I am disappointed in the government. The expectations I had exceeded what the government has been able to deliver. Mind you, I expected no miracle cure for the economic woes; it took eight years to get into the mess that we’re in now, and it might well take even longer to restore things back to normal. However, when I look at everything that was promised during the last election, I have to say that the progress has not been impressive.
The economy is in shambles. The unemployment rate is in the double digits. The ill-fated health care bill looks as if it will be little more than a blip in American history. Yet the government keeps going down the same path that it did during the previous eight years with deficit spending and respect to the wars dragging on. Where’s the change in that? It looks like more of the same to me, and there’s no reason to be cheery about it.
The old saying “actions speak louder than words” is applicable in this case. Notice, however, that I’m not laying the blame on Obama. I’m specifically targeting the government as a whole, not the president who is but one part of it. Without the support of Congress, the president cannot get very far with any of his plans. I do take issue with his unsuccessful attempts at bipartisanship; but just how much support can he expect when one of the best-known Republican spokespersons explicitly stated that he wanted Obama to fail? The result has been a stalemate in which the minority actually controls the majority, a rather warped situation in itself.
Insofar as the health care bill goes, by now it’s scarcely recognizable as the same bill that was originally to be presented to Congress. And small wonder: a lot of effort was made to placate the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry, not the people. The result has been a bill that only empowers insurance companies even more by making health insurance mandatory, totally ignoring the prohibitively high cost that all too many insurance policies have. Just what are the chances of any real reform happening? I see it as another opportunity missed.
In the midst of all this, Congress just authorized borrowing another $1.9 trillion. The national debt was already high enough without this move, but that didn’t seem to concern the government at all. This time, the blame falls squarely on the Democratic Party, which motioned to take this step. Allegedly, if Congress failed to raise the borrowing limit, the impact on global capital markets could spell disaster. However, not all Democrats supported this motion and understandably so. How this translates into its impact on the public cannot be good, especially for the homeless, who are routinely given lowest priority in any government effort.
This does not sound to me like a government “by the people for the people.” The people in government clearly are not worried about the same things as the general public. No surprise: we are continually served up candidates backed by big money, so the chances that they will be able to identify with the struggling lower or middle class are remote in-deed. As much as I do not like to get involved in political issues, I do not see how the public can afford to be uninvolved now. The question is: what happens next? We elected a government with the hopes that it would fix the problems, not sustain them. This doesn’t seem to be happening.
