Flint Michigan is a terrible place. It is blighted, it is depressed, it is poorly led, it is poorly managed. It is overwhelmingly minority. It is overwhelmingly poor. The education system and education basis of the population is poor.
But, the leadership of the city was elected in direct response to a phenomenon occurring all over America. Educated and trained and capable people were elected for years that did not look like their constituents, did not respond to their constituents, and did not care about their constituents. Honestly, I look at Congress and governors and state legislators, and I wonder what drives people to run for office.
They do not understand nor act in the best interests of their constituents. They do not seek nor drive solution to entrenched problems. They govern based on what they learned playing Monopoly. Build stuff, hope that someone lands on it and gives you something that maintains everything else until someone else lands on it. Except, instead of Boardwalk and Park Place, they are holding Baltic and Mediterranean. Most of America is Baltic and Mediterranean. That is just the economic reality. America's Baltic and Mediterranean is still a better investment that almost any street in 80% of the world.
Yet, you must govern and manage within your realities. You have to govern and lead with an eye to the future and to the sustainability of economy. You have to recognize issues, drive solution and guide the ship of state to the place picked out in logic and careful consideration. That is the characteristic of successful civil servants and government throughout the history of America. Careful, logic, guidance, planning, best interests, these are hallmarks.
Nothing about Flint is associated with this. That place is the antithesis of the successful and effective examples of government. And, it can be laid at the feet of the people of Michigan. I do not blame them, but they are responsible. In Flint, they have elected people that are woefully unprepared to govern for decades. They have mismanaged and misinvested civic funds and resources consistently and at the ignorance of the information available. When the situation came to a head, and the city was completely insolvent, the state took over. The citizens of Michigan elected a governor woefully unprepared to govern in this situation.
There is no way to fix the things that are occurring in Michigan, without raising revenue, quickly. Whatever your opinion of trickle down, or pro capital economics, it is a death sentence for a government like the state of Michigan. There is not time to trickle economic benefit down, when there are very real infrastructure failures and crisis confronting you today. And, these are of the citizen's own making.
They have allowed their cities and services to decay and fail, with full knowledge it was occurring. And, it is endemic in Michigan. Flint cannot drink water, Detroit cannot educate children. I don't live there, and I am not trying to be guilty of living in a glass house. But, short sighted economic decisions by those elected to govern in the best interest of the community are condemning the financial demise of an entire state. They knowingly put huge chunks of citizens at risk, which I think the governor did (I don't know much, but I know water purification, and what happened is criminally negligent and clearly the result of criminal decisions around quality and health. We would imprison a doctor that treated a patient with a known poison, we should imprison this governor.)
They have a surplus at the state level that will not pay 10% of the investments needed. Incredibly, instead of committing to utilize that money and make needed improvements now, there is talk about how the cities must be economically rehabilitated, how business must be attracted and how we must look at making the economy attractive. You could offer me 100 years of free taxes and the property for free, and I would not move to Flint and poison myself, my employees and my customers. Short sighted decisions couched in language of long term effectiveness are killing Michigan.
Michigan is a case study of ineffective and feckless government. Illinois is as well. So is most of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin. There has been a fusion of the most diametric politic aspirations that is concocting a witches brew of doom in a enormous section of our national economy. It has been brewing for 60 years, and is starting to overcome even the titanic capacity of America to succeed in spite of ourselves.
We have not enacted a single, sweeping infrastructure initiative since the interstate highway system in the 40's and 50's. That started in the 50's under Eisenhower, and I remember the opening of the final original leg of the system in Florida in the mid 80's. It was a huge effort and it took many years in a gigantic country. We have done nothing similar in the ensuing 70 years. We don't even have the money, nationally, to execute maintenance and upkeep of the system, much less upgrade and improve.
That is a fallacy. We have returned huge amounts of money to the private sector in the last 30 years, that was then removed from the economy and the interaction of the public, and into the coffers of those most insulated from economic danger. At the level of risk that is highest, in areas of poverty, old infrastructure and past environmental damage, we live continually on the drop edge of yonder.
