Ghettos——Cause and Reduction/Elimination, Part 2
The following is based on the assumption that Government is responsible for the kind of communities which exist within it’s borders. If our formative years were not a suitable environment for the development of a healthy body and mind—well, as a child we were not to blame. If ‘family values’ as a term only applies to immediate family, then such a society is in trouble. If ‘family values’ is not meant in the sense Jesus and other major prophets used the term as ‘human family values’, then global peace and prosperity cannot be attained. If the needs of a society do not trump individual family values, then human society, as some of us more affluent live, is doomed. The ‘have nots’ will cause societies to implode as they have in the historical past. Not having a a reasonably balanced distribution of wealth is a death knell to societies.
To eliminate or reduce the size of our ghettoes in this country (or the world), responsible reproduction is an absolute necessity. To shrug our shoulders and dismiss this as “well this is never going to happen” is simply to endorse massive species destruction, including our own species. There is no wiggle room here. Imagine if all the citizens of our own country were required to live in Iowa. Hard to imagine isn’t it? Well, that’s about the density of Bangladesh today. And when the oceans rise, Bangladesh will lose one third of it’s land mass. On my! Not to worry, Trump the Charlatan Intellect, assures us climate change is just a hoax.
Priorities always matter. We spend more on military matters than all of the other industrialized countries put together and yet we really haven’t won a war since Korea if we disregard Grenada and the Balkans. Using modern day weapons to invade other countries and ’save’ them in wars where the enemy is not in uniform is pointless. After we pulverized any infrastructure worth destroying and killed hundreds of thousands, sent million of refugees streaming into countries who don’t want them—then tired of the invasion after endless years and leave—the only thing certain is that the invaded country will then be run by roving bands of thugs while violence begets violence will rule the day. Then add terrorism to the mix and we have a catastrophe. On top of that the citizens of our country (the invader) will be a prime target of terroristic vengeance. Sounds a tad familiar doesn’t it? Even worse, we didn’t save any country, and instead we now behave more and more like them with violence, terrorism, intolerance, widespread worker dissatisfaction with salaries, health care, pensions, etc soaring at an exponential rate.
America has always been the best leader when we lead by example. We need forget military bases all over the world. They are worthless to us except to maintain all these global invasions. And that approach to foreign policy is not working out too well.
The first priority, as mentioned, is a government mandate that enforces responsible reproduction. This is a musing unto itself so for now, we let this just be a statement. Yet we need remember that little else we do matters in the not so long run without global responsible reproduction.
Next, we need to abandon the use of property taxes as the primary basis for funding education. Property tax collection in ghettos is not exactly a huge revenue generation. All children in any society deserve to have the same amount of money spent on them for education. It always stuns me when people who support the use of property taxes to fund schools say, “Throwing money at this problem is not the answer”. Well then fine, we can just reverse the situation and use the money collected from property taxes in the ghettos and use that to fund schools in affluent areas and use the property tax money collected in affluent areas to fund the schools in the ghettos. After all, money is not the answer the affluent claim.
The above two are a good start. Now let’s look at the kind of matters that citizens are concerned about in their lives. Quality of education is one. Safe environment is another. Job opportunities is another. Good health care is another. Good pensions are another. Livable wages is another. Maybe I missed something here, but this gives us a good start. A workable political system is another ,and right now we don’t have that either. Responsible reproduction and a workable political system are the two biggest hurdles we face on the planet today. Those are the toughies.
The rest of the hurdles are more manageable. The federal government should take responsibility for collecting tax money for education and then it should be distributed to all school districts across the country so that the same amount of money is available to educate all children. Curriculum would be controlled by individual school districts. Competition is good and those curriculums which produce the best results will be copied. If there are curriculum matters to be voted on these votes should probably be limited to those who have children in the schools. They have the most vested interest to vote for the best schooling.
At this point it becomes true that money isn’t everything. Science has advanced enough now that we know, for children to develop properly during their formative years, they cannot maximize the development of their genetic potential if they suffer from chronic high levels of stress hormones in their blood. Thus, we need to keep track of these hormones via periodic blood tests. The reasons for chronic high levels of stress hormones will vary and the solutions will often be quite difficult. And of course, just who is it that will spend so much time working on a solution for an individual child? Well, computers have realistically halved the amount of time any teacher may need to spend giving lectures to the class. Half the time the students can be busy on their computers and kids like using gadgets to learn things from anyway. Naturally this means each child needs to have their own computer lap top. Of course some people will scream bloody murder at the government spending money to buy all students a computer. Then again, most parents end up spending their own money to do this, so they actually save money since everyone is taxed not just those with children.
