You make a lot of good points and seem to have a better grasp of the issues than I do in many respects. I think we could find a lot of common ground in the end.

A lot of your ideas seem like tweaks that need to be made, and I would likely vote for the person willing to make them. Your ideas are quite reasonable and moderate.

Thanks for taking the time to share those ideas. I’m just some guy out in the sticks, but I like to learn and found this thread–philosphical as it is–interesting.

First off, social welfare is a small part of what needs to happen. It is something which you deal with after everything else; sort of what you do with what money you have left over.

Next: For social welfare:

Foreign:

Aid as it stands now, is only thinly veiled stock dumping, and should be revised to as to make it actually help the people who are on the recieving end of it.

All aid should be aid, it should not be loans which you know the countries recieving the aid will never pay back.

Next, all aid should have a limit of 2 years put on it. After a 2 year period if the nation still needs aid chances are that it is well on the way to aid addiction, where the much needed goods provided by aid are flooding the market and preventing the locals producing those goods.

Social Welfare:

Is mostly fine and it works. What it needs is adequate funding, don’t have a programe which you are unwilling to fund, for example No Child Left Behind, but rather fully fund all of the programmes you have got. It is a case of either do, or don’t.

Money going towards student loans should be increased, and taxes on people who are under 17 should be scrapped. No taxation without representation being the basic ethic. Higher taxes on the top end of the tax base should cover this, as should cutting goverment pork budgets.

Goverment projects should always have a clear benefit. Pork projects, such as the Alaskan bridge to nowhere, should be investigated for fraud, and vitally important projects, such as modernising the New Orleans levee system, should be funded generously, but run to their optimal effeciency. To help insure this, all goverment projects should be subject to audit, following English, Australian or South African auditing standards, rather then the standardised testing set out by American Law. America’s auditing standards are stupid, any monkey can figure out how to dupe a standardised test, and your accountants just aren’t as good as South Africa’s.

Taxes, though raised in a lot of cases, should be simplified. While no country has a concise tax act, there is no reason to confuse people who are only paying income tax by sending them the whole act. Generally working out your taxes personal tax should not take a degree in tax law.

All goverment positions should be held by people who are practiced in the professions and circumstances the position requires. Your minister of Defense should be someone who has served in a relatively high up position in the military, your guy in charge of the police should be a policeman, and your chief of the FDA should have risen through the ranks of the FDA. No more lackey appointments – the country needs people who know what they are doing.

Though this all sounds very expensive, what it amounts to is transparency, and tightening the way in which goverment is run so as to reduce wasting money. America is in a crisis situation with its debt right now, and debt equals having people with an undue amount of power over you. Once the debt has started to clear, the following can be considered:

Increasing funding for universities, and schools. While many teachers enter the profession because it is a calling, many talented teachers don’t because money is somewhat louder.

Bringing in public healthcare. Currently America suffers from the fact that the number one cause of bankruptcy is Medical Bills, if people want to go to private hospitals they should still have that choice, but the public option should be improved such that people don’t go broke just because they got sick. If a person is bankrupt, that person isn’t hiring anybody and isn’t paying taxes.

Introducing low-interest loans for small start up businesses in needed economic sectors. This way you can encourage certain sectors to grow, and you can encourage greater competition within your economy, which will result in the rejuvination of various areas around America.

By the same token, subsidies for large businesses such as oil companies, should be scrapped. Currently big oil in America is making record breaking profits, should they really be getting subsidies and tax breaks? The same can be said of any company which just point blank no longer needs the goverment to fund them.

Now recognise that being a liberal or a progressive does not mean supporting the Democrats. While the Democrats are possibly a good option for Congress and the Senate this year, apart from Feingold they don’t really have a suitable candidate for the year 2008, and there should be a clear independent revolution by then. If the Democrats fail to make inroads towards what is the ideal progressive goverment they should be sacked and the smaller parties given a chance.

http://www.americanprogress.org/events/special_events/commongood.html

http://www.americanprogress.org/events/special_events/commongood.html

Securing the Common Good: A Vision for America and the World
President William J. Clinton
Center For American Progress
Georgetown University, Washington, DC
October 18, 2006

I have been asked to talk today about the common good in terms of how if affected my presidency. Therefore I will not, unless with questions, arrive at spending an enormous amount of time talking about the way forward — although I have views on all that.

