What annoys me most about the presidential campaign is how every candidate and surrogate dumbs down everything to a few campaign talking points. The very intelligent candidates and highly accomplished surrogates never answer real questions and always choose to revert to their stump speeches. That would be acceptable in a Third World nation with a literacy rate of 50%, but not in America. The dumbing down is an insult to the highly engaged and worried public that is looking for solutions.
I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....
Comments