I am sick to death of all the "useful" applications and deployments of US Military assets to support corporate interests around the globe but being told the cupboard is bare when its time to fix things here at home.
Multinational corporations should be put on notice:
1) Your tax rates are going up, and if you fight the corporate tax rate by stashing funds off-shore, refusing to repatriate profits for tax purposes or setting up dummy corporations to shelter money, the effective rate on corporate board and executive pay will be raised in equal proportion to you chicanery. You are going to pay and you are going to carry your own weight once more. The profits you earn with a huge assist from the American tax payer via infrastructure or military influence has a price tag, and you have been measured and found wanting in your contributions. Campaign donations and super-PACs do not count.
2) The purpose of the United States of America federal government is to: form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It says so at the very beginning of the founding governmental document, the Constitution of the United States of America. Any purposes that divert funding from those stated goals in favor of enriching the favored few are going away.
3) One of the fundamental truisms in human history is that as a population becomes better educated, they enjoy a higher standard of living and a more secure lifestyle as well. They hold their leaders accountable (which explains the outcries of 'unicorn' hurled at Bernie Sanders) and they are less easily deluded by demagogues and rouges. They are also less prone to superstition or religious fervor and are much harder to control....aka, they are FREE!
College education for those who desire it (and can do the work to attain a degree) is an essential need for the future of this nation; but I would not stop there. I would push further to mandate that all citizens finish high school through grade 12 via graduation or GED; and that anyone not enrolled in college, engaged in a family business or entrepreneurial venture or in military or civilian service (through an expanded Peace Corp or re-born WPA) be enrolled in a trade school to learn a skill in their chosen field or practice.
We need engineers and scientists and the kinds of educated and inventive minds that universities create; but we also need electricians, plumbers, construction workers and maintenance crews that can lead the building, expansion and maintenance of a true 21st century infrastructure based on sustainable energy and new ways of building and designing things.
We cannot afford to produce generations idiots or uneducated, unemployable drains on society. In a nation blessed with the resources and institutions of the USA, and facing the breadth of the challenges from an aging population and climate change in a flatter and smaller than ever global economy, to allow any less is suicide.
We need to pull our collective head out of our ample national ass and start demanding that politicians and the government work for us and that we are no longer going to allow it to work against us with impunity!
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