Glenn Beck: "Progressivism is the Cancer in America"

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This was said recently by Glenn Beck--whoever he is, and progressivism--whatever it is--is getting to be a major problem to many Americans.

The fact of the matter is that more and more of our incomes is being eaten away by taxes; so everyone focuses on the taxes.  The Government, meanwhile, has bigger and bigger problems, as America passes into middle age, gets filled with immigrants, we begin to realize that though most of us would like to be classified as middle-class, our educational backgrounds have not kept pace with the demands of the available employment.

It is technology that enables people with very little education to carry on like experts; Excel enables a mathematically inept person keep track of mathematical things; Word enables someone with terrible grammar and spelling skills write moderately well; Google enables someone who is essentially ignorant of world affairs to scrape together a fair amount of information for very little effort.  So the essential ignorance of the vast majority of citizens is masked by technology.

But this same technology makes greater demands on productivity and on workers.  You need to be a lot more hip than our ancestors and our predecessors to handle the requirements of the kinds of jobs there are, out there.  Being able to Google makes us look a little smarter than people of twenty years ago, but we need to be a lot smarter than they, because of the kinds of jobs out there.  So there are some very middle-class people (with middle class expectations), but with less than middle-class jobs, feeling poor and deprived and hostile to the government, which seems to be bent on helping freeloaders.

Life is harder for everybody, and more complicated for everybody.  The problems are more complicated: a few years ago, we did not have to worry that much of the commercial real estate in some of our large cities were owned by foreign banks, for instance, or that such a large proportion of the population of California spoke Spanish, or that security at Airports would be so restrictive.  We didn't know that the Internet would be a major source of information and disinformation, affecting elections and party affiliations, plagiarism and education.  In addition to the general falling-off of how well people do in school, now employers want you to be able to do all sorts of things that were never required before.  And we expect the Government (local government and State government) to provide a better education for our children so that they are employable, but also to do a better job with educating people who have fewer educational resources than ever before: people in low-income neighborhoods living in crowded conditions, in violent home environments.

A responsible administration has to respond to the fact that millions have lost jobs with employers whose revenues reacted to the bad economic conditions of the past year or two.  Millions have lost their homes.  And now, millions have lost their health insurance also.  Some sectors of the population would like the Government to ensure that basic health care is available to everyone.  Others do not like this, since it looks like it will take tax dollars from them.

Well, how progressive is it, really, to want to take care of the health needs of the population at any cost?  That's what I want.  I don't see it as progressive at all.  I see it as an essential way of looking after the weakest members of society.

In the last analysis, when future generations judge us, they will judge us not on how much of our earned income we got to keep, but on how well we looked after the weakest among us.

[P.S.  Just a remark about the weakest members of society.
It might seem reasonable to blame the poor and unemployed for their own problems, but this is by no means an obvious thing to assume.  Poverty has many sources; poverty begets poverty, and so a child born to parents of limited means will often remain poor throughout his or her life.  On the other hand, there are many people in poverty today who were born to middle-class parents.  Their economic conditions could have had their roots in a number of different circumstances: an employer going bankrupt, a sudden illness, the loss of a home to fire or accident, loss of limb, cancer, war, robbery, a traffic accident.  It's amazing how little imagination the wealthy have, when dismissing the poor as the cause of their own poverty.]

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