Now to the most challenging aspect here. Sometimes chronic high levels of stress hormones can be from stress in the school environment (bullying, social interaction problems, etc.) These problems are not a one approach fits all kind of matter, but in most cases the situation can be made better. And every time we make it better we are helping the affected student better develop their potential during their formative years. Many times the chronic high levels of stress hormones are from home situations. This requires a substantial encroachment into family situations. The idea that parents are without reproach in their family matters, as it relates to children, needs to be substantially tweaked. If a child has chronic high levels of stress hormones in their blood and the problem is not limited to the school environment, then it is time for family consultations with teachers and social services about the situation. And yes, all teachers will need to take additional course work to ensure they understand how to evaluate chronic high levels of stress hormones in a child’s blood. To set up this evaluation procedure for every student with chronic high levels of stress hormones is a massive undertaking. Thus, the immediate question is just where does all this money come from to properly run our educational systems? Well there are a lot of potential avenues to reduce expenditures. Some include, in no particular order:
Reduced expenditures on military matters including all these overseas military bases. Other countries don’t have them, so exactly why is it we need them except for a vain attempt to control the rest of the world or be the world’s policemen? It isn’t exactly working out is it? How many countries can an American safely wander around without being a member of a tour group gawking at architecture, buildings, and dining on fine cuisine. If we wanted to really understand a country then we would be better off living with a middle class family for a month. The buildings can be seen on large screen TVs at home and so can fine dining be found at home.
We should change our situation of having 25% of the world’s prisoners in our jails at a cost of $30,000/yr. How many people have been arrested for selling or using marijuana since 1970? “In 1973, there were 328,670 arrests reported by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for drug law violations, out of a total 9,027,700 arrests nationwide for all offenses. In 2015, there were 1,488,707 arrests for drug law violations out of a total 10,797,088 arrests nationwide for all offenses.” I will make no attempt here to go into great depth about statistics. When changes are made to a society that involve expenses, the experts have to crunch the numbers. The point here is simple enough: This ignorant War on Drugs, which we have given high priorities to since 1970 has not reduced drug use—in fact as our ghettos grew in size drug use grew at an exponential rate. We tried mandatory sentences, in part so more politicians could get elected with this promise while our prison population has soared, young people selling marijuana (if poor) were given sentences as harsh as ten yeas, and all this at a cost of $30,000 a year/inmate. So if the kid is in jail for 10 years that is $300,000 for one street smart ghetto ‘punk’. Wow. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to give him $200,000 and let him retire on it? I’ll try a wild guess here, let’s say we averaged 800,000 drug arrests per year since 1970. Let’s say the average time in jail was 5 years and this is a total guess—well hell, others can fiddle with the math. Let’s just say the obvious. We have been spending billions of dollars a year to sustain 25% of the prisoners in jail worldwide. And this just managed to permanently terminate meaningful employment for millions of Americans. Like who is eager to hire someone who has spent meaningful time in jail for drug charges?
I know, the first things I suggest here to reduce are the very things we are superior to compared to other countries—military expenditures and our police/politician/prison system War on Drugs . These are the two areas we lead the world while other industrialized countries put more money into education, health care (not really, as we don’t have the best health care for all our citizens, but by far the most expensive health care system), mass transit, and so on.
When we shift priorities, there are massive shifts in where money is going and where the money in is coming from. For example, when 45% of Americans pay no federal income tax (it keeps going up) and 77.5 million households do not pay any federal income tax, then this puts a massive tax burden on the paying middle class to offset the poor paying in nothing and the very wealthy paying taxes on very little of their income. Plus, if more people had jobs paying a livable wage, millions of people would not have to work two jobs, there would be more jobs available, and the amount of tax money coming into the the government would rise substantially. People who work decent paying jobs have money to spend and this stimulates the economy, and puts more people to work. On top of this, if the 2-5% of our citizens who own 90% of our wealth had to pay legitimate tax rates on this wealth via progressive income tax rates and inheritance taxes, the amount of money coming into the treasury from putting more people to work at decent paying jobs and forcing the real wealthy to pay taxes on all this wealth they own, well—it is obvious we would have an exponential increase in tax revenue, which combined with downsizing worthless military expenditures, treating the war on drug abuse as a medical problem instead of a criminal problem—with just all this we would be suddenly wallowing in massive amounts of money to be spent on a high quality, more just educational system. In addition, the whole idea of using machines instead of humans to perform a lot work was to reduce the work week from so many people working 70-80 hours per week. And this worked, the work week for most fell from 70 0r 80 downward until it hit 40hr/wk and then it froze. A full time work week today should probably be 30 hr/wk. This would help full employment and enable more people to deal with the stresses of modern environments.
