Our job is not to think small. It is to think big.
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Why are we so far behind so many other countries when it comes to meeting the needs of working families and the American middle class?
Why doesn’t every American have access to healthcare as a basic right?
Why can’t every American who is qualified get a higher education, regardless of family income?
Why can’t we have full employment at a decent living wage?
Why must many older Americans be forced to choose between paying for food, shelter, or medical care?
Why can’t working parents have access to affordable, high-quality childcare?
We should be asking questions like these every day. We have more billionaires in this country than any other nation on earth. We also have more child poverty than any other major industrialized nation. We have the highest rate of student debt. We have more prisoners, more homeless people and more economic inequality.
It doesn’t have to be this way. These conditions are the result of deliberate policy decisions. We provide outrageous tax loopholes for billionaires and large corporations. The top tax rate is less than half of what it was during the postwar economic boom. The real minimum wage has fallen dramatically since the 1960s.
We can make better choices. Let’s look at some of the issues that matter most to the American people:
Health Care for All
35 million Americans still lack health insurance. Millions of others are under-insured, with high deductibles and copayments that can make needed medical treatment unaffordable.
We are the only major industrialized country in the world that does not provide universal health care for all its citizens. Medicare is much more cost-effective than private insurers, and could serve as the foundation for a single-payer system like those in Great Britain, Spain, Norway, Italy, Iceland and Portugal. Other countries, including Japan, France, Germany, Canada and Denmark, provide universal coverage without a single-payer system but with better controls on costs and service.
If these countries can provide universal health care, why can’t we?
Tuition-Free Public Higher Education
Student debt has reached crisis proportions in this country. 41 million Americans are burdened with student debt. Student debt has surpassed credit card debt and is now the second-largest source of personal indebtedness in this country.
People who graduated in 2014 with student debt owed an average of $30,000 each. That’s unsustainable, and unforgivable.
College tuition is free in Germany, even for citizens of other countries. It’s also free in Denmark, Norway Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Mexico. If they can do it, why can’t we? Why do we accept a situation where hundreds of thousands of qualified people are unable to go to college because their families don’t have enough money?
Paid Family Leave
We are the only major nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid time off for new parents. Of 182 nations that do provide paid leave, more than half guarantee at least 14 weeks off.
In Great Britain, new mothers get 40 weeks of paid leave. 70 percent of countries offer paid leave to new fathers as well. Dads get two weeks of paid leave in Great Britain, Denmark, and Austria.
We are a nation that prides itself on its dedication to family values. Why can’t we ensure that new parents have time to bond with their children?
Sick Leave
Even when working Americans face a serious disease like cancer, they have no guarantee of paid sick leave.
The average worker in other developed countries is guaranteed paid sick leave for long-term cancer treatment, for periods that range from 22 days in Canada to 44 days in Germany and 50 days in Norway.
We are the only one of 22 wealthy nations that does not guarantee some type of paid sick leave. When will we join the rest of the world in ensuring that ailing workers can get well without going broke?
Paid Vacation
We are the only advanced economy, and one of only 13 nations in the entire world, that doesn’t guarantee workers a paid vacation. Workers in France get an entire month of paid time off every year. Scandinavian workers are guaranteed 25 paid vacation days per year. In Germany the figure is 20 days, and Japan and Canada each guarantee 10 paid vacation days per year.
It’s common (although not guaranteed) for higher-paid American workers to get some vacation time. But half of all low-wage workers in this country get no paid time off at all.
Overwork
Americans are overworked in other ways, too. Despite huge increases in productivity over the last 100 years, Americans continue to work some of the longest hours on earth. Vast majorities of working people (85.8 percent of men and 66.5 percent of women) work more than 40 hours per week. Compare that to a country like Norway, where only 23 percent of males and 8 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.
Every year Americans work 137 hours more than Japanese workers, 260 hours more than British workers, and 499 hours (62.3 days) more than French workers — despite the fact that productivity has risen 400 percent since 1950!