Flint and Detroit have fallen over the edge. So has Gary Indiana. Huge cities, once key industrial havens that were entwined cogs in a massive industrial engine, have devolved into wastelands that are most notable for the poverty, bad education and health risk associated with living there. That is coming in many other places, especially if we continue to follow the economic model that we have followed since the 50's. Let's discuss the snake ready to give us an apple, LOWER TAXES.
To recover from the greatest economic ditch the nation had ever experienced, the government responded with a program that raised taxes, increased the income impact to every single American, but invested that money into infrastructure work and construction that built the spine of the economy we have today. It has ruptured disks, fractures and misalignment, but it has served us remarkably well. That was FDR and the Great Depression. Out of that horror, came greater taxes, bigger government, social programs that were publicly funded, and national investment at a local level that improved the entire economy, not the blind interests of a single community or state. We expected that we all bore a burden that was related to the national welfare.
We proudly went to work and made America great. We accepted that desperate times required investment, sacrifice and long term thinking for long term solutions. In the midst of our most immediate crisis, we took the long view and did the patient hard work. It staged us for unparalleled economic growth for 40 years and laid the required ground work to mobilize, industrialize and defeat the combined might of the Western world simply because we could outproduce and outfight them all.
Today, we face crushing debt, crumbling and inadequate roads and bridges and services, poisonous water, piss poor education nation wide at a broad level, raging violent crime rates, and governmental deadlock. In response to that, the solution we continue to discuss, in large part, is to cut government funding short term (tax cuts) to provide economic growth that will return much greater taxes in the long run. We started this nonsense under Reagan, when we had the infrastructure and economic engine to support such a theory. We had a correction under Bush the First, that updated the tax rates for economic reality, for which we rewarded that good public servant with defeat. It drove prosperity that we had not seen in decades under Clinton.
Instead of investing even portions of that surplus in the work of the nation and the underpinnings of our economy and society, we used it to fund additional tax cuts. When that failed to drive the engine of economy further, we tried the Kennedy/Johnson trick and fabricated a reason to turn on the war economy. We tried to make that false input turn the wheels of our economy to greater gain. But, we had failed already.
We had lost sight of the underpinnings and structure of what drove our nation. We have antiquated electrical grids, antiquated water purification, antiquated bridges, antiquated traffic control and direction, antiquated communication structures, antiquated social services and medical care systems. We have allowed the nation to degrade, and now the bills are coming due. Instead of being forthright, instead of taking the long view, we continue to claim we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
We can continue to decrease the rate at which we bring in money that services the shared concerns and interconnections of the nation to see national economic benefit. We have too many corporate taxes, yet they have contributed to the environmental mess that our systems are failing to process and contain. We have too much personal exposure to taxes, yet few, if any, of the tax cuts that have occurred in last 20 years have changed the average American's take home by more than $20 a pay period. They have only significantly improved the position of the top 20%, in which I proudly belong.
I have worked hard, and gotten nothing I have not earned, except the blessings of having been born and American, into the opportunity that brings. I am in the bullseye of what I am claiming here. I know that what I espouse will impact me. I am willing to make the investment. I don't want to pay money I have earned to the government, that will then be used to fix the mess that is Flint, or Detroit, or Chicago, or Gary, or some place other than Clayton. But, if I am not willing to sacrifice, there is no current path to success that has any history of being effective. Nothing we have recently done has ended up with success at what is causing us issues.
Let me put it a different way, as to why I am not reluctant to be part of a holistic solution. A significant chunk of the products we ingest from General Mills, you know cereal, oatmeal, etc., are produced in Michigan. Battle Creek. Do you think the water there, that is treating your food and what you are feeding your children, grandchildren, aging parents, anyone you care about, is significantly better than in Flint? Do you think that the water is treated to a higher level of purification than the communities around it? Do you think it is going to get better, with the status quo, or are you going to switch to Kelloggs? That is Rust Belt toxic, too.