You have heard that I came here nearly 15 years ago to deliver a series of speeches outlining my philosophy of government and the ideas that I propose to pursue if I got elected. When I gave the first speech I believe I was still running fifth in the polls in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire – so it was probably an act of hubris that I felt good here. I first came to this hall 42 years ago, and I have come many times since. I love it very much.

In the context of late 1991, I defined the common good as a new covenant for equal opportunity, shared responsibility, and inclusive community — and an aggressive approach to try to create those values throughout the world at the end of the Cold War. It is what I thought America should do to advance the common good. It is just a restatement of what our Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor to — to form a more perfect union.

Given the nature of the political debate today, I think that it is important to point out that 18th century construct in 21st century language meant the following: We are not perfect, we never will be perfect, no one has the whole truth — but we can always do better. That is what a more perfect union meant. It is a permanent mission for America designed to make America a permanent work-in-progress.

Now as Jack and John has said, I try to do that work as a private citizen through the foundation’s work here in American and around the world – on AIDS, on climate change, on economic development – and through the Clinton Global Initiative. But I know that politics still matters. And I believe that ideas matter. I love the four years that I spent here at Georgetown. When I wrote my memoirs, my editor made me take out several pages that I had written about Georgetown: no one will believe that you remembered every professor and all these lectures and that you saved all your papers! No one will believe this! You’ve got to take some of this out. I say that for all of you who are students here to say that this was a seminal experience in my life coming here. The professors that I had then affected me in ways that continue in my life today. And the most important point that I can make about that for the purposes of my remarks today is that I really believed — more strongly when I left here than when I came — that ideas matter, that evidence matters, that thinking and reasoning matter, that ideas have consequences, and that in politics that means that ideas lead to policies which have positive or negative effects in people’s lives. I believe that then, I believe that now. I believe that then based on my experiences that I had here, that not everyone who disagreed with me was my enemy. That I might be wrong. That as forcefully as I pursued anything that I believed in, and in any argument that I embraced, I had to always be able to listen to others. And that in the interplay — the dialectic — between my position and another the searching for more facts, the searching for better arguments, and frankly just facing the evidence of what did or didn’t work — and what the consequences of those various courses were –- that I would come to a better place as a public official. I believe that then. I believe that now.

You heard in [Georgetown] President DeGioia’s remarks (I wonder how many college presidents would even quote Latin anymore, I love it) the same conviction. When I give these Georgetown speeches, they allowed me to set up this construct of equal opportunity, shared responsibilities, inclusive community — an aggressive approach to engagement with the rest of the world. I thought that they were consistent with the traditional American values of work and family, freedom and responsibility, faith and tolerance. That as a Democrat I was being faithful to Andrew Jackson’s credo of “opportunity for all and special privileges for none,” to President Kennedy’s call for mutual responsibility and citizen service, and to Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to continuous innovation — to bold, persistent, experimentation. I also ask that there and throughout the 1992 campaign for a political debate that engaged these themes. That moved away from what I thought was an unacceptable level of partisanship and rancor — and a tendency to let elections turn on issues that had nothing to do with the decision that leaders would make after the election was over, or the consequences on the ordinary people’s lives –- the politics of division and personal destruction.

I frequently cited in that year a book that was written that has special relevance today (even though 15 years is a lifetime ago), and I swear this was in my notes before I saw him in the audience, but EJ Dionne, the distinguished columnist for the Washington Post wrote a book called Why Americans Hate Politics. And the central thesis was that Americans hate politics because it seemed irrelevant to them and they feel like they are being manipulated because of always being asked to make false choices: you are either pro-labor or pro-business; pro-growth or pro-environment; either for a strong national defense or for trying to make an agreement with everybody no matter how crazy they are. That there is always an either-or choice, and the truth is most of us don’t think that way, and most of us don’t live out lives that way, and most of us long for a politics where we have genuine arguments, vigorous disagreements, but we don’t claim to have the whole truth, and we don’t demonize our opponents, and we really try to work on what works for the American people.

