Not that you asked
I still have two more comments on that Republican debate. I just love beating a dead elephant. These comments are about climate change and income inequality, things that never came up in the debate. Their omission alone should worry you if one of those people becomes the next President.
Climate change probably didn't come up because most Republicans don't believe it's real, and the few that do don't think man has anything to do with it. They're wrong on both counts, but rather than arguing with them, let's just try to agree on two points. One is that coal is the worst energy source we use. The other is that it just makes sense to take care of this planet.
We can all agree that coal is dirty. We can all agree that coal pollutes the air and water. We can all agree that coal mining is dangerous. Why can't we agree to wean ourselves off of it, and use other clean alternatives like solar and wind? Money. Like everything else, it always comes down to the money. The people making piles of money from coal don't want to lose it, and they have enough of that money to lobby Congress to keep us tied to coal.
As for the Republicans in and out of Congress arguing against switching from coal to other forms of energy, they remind me of how the naysayers might have reacted when we were switching from real horsepower to cars with horsepower. I'm sure that back then, those people were saying that switching to cars was going to cost jobs, and that cars were too expensive, just like the pro-coal gang is doing now. Well, those guys were wrong back then, and these guys are wrong today. The new energy sources will create new jobs, and the cost of solar and wind continue to drop.
This planet is the only home we have. If it goes bad, we've had it. If there is any chance that changing the way we treat it could make it live longer, it just makes sense to make those changes. We lose nothing by trying and everything to lose if we don't.
Likewise when you start talking about income inequality, Republicans and conservatives start screaming that you're talking about redistributing wealth, and they are right. Right now the top 10 percent are getting 90 percent of the wealth while the other 90 percent are getting 10 percent. Everybody in the workforce contributes to the creation of that wealth. No job is unimportant. If a job wasn't needed, it wouldn't have been created. They should all benefit from that wealth. Here's an example of what I mean.
Suppose there are two grocery stores in a town. One store has low prices. The other store has inflated prices. The bathrooms in the store with low prices are filthy, and smell like the inside of someone's colon. The bathrooms in the store with inflated prices are spotless and pristine, and have no odor. Where do you think most of the people in town are going to buy their groceries? If you picked the store with the clean bathrooms, you deserve a gold star.
The owner of the store with clean bathrooms can have inflated prices, and most of the town's business just because his maintenance man keeps his bathrooms clean. Shouldn't that man expect to make a living wage?
Another consequence of low wages is that workers are forced to use food stamps and other forms of government assistance just to get by. That means that taxpayers subsidize the workforce of almost every large business. Companies making record profits shouldn't expect the rest of us to do that.
So there you have it. We need to take better care of this planet, and workers should make a living wage. To me those are issues that people who want to be President should be talking about. Unfortunately, none of the Republicans who want that job agree with me.
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