May 23, 2010
By Herman Cain
Most people are able to avoid committing all of the seven deadly sins (vanity, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth), but our government has managed to solve none of the seven deadly problems that could destroy the future of our nation – health care costs, financial reform, Social Security, Medicare, national debt, immigration law and lack of real job growth.
These seven deadly domestic problems have three things in common. First, inept politicians and bureaucrats have consistently worked on the wrong problem. They have put political agendas and political pandering ahead of what’s best for the people.
Much has been written about the fact that we do not have a health care crisis in America, we have a health care cost crisis. The recently passed health care deform legislation does not address the real problem, nor will it bring down the deficit as we have been falsely told. The right steps to solve the right problem have also been written about extensively, but those steps would get in the way of the all-out power grab we are seeing from this administration and the Democrats in Congress.
Congress is about to pass financial reform legislation, which will also be another “deform” bill, because it establishes another un-needed oversight bureaucracy to oversee all financial institutions except Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One would think that the two entities that were the catalyst for the financial meltdown over a year ago would be included in any so-called reform legislation even if the new bureaucracy is un-needed. But, we are not supposed to think.
Secondly, these same politicians provide lip service to the least informed voters who usually continue to re-elect them, while they let the problems grow for decades. The Social Security and Medicare systems are in desperate need of modernization. This could start with the novel idea of just using payroll taxes for their originally intended purpose of providing benefits, but legislation introduced by Senator Tom Coburn a few years ago to do that failed with 85 votes against.
And thirdly, we know how to solve all of these problems, but we do not have the leadership or political courage in Washington, D.C. to solve them. Instead, problems go unsolved, or we get incremental band-aids and, worse yet, more problems are created. The exponential increase in the national debt is simply irresponsibility on steroids!
The biggest problem with federal immigration laws is that they are not being enforced. So when the state of Arizona passed a bill to empower its law enforcement authorities to do what the federal government was not doing, the president and the administration spoke out against it. The new Arizona immigration enforcement law is not discriminatory as many have claimed, and if they would actually read it they might discover that for themselves.
Real job growth is not going to happen in this economy until the private sector receives some real economic stimulus. Many alternative ideas such as lowering the federal corporate tax rate, suspending taxes on repatriated profits, removing the uncertainty about tax increases, and suspending payroll taxes for a period of time have been made to this administration and the Democratic leaders, but those ideas have been sentenced to committee in Congress and they can’t get out.
Collectively, these seven deadly un-solved problems have us headed for the same type of economic and social turmoil we are seeing in Greece. It’s just a matter of time, and there is no “sugar daddy” to bail Uncle Sam out.
There is some good news! The informed voters are showing tangible signs of not continuing to tolerate the Washington D.C. culture of corruption, cronyism and complacency by electing a different breed of representatives.
As this new mood of the electorate continues into November 2010 and beyond, we might be able to avoid a disastrous future. We might even be able to send some of the seven heavenly virtues (faith, hope, charity, courage, justice, temperance and prudence) back to government.
Let’s dream big!