Everybody knows this, down deep in their gut. That is why I have gotten such a strong response for the work that I have done with former President Bush since I left office on the tsunami, on Katrina, and with former Senator Dole, my opponent in 1996, who raised $100 million to guarantee a college education to the spouses and children of the people killed or disabled on 9/11. It is not that we want a bland, mushy, meaningless politics — we like our debates; the country has been well-served by its progressive and by its conservative traditions. We understand that campaigns will be heated and only one side can win. But we want it to be connected somehow to the real lives of real people — to the aspirations of ordinary Americans, to the future of our children and grandchildren.

Now, this sort of politics — striving for the common good — for me, stands in stark contrast to both the political and governing philosophy of the leadership of Washington today, and for the last six years. The more ideological right-wing element of the Republican Party has been building strength partly in reaction to things that happened forty years ago — Barry Goldwater’s defeat, what they saw as the excesses of the 1960’s — it got a lot of legs when President Reagan was elected — but this is the first time when on a consistent basis, the most conservative, most ideological wing of the Republican Party has had both the executive and legislative branch with a very distinct governing philosophy and a very distinct political philosophy. Whereas us ‘common good’ folks favor equal opportunity and empowerment, they believe the country is best served by the maximum concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the right people – “right” in both senses.

We believe in mutual responsibility; they believe that in large measure, people make or break their own lives and you are on your own. We believe in striving at least to cooperate with others because we think that there are very few problems in the world that we can solve on our own. They favor unilateralism whenever possible and cooperation when it unavoidable. And you may think that is laughable, but even today in the press there is a story about the administration’s new policy on national security in space which points out that 160 nations are asked to vote to begin negotiations — not to prejudge the outcome but just begin negotiations — on making outer space weapons free — and the vote was 159 to 1 to do it. We were the only country that didn’t do it.

I will give you another example which has given us a lot of problems, which I almost never read about in the press. There is legitimate concern about the North Korean nuclear tests, about what Iran’s nuclear ambitions are; we knew that these problems have easy solutions now; but our position has been weakened because for at least half of the last six years the administration has asked for funds to research the development of two new nuclear weapons. One a nuclear bunker buster (even through we have a conventional bunker buster that is quite powerfu), and two, a so-called tactical battlefield nuclear weapon which the administration admits had it been deployed in the Iraq conflict would have taken out 25% of Baghdad. So there is this sense that the world is divided between the good guys and the bad guys: the good guys should have their nuclear weapons and the bad guys shouldn’t. We may not all feel that way but it is a very hard argument to make.

I had an eighth grade science teacher who was one of the most fearfully unattractive people I have ever met in my life. He had thick coke-bottle glasses, and he smoked cheap cigars in a cigar holder that caused his mouth to pinch, and he had been a football coach and became a science teacher — and he gained a little a weight after he turned to science and he still wore the same clothes. Let me tell you why I said this. One day in class he said to us (I was thirteen at the time, forty-seven years ago): you won’t remember anything about science in a few years. So if you don’t learn anything else in class that I teach you, remember this — every day I get up and I go to my bathroom and I wash my face, throw water in my eyes, shave, and as I wash the shaving cream off, look in the mirror and say Vernon, you’re beautiful. [laughter] And by the end of the year he was beautiful to me. I say that to remind you that it is very hard to succeed in politics when you are telling people that they are ugly all the time. You have to oppose people who are doing things that are wrong. But it is very hard to say that there will be one set of rules for me, and another set for everyone else. I think that the common good approach on national security works! It is a combination of carrots and sticks. We did have military encounters; we didn’t succeed at everything we tried to do but I think on balance the world is safer when we stopped than when we started.

Now, the same thing works in politics. I think that the central challenge to American politics today is that what I would call the “uncommon good” approach has been so successful. It may not be in three weeks but it has been. Us common good folks, we believe in a politics dominated by evidence and argument. There is a big difference between a philosophy and an ideology — on the right or the left. If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in certain direction or another; but like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning; and you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy. Therefore you might wind up making a principled agreement with someone with a different philosophy. If you look at the welfare reform legislation which passed, for example, when I was president, I vetoed the first two bills because they took away the guarantee of free medicine for poor people; when those things were put back in I signed it. Some people who shared my philosophy did indeed disagree with my decision because they said that we shouldn’t have a hard-and-fast requirement for people on welfare who are able-bodied to work. I disagreed. I thought that work was the best social program and I thought that it would help to overcome a lot of the pathologies in the families of poor people; and I also think that you should never patronize the poor, they are basically as smart as the rest of us without the same breaks. So I thought that. So we had a conservative idea in welfare reform: if you can work, you’ve got to go to work. One of the reasons that it worked is that there was a huge increase in support for people to go to work: a huge increase in child care; a huge increase in transportation assistance (while these people did not have cars); a huge increase in worker training and support; and other things that were essential. In other words, because we had a philosophical debate, with plenty of politics and a few vetoes, we had a creative tension which led us to a dynamic center –- not a mushy center –- that worked.