I have nothing against Michigan, other than they have been too stupid to get out of their own way. But, before you get too mad at that statement, drive on I 40 anywhere around Raleigh or Durham, or take some miles on I95 anywhere in NC, and tell me how much better we are than Michigan. Check into the changes that have been made in municipal water purification in this state, all over this state, driven by "economic reality". Ask the folks that run those systems if they are safer and more effective today, or just cheaper to run. There is always a trade off. And, it is not that far off from where Michigan is. Again, I don't know much, but I know water purification.
If we continue to be unwilling to invest in our nation, to make the personal sacrifice necessary to raise our community standards and levels, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we continue to elect candidates simply because they are against costing you any more money and can make you think they can quote your part of the Bible, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we do not elect candidates dedicated to our improvement, hold them accountable to that improvement and expect a better nation with real deliverables, out of our investment, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
There is no truth to the myth that we can fix what ails us with what we currently pay to the government, much less with lower taxes. There is not enough time to wait for the mythical trickle. Johnston County NC is an idyllic place compared to Flint and Detroit. But, within 20 years, if we do not develop a way to improve and sustain our infrastructure, we will be in the same place as Flint and Detroit. We are already growing faster than our investment level in services and infrastructure, and growing by means of deferring and delaying and in some cases forgoing, any tax advantage from the growth. So there is nothing new coming into the coffers to improve the services this growth will need. Maybe we will finance it? No, we expect new people moving here to contribute and that will make it work. Except we are getting people here, by and large, that work in Raleigh and Wake. When we resemble Raleigh and Wake, because of growth, the new folks will live in Wayne and Sampson counties.
It is a self defeating cycle. I don't like it. I don't want to pay a bigger share. But, just like I sacrificed a huge chunk of my life to the service of this country, I can extend some of my income to the service of this country. That is the only truth you are going to hear for the rest of the campaign season. We will, in large number, congratulate ourselves for electing another short term bandit to the government, because we are angry at the failure of the preceding short term bandits. These are not bad people, they are just wrong. And changing the face won't change the outcome. Being mad that someone that was in the short term camp got it through their head that nothing comes for free and voted in the assembly to service the common good, makes you a short term bandit.
Most won't understand why I feel the way I do. Most of the people I know are firmly convinced that taxes are too high, government is bad and ineffective and the problem. But, instead of electing effective managers and overseers of the government, they will support people notable for their anger and their positions against things. They will not ask how, they will not ask when, they will not ask for the proof it is working, or the signs it is effective. They want someone as mad as them, period. They don't look for someone that is mad, but is going to try something different. Repeating what has failed and failed and failed is something that Einstein described.
It just infuriated me this morning, to hear about our problems, and hear nothing about how we fix it. No one, not one single national or local government official in Michigan has asked what other communities are at the same risk as Flint, publicly. Flint is not the only city along the Flint River. This is just the 30 second soundbite window that our piss poor journalists can barely manage. Not because they can't, but because if they get any more detailed than that, we as a whole, tune out. Too much detail. 100,000 intentionally poisoned for 2 years in an American city, and we don't have time or interest in the details. We are not outraged. We are willing to send some cases of water, but not be part of the broad solution. It is sad, and sad for the nation. It condemns us for the future, because we do not understand the sins of the past.
I know there are many that disagree, and I welcome the debate. But, the time is running short. You would be surprised how very similar the treatment systems in Johnston County, coming from the Neuse River, are to the treatment systems in Flint, coming from the Flint River. You would be surprised how many coal ash pits, abandoned mines, farm retention lagoons and industrial risks line the Neuse. You would be surprised what the concentration and hazard of the effluent from fracking are. We are less than a few years and less than a couple of "tragic accidents", like on the Dan River, from being in Flint's position.
I am going to get in the shower, because it is clean. In Flint, they don't get that choice. It can come here, much more quickly than you realize. We are only waiting, especially if we don't soon make significant and pervasive investment. It might be worth asking someone that you are supporting for office. Beg them to connect the dots for you, how this gets better. Write it down and hold them to it. You don't want a container hub along the interstate because they used the term imminent domain, but you support adding industry on purchased land that the infrastructure cannot support with current growth rates. Please ask those you are supporting to make that make sense for you, how it gets better, and when.
GLYASDI.
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