicated problems can be fixed simply either doesn’t understand the problem or has no intention of actually trying to solving it.
A quality of a president is not based not based primarily upon his own abilities. A quality of a president is primarily based upon his ability to surround himself with the best possible advisers and delegates. Just important is the ability to find and purge those who are incompetent or dishonest. They say a man can be judged based upon the company he keeps, I say the same thing can often be applied to the man in the White House.
Your religious or moral objection to an issue is not a reason for the government to not spend money on it. Truth be told, your personal moral or religious objection is just about the weakest argument one could give. This nation has religious pacifists so does that mean we can’t spend money on wars or the military? There are religions that oppose modern medicine, does that mean we have to end Medicare and Medicaid? Does it mean that the government cannot help pay to find cures for cancer or AIDS? This is a large, diverse nation full of young Earth creationists, flat-Earth believers, and geocentrists; so I guess this means NASA has to go. If you look hard or long enough you can find religious and/or moral opposition to just about everything so using that as your political compass will leave you spinning in circles.
The source of America’s strength is not based solely (or even primarily) on independent thinking; it is using good ideas when we come up with them and stealing good ideas when others do that made us great. Refusal to accept or consider a good idea simply because it came from a foreign source is merely the sign of insecurity, ineptitude, and general stubbornness. If some of the leaders of today were around in the eighteenth century I can already hear them decrying democracy as "the failed policies of Europe and ancient Greece."
An economy, at its heart is the movement of money. Or to put it another way, the redistribution of wealth. When you receive your paycheck from work, money is being redistributed from your employer to you. When you buy things with that money, wealth is being redistributed from you to the company(s) you bought them from. Anybody who tells you that they want to repair, restore, or fix the economy but opposes redistribution of wealth doesn’t know what he’s talking about or is hoping you do not.
Education and infrastructure is every bit as vital to national security as is the military. Military uses the weapons of today, education creates the weapons of tomorrow, and infrastructure creates both.
Politicians who claim that government cannot create jobs are wrong. Quite often when they say this they either are running for or holding political office; you know, a job created by the government. Many of these individuals who were around in the 1990s spent their time complaining that the US Government was the largest single employer in the country. Not only is the government capable of creating jobs, but it has national reach, infrastructure, and capacity which make it one of the most efficient and reliable job-creating entities that exist today if it is allowed to do its job.
There is no such thing as a self-made millionaire. Every wealthy person has had to rely upon customers and employees to aid him in his rise as well as infrastructure largely built through public means. Roads, telephone wires, airports, bridges, education and whatnot contribute greatly to the success of every business and every businessperson. If a company’s potential customers don’t have the capacity or access to purchase what you’re selling, you won’t have any sales. If you have no sales, you have no business.
On the origins of the financial crisis: our business-minded leaders, the rational, smarter and more knowledgeable than us decided to drive down wages in an attempt to make products cheaper. With ever lowering customer purchasing capacity they decided to expand credit availability. This created a climate of falling wages and greater debt slowly building over time, anybody in business who can’t figure out how this is not a sustainable model is an idiot and not fit to handle my cat's morning feeding let alone my life savings.