The problem with ideology is that if you got an ideology, you have already got your mind made up -– you know all the answers. And that makes evidence irrelevant, and argument a waste of time. So you tend to govern by assertion, attack: the problem with that is that it discourages thinking and gives you bad results! Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial is well named but I think that it is important to point out that if you are an ideologue, denial is an essential part of your political being -–whichever side. Because if you are an ideologue, you have got your mind made up. So when an inconvenient fact crops up, you have to be in denial — it has to be a less significant fact.

Ron Sukind wrote a related book called the One Percent Solution. The most interesting thing to me in this One Percent Solution is not the part that people have talked about –- 9/11 -– but Mr. Suskind says that the ideologues within the current government refer to people like me and others like Colin Powell and Admiral Scowcroft as somehow lesser political mortals because we are trapped in the “reality-based world.” And what they mean by that in fairness to them is that we are an empire, we are the world’s only military superpower, and you can use power to change reality. And if you don’t see that, then you will always be condemning your country to a lesser status.

When I was a kid I grew up in an alcoholic home -– I spent half my time trying to get into a reality-based world and I like it here! [laughter] People ask me all the time what great new idea that you and Bob Rubin brought to economic policymaking in Washington, and I say — Rubin came down and put all that fancy Goldman Sachs-type spin on what we were doing — but the truth is that all we brought to Washington was arithmetic. [laughter] I had that dumb idea that 2 + 2 = 4 in Little Rock, it probably was in Washington. [laughter] And sure enough it turned out to be right. Now we are all laughing here, but I want you to laugh so that I can make a point.

This is not about conservative or liberal philosophies. You can argue on problem X or Y or Z you need more or less government. You can argue whether you get more growth from stimulating the business side of things or training workers better. You can have an argument about trade and about whether you should be more protectionist or more free trade or you need, what I think is trade-plus (labor and environmental standards with everybody around the world). You can have these arguments, but in every case the evidence is relevant. In every case the act of entering into a conversation with someone else and listening to what they have to say means that you might not be right about everything. You might have something to learn. It might be an ongoing process in which when you put all these perspectives together, you come out with something that will actually move the ball forward for the more perfect Union — which will actually make lives better for ordinary Americans.

I believe that while much has changed in the last 15 years — the acceleration of an interdependent global economy based on information technology — is more apparent, it is clearer than it was then that we are all vulnerable to terror and weapons of mass destruction, to climate change. Much has changed, but that has not changed – the relentless search for the common good — to devise policies that provide equal opportunity, shared responsibility, and inclusive community -– is still relevant to the present day. And to have a politics that celebrates our partisan differences, loves our rolling debates — that has just enough humility to know that we all might be wrong — that we have something to learn from one another — I believe that is still relevant. And I believe that you can make a compelling case that it works!

For me the ultimate test is not whether the intellectual architecture of my view –- as opposed to a view of those that are running things now -– is more pristine and less messy; but whether people will be better off when you quit than when you started. So these common good philosophies, when I was president, we had 22.8 million new jobs (50% more in our 8 years than in the previous 12 years, and the ratio will be better compared to the subsequent 8 years); it is more important to me based on what [Georgetown] President DeGioia said about the percentage of low-income people getting 4-year college degrees; a hundred times as many people moved out of poverty in our 8 years as in our previous 12 years -– a hundred times, that was policy for the common good.

What were these policies? Well we changed the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires federally-insured banks to invest in their communities: $800 billion was invested under those provisions in those 8 years, that was 95% of all the money ever invested under the Community Reinvestment Act, which was passed in the 1970’s. Just one example, people did not know about. Something that was done by executive order, but it was a common good philosophy and it turned out to be good for the banks too!