When I think of our government welfare mentality in this country I think of the saying: “Give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.” Welfare in our country has always been geared to giving someone a fish for a day. Come Thanksgiving, the affluent staff the soup kitchens in their area and cleanse their conscience about the less fortunate. So it just seems the time is ripe to give all students good schools and good teachers, good health care, a safe neighborhood, and job opportunities. That is the collective duty of all citizens. That is how the Golden Rule works in reality. If we are willing to receive, we have a duty to give. Societal needs trump individual needs. A disturbing image is that some of these medically ‘damaged’ products of the ghetto are often booked on Judge Judy so we can all be amused by Judge Judy, raised in wealth, and earning $47 million per year, belittle these victims of the ghetto during their formative years. The offspring of the rich can be damaged via chronic stress during their formative years too, but the likelihood is much less, except for the offspring of the very wealthy who are often emotionally imbalanced for different sort of reasons.
There is another saying that bears attention: “It takes a village to raise a child”. All parents are not good parents. Some parents, for varied reasons, simply cannot be good parents. Today we pretty much say to those kids with poor parents: “Tough luck, you have what you have.” We too much blame victims, and this tendency is never more in place than today. When someone says ‘black lives matter’ most non blacks will say, “Well then concentrate on all the killing, robbery, and assault that goes on in your own black neighborhoods” I see, blaming the kids who grow up to perpetuate the ghetto environment will certainly correct the problem. It is, to many people, a genetic thing or a religious thing, or a culture thing. We know a lot of parenting, at all levels of society, varies considerably. Science now tells us that in addition, if children are allowed to go through their formative years with chronically high levels of stress hormones, then many of these children will end their formative years with damaged physiology, damaged emotional states, damaged mental abilities—but we still act angry when we see damaged products of their formative years behave ‘like animals’. Maybe if we allow children to be raised as animals they may end up acting like animals. Then we blame it on genetics.
Another statement which comes to mind about the current nature of our society is this: "I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is." (Catholic Nun)
Priorities tell us a lot about any society. Right now our society values the elderly (mostly because they vote) and pegs social security benefits to any rise in the cost of living. We highly value our own family via ‘family values’. We value the very wealthy (they mostly control the three branches of government) and we give them endless tax breaks, tax deferments, tax exemptions, tax shelters, and so on until some of the wealthiest don’t even pay any taxes and most of the affluent pay a smaller percentage of taxes on their income than the poorest who do have to pay income tax. We don’t value the poor since the minimum wage is not pegged to any rise in the cost of living. If the minimum wage had gone up with the cost of living since 1955 it would roughly $22. We are not really sick of welfare, just sick of providing ever increasing costs of welfare to the poor. I, for example, pay no state tax on my pension. I only have to pay a 15% tax on my capital gains from stocks. I get huge tax deductions on my charitable contributions. And the game goes on and on, with the affluent and wealthy getting endless ways to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. In the meantime, the poor guy who pushes a wheelbarrow around all day and makes enough to pay taxes, gets no tax relief and will pay at a tax rate 3-4 times what I pay for shuffling papers around. In other words, today many of us tend to resent welfare to the poor and turn a blind spot to where most government welfare goes—to the affluent and the wealthy. Finally, the cost of taxes should go up automatically with the cost of living. Right now we have the absurd situation in which a politician cannot get elected unless they promise to reduce taxes. This means the national debt will continue to soar because the cost of living for government operations goes up too. Even worse, any tax cuts invariably are huge for the wealthy and chump change for what’s left of the middle class. All the poor get is reduced safety nets in an attempt by politicians to reduce expenditures of government at their expense.
This is not the kind of musing best written in long lengths. There are too many aspects for focus to be kept very long, both in reading the epistle and writing it. In the end, the ‘devil is in the details’ and of course I am not the one to effectively provide the details. So I will stop here and Part 3 will follow when I find the mood to refocus on this topic. For government to provide suitable communities for all their citizens is no small task, but not solved, the society which is ruled by that government is doomed.
