Get Ready to Solve Fake Problems and Ignore Real Ones
If I had to list out the biggest problems facing the United States right now, my list would look like this:
- Global warming, microplastics, PFAs and other systemic environmental threats to life
- Economic disparity & deaths of despair
- National security (Russia first, China second)
- Civil rights
- Gun deaths
If I were somehow appointed president, I would dedicate my energy to adjusting our economy to represent the true costs of inefficiencies in the system. I would not be leading a revolution, but an evolution — gradual, but expeditious, shifts in tax policy to increase truly sustainable forms of exchange and decrease the deleterious forms we’ve continued to subsidize, as if the clock read “Dawn of the 20th Century” and not “90 seconds to midnight.” I would focus on creating economic opportunity for all, not exacerbating the two-tiered system whereby a very small group can’t lose and a very large group can’t win.
However, I feel 99.99% confident that we won’t do any of that. We will instead be focused on a different set of things that are problems only to people with a wholly imaginary picture of where we’re headed and how we got here.
Focusing on the wrong problems is not just inefficient. It’s ruinous, especially now. Against existential threats, we have squandered all margin of error we had, so even fixing real problems that aren’t the most pressing problems would be ruinous. Doubling down on things that will actually make things worse is like seeing the cliff you’re driving towards, lighting a stick of dynamite, pressing your foot to the floor, and hitting the nitro. Here’s how that will likely look in the next four years.
- Illegal immigration and immigrant crime.
Illegal immigration seems bad, and seeing people pour through every physical gap in the border is insane. However, the harm is completely overstated. Immigration is critical to our economy. Immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than naturalized citizens. Scaring even illegal immigrants away will crimp the economy.
And yet, this is top of the agenda.
2. Government waste.
Could government be more efficient? Of course. It always can.
Is government waste really to blame for our insane national balance sheet? No, it’s tax cut after tax cut, dating back to Reagan, Bush, Bush again, and Trump. We keep slashing revenues, because a certain libertarian strain has long infected our national thought. No government! Let’s be truly free!
There’s far greater risk to slashing government programs (and really, let’s be honest about the aim — undermining the very concept of an administrative state) than letting the waste continue.
More effective government should be the aim, but that’s not remotely what you will get from two shadow cabinet members who named their initiative after a meme coin, like two giggling 13-year old boys.
3. Taxation.
The taxes are too darn high!!
That’s been the cry from the right for years, and it’s like offering kids a candy bar. Even if the kid has a raging case of type 2 diabetes and a BMI of 204, they won’t turn you down. They should.
Taxes — especially federal taxes — are too low, where they count: at the top of the income scale. Why can some people not lose, while others can’t win? Because marginal tax rates for the very rich are historically low, and the IRS is outgunned by an army of private tax attorneys and wealth managers.
4. DEI
I can almost guarantee you that the sum total disadvantage suffered by white people during the brief shining era of DEI wouldn’t even amount to .0001% of the disadvantage suffered by people of color over the history of the United States; but a lot of people are dedicating a lot of time to ending even the mildest of efforts meant to create truly equal opportunity.
5. Gender-affirming care and abortion
The people who supposedly hate big government and believe government shouldn’t be meddling in people’s private affairs want…government meddling in certain people’s private affairs. They want to overrule medial professionals on both women’s reproductive health and gender care, both incredibly nuanced and personal spaces.
It’s done under the banner of preventing harm to children, because: of course. Should we trust a group of people who spent years claiming that the protection of children necessitated supporting a fictional character who was fighting a fictional child-sex ring being run by those criminal masterminds, the Democrats?
Fun fact: the guy who inspired “Sound of Freedom” has been alleged to be a sexual predator himself, and the man who was almost the new top law enforcement official in all the land was accused of committing statutory rape. Should the esteem vested by the incoming party of power in people like these be disqualifying, when they say anything about protecting kids?
Spoiler alert: that was a rhetorical question.
We’re going to spend the next four years working extremely hard to make our nation more comfortable for rich, white men. Rich white men, despite the clumsy request from the “radical left” (of which there is no such thing in this country) to respect some pronouns and stop strangling black motorists on a whim, are already quite comfortable and probably will be, no matter what, except for one small thing: the deviation in global temperature is going to stay above 1.5 degrees Celsius. In fact, it’s going to keep getting worse. All the wishing and hoping for another ice age or a strong La Nina won’t do a thing to slow down our inexorable trajectory.
We’ll all be deeply and increasingly uncomfortable with every passing year, and while the rich might eke out another year or two past the point of no return, to paraphrase a certain comic book: the sun shines on the just and unjust alike.
Sooner or later, ignoring the real problems will kill us all. And on that day, even I won’t want to say, “I told you so.” I’ll be too busy dying of thirst, hunger, or both.