The empowerment zones, the enterprise communities. All the urban development initiatives. The welfare reform issues that I talked to you about. When we passed the budget in 1993, which passed by one vote in a strict party-line vote, one vote in both houses, it raised taxes in upper income people, raised the gas tax 4.3% as I remember, and cut taxes on lower income working families -– 15X as many people got a tax cut as a tax increase. We doubled the income tax credit, that alone took over two million children out of poverty. When we raised the minimum wage, it lifted the earnings of 10 million people–and I tried to do it twice–and we haven’t done it since. We provide more health care options for low-income families; we had the biggest expansion in health care coverage since Medicaid in the 1960’s with the children health insurance program; we had the biggest increase in college aid since the GI Bill at the end of World War II — 10 million more people getting college assistance through tax credits or Pell Grants or work-study programs than when we started. The average hourly wages actually went up during my second term as against inflation for the first time since 1973. Now, the number of people without health insurance went down. I could keep you here all day talking about other statistics, but the point here is that this works! A focus on the common good turned out to be good: we had more millionaires than billionaires than ever before. But the biggest income gains percentage-wise were in the bottom quintile. It works! It is good for everybody!

And it is more important now than ever because whenever an economic paradigm changes, there is anyway a concentration of wealth in the beginning. When we moved from farm to factory, and people had to come into the cities to make a living, we had this huge wave of immigrants around at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century; people coming here looking for these jobs; there was a yawning increase in inequality. It always happens when you change the economic paradigm. If you have a government committed to the common good, have a politics committed to the common good, you try to sand the rough edges off that so that you can keep the economy growing, but you can lift everybody up and they can all be part of it.

As far as I can determine, these five years have been the first time since the economists have been keeping the figures — when we have had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity increase in the workforce, a 40-year high in corporate profits, CEO executive pay averaging 369X the pay of people in the companies — and average wages are flat or declining. Last year, 2005, for the top 1% of Americans, income increased 12.5%; for the bottom 99%, 1.5%, which means for the bottom half, it was flat or negative. Now, I don’t think that is very good -– I don’t think that is a common good policy. And I believe that we can do better than that. And we should.

To achieve the common good, you have to believe in equal opportunity. I also believe that it was inconsistent with the common good to give me (I love saying that I never had any money before I left the White House–and now I am one of those really important people, I am a millionaire -– I get more help from the federal government than anybody) -– five tax cuts and cut college aide at a time when the cost of a college education is going through the roof. Go figure. Because I am a common good sort of guy and because I don’t need another home, or another car, or another vacation, they should have kept my money and made it possible for people like you to go to college. That is what I believe. I think that I was a mistake to give me a tax cut, and cut funding to after-school programs for poor kids; we know this works to increase academic achievement and reduce the dropout rate. We know it does! Here we are giving no support to that; in my second term when I left, the federal government was supporting 1.3 million people. We have evidence that crime rate is going up in some places, and I think that it was mistake to give five tax cuts and get rid of the COPS program, which put over 100,000 police officers on the street. I don’t think it is consistent with the common good.

We keep being told that we can’t afford to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. That last year the number one priority in Congress was giving further estate tax relief to about 8,000 families at a cost of $250 billion over ten years; at $25 billion a year that is several times what it would cost to restore the cuts in college aid, the destruction of after-school programs, and implement the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. Now if you believe in the concentration of wealth and power, and if you believe that money in the hands of the right people will spark an economic renaissance in America, you embrace that. If you believe in the common good, you think that we all ought to kick in a little.

I’ll give you a tougher example. I was often criticized by people in my own party -– the liberals –- for being so tight-fisted on insisting on running a balanced budget and trying to get a surplus. Because they said, you know it only matters if the deficit is a small percentage of GDP who cares, and if you spend this money, you could send even more kids to college, and provide even more healthcare, and do even more better. So I was criticized by my left. My reasoning was twofold. One is that if you get the deficit down and keep it down, interest rates would be so low that you would be giving another couple thousand dollars a year to working middle class families; and two, the baby boomers are fixing to retire and they will impose a great burden on society when they quit working so if we were running a surplus for several years and paying down our debt, we would stabilize Social Security by putting the interest savings into the Social Security trust fund and have the funds necessary to whatever health care challenge was there. But that is a common good theory.

