I’ve sent the following to President Obama via the White House contact web site:
You might consider doing something similar to counter all the fiscal cliff fear mongering we will hear for the next several weeks.
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RE: Fiscal Cliff Fear Mongering and Sacrificing the Public Good
Mr. President,
Between now and the end of the year there will be a lot of fanciful fear mongering over the fiscal cliff. Please stay cool and don’t agree to replace representative governance of citizen benefits with corporate governance where accountability shifts from our elected officials to major stock holders.
Just like the family’s moral purpose is to protect and empower their children, our government’s moral purpose is to protect and empower its citizens. Transferring this moral function to local daycare centers or multinational corporations, who must put profit before protecting or empowering their customers, harms both our children and our citizens. As George Lakoff puts it, ” ‘Smaller government’ means making the public good secondary and abandoning the sacred moral mission of the government.”
More specifically, it is the moral obligation of our government to provide and manage the Social Security and Medicare programs for the citizens. These programs are especially critical for protecting and empowering senior citizens. Without representative governance, the freedom of seniors will be severely restricted as they unnecessarily suffer from shrinking incomes while trying to pay for increasing medical costs during their retirement years.
Privatization of SS only benefits Wall Street while it robs Main Street. Wages, which haven’t grown for decades and have become insufficient, are then subjected to the vagaries of the irrational and inherently selfish free market. This exacerbates the decades long transfer of wealth from most Americans to the ONE%.
Privatization of Medicare only benefits the insurance industry while robbing elderly citizens of their right to healthcare – a moral responsibility of our government. Insurance companies cannot compete with Medicare with their higher administrative costs and profit requirements, and elderly citizens can’t afford the insurance premiums of totally privatized health care that has no moral concern for the health of its customers.
What we need, instead of privatization, is additional revenue to properly fund these citizenship benefits. All citizens need to pay, as most currently do, citizenship dues for these future benefits. This includes paying dues on all pre-retirement income, not just income from employment wages.