Timothy Kline: Thoughts and Reflections

What Have We Learned?

Just so that I’m clear on this… Our government leaders had very few qualms about handing off $700B to Wall Street and the financial institutions, and passed that level of funding in not time at all. Few stipulations were set into place, even. And that money came from the taxpayers (or will!), a decision that was purportedly so that the financial institutions who were buckling under mortgage buy-ins gone wrong would then extend help to those families who were buckling under those mortgages. At last report, only a sliver of the total number of families struggling to meet their mortgages have since received help, while the banks and Wall Street have returned to business-as-usual with their speculative buying, bonus payments, and have reportedly now even moved into life insurances as well. The $700B that was handed over is essentially vanished now.

Yet an estimated health plan that will cost $856B over the course of a decade is being stopped and hindered at every turn? If you don’t do what’s needed to keep the ones paying in to that tax base healthy and able to work, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, aren’t you?

I am NOT saying whether or not this particular healthcare plan is the answer, mind you. My point is this: How is it that we can, as a nation, hand over $700B to the rich, who have dissolved that fund pool within months– yet take umbrage with spending $876B over the course of ten years to assist our brothers, sisters, families, neighbors, and co-workers to have accessible healthcare?

How have we become a better moral and physical nation by handing off $700B to Wall Street and Banking Industries? And how have we bought into the idea that if we do that for the less fortunate among us, that we will become less than we are for having funded those who have shown nothing but disdain and lack of concern for us since we gave them our hard-earned dollar?

If this particular healthcare plan isn’t the best way to spend/invest that $856B, is it not better than what we have now? Where are the alternatives that will benefit the less fortunate among us instead of resorting to the “trickle-down” philosophy by giving tax breaks and the like to the health insurance industry itself?

At what point do we say that WE are too big to fail–us! The common man/woman, and let Wall Street and CEOs and Banking Conglomerates who demonstrably fritter away money rise or fall on their own choices? At what point will we stop funding them and start helping ourselves and one another?

I’m just curious.