And again people can argue whether I was right or wrong but I believe that it was right. Now we have added about $3 trillion to the national debt, we have a trade deficit annually that is more than twice as big as the budget deficit, and I think there is another common good question. Is it in the interest of the common good for the United States to borrow money everyday from China, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and UK to finance my tax cut and our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan? That is what we do, basically knock on the door of these banks everyday and say can you give us a little more money to pay for Bill Clinton’s tax cut, soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq? We don’t use those words but that is what it is. And we say that our kids will pay you back. Now, to me that is not consistent with the common good. You know who our tenth biggest creditor is? Mexico. So we are having all these big debates now about immigration, but we know whatever you think that should be done there (and I have my own views), but we know one thing, the overwhelming majority of these poor Mexicans that pour across the Rio Grande River wherever they can get across everyday– are coming to this country because they can make more money here and they send a bunch of their money home to their mothers and fathers and their children. Whatever you think about it, no one disputes that, right? So it seems to me like it would be a better behold if the Mexicans kept their money and invested it in their own people, gave them a better education, and gave them a good chance to have a descent job. Even the Chinese have enormous problems in rural areas where I work with the AIDS problem. China is trying to stabilize the economy of the rural areas to keep everybody from moving to the cities — and manage their growth. There was a story in the paper yesterday that they are about to get a trillion dollars in cash money, the Chinese. Forty-five percent of our debt is now held by people who are non-American. One country alone could crater our currency. So I was a big free trader, and a lot of people thought that was inconsistent with the common good but I did believe in enforcing our agreements. And only 20% as many trade enforcement actions are taken today as there was when I was president. Part of the reason is that a lot of our trade disputes are with the Chinese and they are our banker. When was the last time you got tough on your banker? [laughter]

The point I want to make is that you don’t have to agree with me on any of this, but we should solve this problem based on what we think is the common good. I do not think that it makes any sense to borrow money to pay my tax cut and ask my daughter’s generation to pay it off. I don’t that it is good economics today, or good economics tomorrow. And I think that it is a big gamble to say that everybody will always have to pay our debt. But we don’t talk about it in these terms. I haven’t heard anybody say, actually get up and explain to the American people, how we finance our deficits. From whom do we get the money? What are the consequences? What are the alternatives?

So as you think about not only this election year but for all of you who are students here you think about your future: whether you are a Republican or Democrat or an Independent, whether you consider yourself a traditional liberal or a conservative, I ask you to remember the traditions that you learned here. This is a religious institution that believes in the life of the mind. This is a Jesuit institution, representing an order which for hundreds of years now has been legendary for developing people’s intellectual capacity. The man who taught me comparative religion when I was at Georgetown — popularly known as ‘Buddhism for Baptists’ — Father Joseph Seabees(sp) gave … we had 204 people in the class … he gave oral examinations to the non-American students who didn’t feel comfortable writing their exam questions … in nine languages. We had a Hungarian economics professor when I was here named Joseph Sereny(sp) that made everybody sit in assigned seats until Thanksgiving, took roll every day, then you could sit wherever you want. And at the end of the second semester, not the first, a friend of mine and I were walking up to him and he said, “Father, I think I am going to have trouble on the final,” and he looked at him and said, “What do you expect, you missed three classes.” He kept roll in his head of people not sitting in assigned seats for a whole semester and he had 200 kids and five classes. What does this mean? It means that these deeply religious people believed — as all religious people do of whatever faith — that there is a truth; but they believed that life was a journey towards it. And they believed in the most humbling possible way in the relentless search to develop the mind that God had given them to the maximum possible degree to aid in the search — but they knew no matter how smart they were, no matter how many students they remembered, no matter how many languages they spoke, they would never be in full possession of the truth, much less be able to turn it into a political program that was absolutely truth, that you were somehow less human if you did not embrace. And so they created this university, and so many like it to help people in their journey in life.

