100% of us.
To keep our country safe, we depend on the best men and women soldiers in the world.
To keep our homes and streets and roads safe, we depend on our police and fire and highway patrols.
To keep our money safe, we depend on the FDIC, the Federal Reserve the U.S. Treasury and other federal agencies who maintain safeguards and rules that keep our financial systems running smoothly.
To keep our food safe and well supplied, we depend on food inspectors at the Department of Agriculture and U.S. Customs and Departments of Commerce and Transportation. The national weather service and EPA also make a difference in the water we drink and the food we eat.
To keep our health as safe as possible, the Center For Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health play major roles in monitoring and recommending our responses to health epidemics like flu and polio, HIV and new strains of bacteria. We all depend daily on their continued research and response to these health issues as well as new treatments for illnesses.
To keep our public and private sectors functioning well, we depend on a world class educational system, from pre-school, to the finest graduate programs imaginable. We could not begin to compete or properly staff the above government agencies without the best education possible.
There are many, more specific examples of how, every day, all of us, 100% of us, depend on the government.
An exhaustive list of ALL the ways government benefits its citizens, from favorable tax breaks for investors and well-connected corporate interests (see F-35 and big Pharma) – an exhaustive list that honestly includes the wealthiest beneficiaries of governmental largesse would clearly demonstrate that rather than some specious 47% of Americans dependent on the government, that the number is actually much, much closer to 100%.
And the 100% truth deserves to be spoken for all to hear.
And what we all can agree on is that we want the government that we depend on to be as successful as it can possibly be.
To want that success fairly, for 100% of Americans, ought to be the common ground we all seek in our relations with one another.
It's an ideal, to be sure, but our country was founded on them...