Other countries are moving in the opposite direction. Spain, Norway, and the Netherlands have all shortened their workweeks to 35 hours. Interestingly, those countries have higher productivity than those with a 40-hour workweek.
We’re also spending more years of our life at work. Millions of Americans are delaying retirement — and, in some cases, working until the day they die. Polls have shown that a third of Americans are afraid they will never be able to retire.
Inequality
We’re lagging behind in other areas too, ranging from childcare costs to internet access. We can and must do better. That means addressing the great economic, political, and moral issue of our time: wealth and income inequality. We have more inequality today than at any time since 1928. That is unacceptable.
We must send a simple message to the billionaire class: You can’t have it all.
They will argue, of course. So will the politicians who serve them. They will insist that we can’t do better, that we can’t have the same basic rights as citizens of other countries.
It’s time to ask them, and ourselves, a simple but very important question: Why not?
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4 Comments
One can confidently predict with 100% accuracy that the corporate candidate will win in 2016. THE CORPORATE CANDIDATE WILL WIN! George Carlin was 100% right when he said words to the effect that they don’t give a (pejorative) about you or your kids or the country.
Does this have anything to do with one man one vote, with the nature of a republic, with any definition of democracy? Hardly. Are the Dems or the G.O.P. capable of fielding a candidate who has permission from the real power elite to deal with existential problems that face the country and the world today? Over population, economic predation, climate chaos and environmental degradation and technology out-of-control threaten the species; these among a host of other populist issues are ignored. So vote, don’t vote in this dysfunctional two-party system. Not much if anything will change except our real pathologies will fester and further decay a society with infinite potential. In the mean time, do something every day to engage the real enemy. Occupy called them the 1%. Do this before we become as helpless as Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist in “1984.” Do this with the understanding that there is absolutely nothing legal about the surveillance state that today’s Big Brother has created that would put Orwell,s Big Brother to shame.
At this point people will ask, “But what can I do?” They ask this without realizing that they have just indicted the system. In a real republic such a question would be unthinkable. What more proof is needed that our system is dictatorial, oligarchic?
If not Bernie, Who?
Should we not vote? Percent of participants keeps dropping, the repubs are doing everything in their states to keep it low.
If the vote drops below 20% in a major election, can you call it democratic ?
Bernie know very well why not. It’s because the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, the Council of Foreign Relations and related banking and corporate interests aren’t the least bit interested. They’ve worked hard over the decades to scam the system and undermine the wellbeing of the populous.
This is the Greatest Show on Earth, Circus Maximus and Chomsky’s “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” all wrapped up in one big dog and pony show. It’s the art of distraction, and Big Brother is on track for pulling it off once again in 2016. Bernie is not the answer. We are the answer, and we’re running out of time.
Bernie Sanders:
Your entire essay is framed within the massively destructive paradigm of capitalism. Until you renounce the fundamental cause of human-caused climate change — an economic system contrived for the profit of the few regardless of its consequences for other lives, human and otherwise — misguided, misinformative response to “why not?” is nothing more than an apology for continuing along the same destructive, consumptive path of environmental and cultural exploitation for profit. If you really believed in turning the tide on inequality, health care and education for all — let alone allowing people to live in peace — you’d make a clear case for abandoning capitalism, and dissolving the financial system that continues to make economic profit for a very small proportion of humanity possible while most of the world lives with poverty, hunger, repression, warfare, and all the other manifestations of corporate-sponsored imperialism and terrorism. None of your platitudes about doing better will matter when the human life support system of global ecology becomes unlivable.
Moreover, you have written nothing to indicate that you resign your proven stance as a militarist and an advocate for continuing American imperialism and terrorism. As well, you clearly remain a supporter of Israeli apartheid and racism and American support for a government that, in addition to the U. S., continues to practice war crimes with impunity.
I read nothing more in your presumptuous essay than more vacuous rhetoric intended to manipulate American citizens into participating in the charade of democracy and corporate-bought elections. Like every other corporate-beholden politician — apologists all for the status quo destruction of life — you are nothing but a fraud!