And they like the Founders from a much more secular point of view, did so because they realized that what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences. I try always to mention in every speech I give now that when the human genome was sequenced, the most interesting finding to me was that all human beings are genetically more than 99.9% the same. Yet all of us spend over 90% of our lives (I no less than anyone else) thinking about that 0.1%: I’m older, I’m younger, I’m taller, I’m shorter, I’m smarter, or I’m richer, I’m poorer, I’m this or that or the other thing. You think about the way we organize our lives, it is all about that 0.1%. All the common good is, is a reaffirmation of the fact that in the end in order for your 0.1% to flower to amount to a hill of beans, you have to give others the same chance — that the 99.9% is ultimately more important. And without tending to that, you can’t possibly unleash the 0.1%. Does this answer everything we should do in Iran or what we should do now in Iraq? Exactly how we should move to universal coverage, and stop spending 50% more than any other country in insuring 16% fewer people? No. Did everything we tried work? No. But on balance people were way better off when we stopped than when we started. Why? Because of the commitment to equal opportunity, shared responsibility, and an inclusive community — the basic building blocks of the common good.

I long for the day when my party does not represent both the progressive and conservative strains in the search for the common good. But we do today. We are the conservative party on the budget, on natural resources, on military resources. And the progressive party on the minimum wage, on healthcare, on education. I long for the day when we will return to a debate that is not about who is a good person and who is a slug. Not about who represents the religious truth and who is basically running for office on his or her way to hell. [laugher] You laugh, but you know that I am telling the truth. I long for the day when Republicans and Democrats will sit around and have these raucous, fighting arguments and actually love learning from one another — and when we create the common good out of a dynamic center. I works! You can just look at the evidence, and compare it to what went before and what happened after. Ideological, divisive, demonizing, distracting, politics — they may be very good for an election, particularly when people feel unsettled and insecure — but they don’t do much to advance the common good. So whatever your politics are, I hope that throughout your life, you will try to advance it. Because that is what our Founders told us to do: they turned out to be pretty smart; they figured it out more than two centuries before the scientists discovered that we are 99.9% the same. Thank you very much. [applause]

http://www.americanprogress.org/events/special_events/commongood.html

My point is not that republicans can do a better job; my point is that competence already exists in the public sector. And in as much as these programs are necessary, why not rely more on private institutions. Why not run by all these politicians and bureaucrats to the people who could put more money on the street. Efficiency is the issue just as much as competence.

There are plenty of hacks on both sides of the coin.

Look, I’m sure that the social programs created during the previous century served their purpose. They kept people struggling by, but not getting ahead. Politicains could make their campaigns by toying with these “benefits”, making people happy or afraid, but mostly dependent. Why not try something new? Can’t we find a new model? What is the progressive movement if it is not going to offer a new way? I’m willing to listen, but a new ratio for distribution and another round of blame the rich–or envy them–is nothing any of us hasn’t seen before.

And if progressives will not offer anything really new, why not just be a democrat or republican. Take your pick, because nothing will change.

So, Bruce, what new idea would you bring to the table?

The money dropped into those sites, while under what was at least a mediocre Goverment did one heck of a lot of good. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because the Republicans can’t run their way out of a paper bag that that is the normal state of affairs.

Goverment needs competence as well as money, and that is a big part of Progressive idealogy. If the money is competently managed, and you don’t have instances like those that have been revealed about the Republicans (For example, only Republican contractors getting contracts, pork-barrel projects which don’t do anyone any good, that sort of thing) federal funding can do a massive amount of good.

The example of the Indian Nobel Laureate is truely a rare example, but not unique.

Why don’t you explain why all the billions dumped into the areas you cite hasn’t made any substantial difference. Oh, wait–it must be elitist, whitey, crackers like me, right.

And if all that money has done so little good, doesn’t common sense indicate that something different needs to be done. Maybe the problem is that government isn’t the solution. Like I said before, give the money to local groups–church groups, civic groups, etc…. Give the money directly to them so it isn’t skimmed by every level of government or held hostage to foolish politicians.

The progressive philosophy should be to empower the local people who have already made the commitment to do the work. Those local people should ensure that the people they help have something at stake too. Its about dignity.

Or am I too much of a “cracker” to understand dignity?

And in a world where no loans were available to me I would have worked longer and harder to get my “so called” education. Don’t tell me that anyone couldn’t have done the same.

…how many Indian billionaires do you know giving out “micro-loans”…

…in South Central L.A., Chicago, New Orleans, Brownsville (NYC), Philadelphia, Houston, Detroit, etc.? …

…and imagine a world where that student loan hadn’t been there for YOU…

A good point about the loan. I did get one and paid it off. But a loan is not a hand-out. Because I had to pay the money back, I knew I had to make the most of school. Paying it off helped me establish a credit rating and the interest made sure there was a little more in the kitty for the next person who wanted a loan. The point is, yes I got help, but there were strings and I was expected to help myself.

