My Opponent Says:

My opponent says we have a financial problem. Put plain, we’re spending too much money, a lot more than we can afford. We need fiscal responsibility.

My opponent says a lot of that money was not even ours. We borrowed that money. Now we have huge debts and the interest alone is a threat to our financial well-being.

My opponent says we need to cut ’Entitlement Spending’ to get our costs in line.

I have given his words a great deal of thought. It’s not that we’re spending too much money. It’s what we’re spending the money on!

It’s not that we borrowed way too much money and took on too much debt, It’s Why we borrowed the money and put ourselves in debt.

Let’s look at those issues. 

First, the billions we borrowed.

• We borrowed the money to finance tax breaks for the rich. If we didn’t have the money, why would we do that? 
• We borrowed that money from China. If we’re so sure they’re an enemy, why would we do that? 
• If China sees us in the same way, why would they loan us the money?
• We borrowed the money to pay for two wars, one of which we are still waging, and for incursions into sovereign nations we call allies. If we had, instead said, “We’re going to pay for these wars by taxing our citizens.”, there would have been no wars. If we had said, “We have to reinstitute the draft.” there would have been no wars, either.

Let’s look at where our money goes. The biggest slice of the spending pie is for the military, where we spend over $600 Billion each year. That’s ten times what our perceived threat, China, spends. Six hundred billion dollars is more than the military budgets of the next eighteen nations combined, most of whom are our friends and allies.

We all agree that we must be a strong nation, that a national defense is necessary. Can we all agree that overspending for armament that we neither need, nor will ever use is wasteful? We can do better!

Let’s look at where we are not spending money and see if there’s a threat to us for that reason.  We do not spend much money on the poor. In fact, we’re cutting the spending we are doing. On the face of it, that’s wrong. It’s immoral to leave children unfed and unclothed, and oftentimes on the street.

Morality aside, it’s also fiscally irresponsible.

When we don’t take care of the least of us,

            Early childhood development is stunted. Children who are poor start school fully two years behind their better cared for peers. They have a three million word deficit in  their vocabulary from the start.

When we don’t take care of the least of us,

• Children go to school hungry, ill prepared to learn. They fall behind once more.  
• Children go to school hungry. They pay less attention in class, they act out more in class,  and they miss more days of school due to illness. These are not discipline issues, they’re easily understood cause and effect relationships.

When we don’t take care of the least of us,

Large numbers of underperforming teenagers drop out of school. They’re unemployable.  In a nation that needs workers with better skills than ever, we are destroying resources in the millions. We’ll pay for that in the long run, in lower competitiveness, in higher social costs.

When we don’t take care of the least of us, we find over time that our place in the world has diminished. We have not taken care of the least of us, and our rankings have, indeed, plummeted, in all categories that matter, including life expectancy, quality of life, and opportunities for the future.

What we don’t invest in now, we pay dearly for later. The people we leave behind now will cost us an estimated $500 Billion in the future. See the connection?

If we look at out military arsenal, we have some 3,000 fighter aircraft and some 3,000 fighter pilots. The last combat pilot to engage the enemy, a junior officer at the time, is now a retired general. That’s a long time ago.

Three thousand planes is as many as China has, and thousands more than the rest of the world’s militaries. Yet. We have on order an additional 2,500. Why is that?

It’s not because the military wants them. Generals have time and time again said we don’t need them. And it’s not just planes they don’t need. It’s tanks and armored personnel carriers. If anything, they could use more drones. They’re more effective, and they’re a darn sight less expensive.

Why is it that we continue to build armament that our own generals don’t want?

It’s because Congress loves it. It keeps congressmen in office. It keeps their constituents working. It’s what is robbing our coffers of monies needed elsewhere –

For infrastructure, to replace the electrical grid systems that are on the verge of failure across the nation. We don’t have to fight and lose to a superior enemy force to be ruined as a nation. We just have to let the grid fail massively.

For infrastructure to replace the arteries over which all our nation’s commerce runs. Our roads and bridges are crumbling and collapsing around us. We don’t have to fight and lose to a superior enemy force to be ruined as a nation. We just have to let the infrastructure collapse under its own weight.

For the price of two jets, we can replace thousands of miles of roads and begin rebuilding failing bridges.

For the price of two jets,  we can rebuild crumbling schools, give better pay for teachers, invest in books and tablets, and expand wireless internet to all areas of the state.

We don’t have to fight and lose to a superior enemy force to be ruined as a nation. We just have to let the education systems that made us strong deteriorate around us, then let the vultures pick and choose who they want to educate, and take huge chunks of our tax dollars for profit – dollars that will never benefit the nation that needs to do better.

For the price of one jet we can feed 17,500 children for a year, and in the process advance their early childhood development, the first step in creating the nation we all want.

When we feed our children wholesome meals, we advance our nation. When we nurture our children, our fortunes improve. When we lovingly guide all our children our society strengthens and we become better for it.

Last, to his statements on ‘Entitlement spending’.  By and large, the spending he refers to implies that people feel, wrongly in his view, entitled, to Social Security and Medicare, like it’s owed them.

The nation’s seniors get these services because they are entitled to them, They paid in those dollars over their entire working lives for the express purpose of having a small nest egg for their senior years.  They are entitled.

As for the costs, it is not the costs of these programs that threaten our nation. It is the costs of wars, tax breaks for the non-job creators, the draining of government revenues, taxpayers’ dollars by corporations who are strategically keeping their profits off shore rather than pay their fair share of taxes, the draining of government revenues through unnecessary tax breaks that are the real causes of our fiscal problems.

The problem is not that we’re not taking in enough money. It’s that our legislators are preventing your government from receiving revenues from tax dodgers, in return for campaign contributions to keep them in office.

There are solutions to all this. Happily, they’re available and, while they’ll take time, they are easy to implement. We just have to agree that we want them.

We have to agree that rebuilding at home is better than incursions abroad. We have to agree that new roads and bridges, new electrical grids take priority over bombs and planes.

We have to agree that an educated population is preferable to a nation woefully overburdened with uneducated, unemployed, underutilized human assets.

We have to believe that we can be the nation we keep telling ourselves One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All.

Are we ready?