Michael H. Brownstein
Jefferson City
Dear Editor:
I do not want to join in the adoration/bashing of Obama. Nor do I want to join the adoration/bashing of Trump. I just want to make a few comments.
Did we not learn anything over the forcible removal of children from their parents during slavery and the Jim Crow rule? It’s been 150 years now and we are still paying billions — if not more — for this travesty that continues today with inequalities all around us. Or how about the forced removal of the Native child from the reservation into boarding schools? We are still paying for its negative impact, too. When did it become OK to remove a child from their parents because they did something illegal even though they had their family’s best interests at heart? When are we going to realize children are not criminals and the forcible separation of child from parent is wrong — and very costly?
The health care system is broken. The Affordable Care Act did not fix it, but it made inroads toward fixing it. More people were insured and healthier than ever before. The act included a free annual physical. Health insurance companies became very wealthy. Walgreen’s is now a member of the Dow Jones 30. But now that much of the act has been discarded, what do we have? We have the same broken system we had before. When an uninsured individual gets hospitalized and cannot afford to pay for their care, we pay for it through higher insurance premiums, higher hospital costs, higher taxes and higher national debt. Bad decisions mean spending more money now and into the future.
Now, the economy. “This week we are celebrating the fact the U.S. economy has entered its ninth year of growth, which has allowed for GDP to expand 12 percentage points above pre-crisis levels and for the creation of 16 million jobs.” This from a European website: http://thecorner.eu/world-economy/nine-years-of-economic-growth-in-the-us/65579/. This is great news. Let’s look at the number of years this great economic growth took place: nine. Trump has been president for about two of them. Someone else was president for the other seven. Let’s give credit to where credit is due.
Lastly, a comment on climate change. If NASA and the Smithsonian — two serious and reliable American institutions — claim climate change is real, then it must be.