The point about education is also good. As a sociecty we do have that responsibility, but students also have a responsibility there too. At my school we reach out to students in every possible way, but some flat out refuse to try. Where does our responsibility end? Some students choose to ignore the opportunity even when people tell them over and over how important school is because they believe someone is always going to pick up the bill. Its a tough problem.

I guess I’m just a little cynical about the power of a distant central government to really affect changes for individuals on a local level. True also, the economy is great right now, and there may be another depression down the road, but national crisis aside, it is local people NGO’s who do the best work. People can rebulid pride once they’ve fallen if they accomplish something–like repay a loan.

I just think that a progressive government would really bring about the thousand points of light by empowering local helpers. I know Big Papa will rag on this, saying I’m some stupid republican elitist robot, but wasn’t this thousand points of light business a liberal/progressive idea to begin with?

Consider the recent award of the Nobel prize to the Indian Billionaire who gave micro-loans to poor people to start businesses. There is a true win-win situation and the best recent example of “progressive” values in action.

Thanks.

Before you accuse me of lying, read the Talmud.

Specifically Kodashim Menahoth 43b-44a.

In it is specifically states a Jewish guy has to thank god every day for not being born a heathen, a woman, or a slave.

The Old South had an “ownership society” too. They were a lot more honest about it and called it what it was: SLAVERY.

Let me know when “Progressives” wake the hell up.

…you’re parroting ‘CON’servative talking points…

…if you’re a teacher and don’t believe your father at one time or another…

…had someone (either in his family or government) help him…

…then your parents wasted their money on your (supposed) education…

…understand this Chris…

…white privilege created not only upper and middle classes…

…it created an underclass…

…Jim Crow was not so long ago…

…and all one needs do is pay attention to the senate races in Virginia and Tennessee…

…to see that it ain’t gone at all…

…I don’t feel a need to insult you (personally)…

…just your selfish ideology…

…you know the one…

…”I’ve got mine…

…to hell with everybody else”…

you said “If you are Jewish and male you wake up every day and pray to god to thank him for not making you female”

That is SO untrue that it makes me sick that someone could even say that.

It is in fact, the man’s primary duty, to protect the woman, is so written into every law judaism has that it’s almost ingrained now.

In fact jewish law is so supportive of women, that even in marriage, the FIRST thing that is done, is provide for the women in the event the man leaves the marriage or something happens to him. It’s imperitive that women and children are taken care of in the jewish religion.

You know, you have probably gotten government help without even realising it. A loan for university, or a higher salary because yonks ago there was a teachers union that lobbied for it, that sort of thing. Heck if you are a teacher unless you work for a private school, you are getting paid to help people’s kids and that is a kind of welfare.

A lot of the protections brought by liberals are so ingrained in America that you probably don’t even think about them. It is the sort of stuff you take for granted, but it is there.

With public welfare, the system is there to catch people when they fall. Most of the time it is not intended to be a permanent state people find themselves in, but rather a means of giving people the ability to get up and get on with living. Private welfare is good, but it does not have the same power as public welfare, and in the event of another Great Depression, public welfare means at least there will be the infrastructure available to deal with it.

It is not something which comprises as big a percentage of America’s budget, it is something which you actually need (A lot of money was wasted in the New Deal because the system was new then, it has been slowly tightened since) and it is something which most people don’t pay any attention to. Realise before public welfare, even before the Great Depression, there was starvation in America. Now there is obesity.

Cool poem, man.

Read my post, I’ll be the first to admit I may be blinded, that’s why I’m here reading.

I’m a teacher, and no, I don’t think I’m the best one that ever lived. My dad started his own business cleaning offices and never got rich. But he didn’t depend on others.

Why do you feel the need to insult me? Is that a great part of your progressive ideal? I thought progressives were the “good” people–open minded and willing to engage in debate.

As far as helping other people goes, this ideal is best left to the private sector. Most of the good done here in Milwaukee is done by community groups and individuals. They know the people and the problems, government institutions know how to secure their wages and cling to power. Government should empower people willing to help by giving them money and staying out of their way.

By the way, I loved “al Cracker”–that was a great one!