WE SHOULD INCLUDE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW APPROPRIATE OUR FOUNDING FATHER'S THINKING IS TO OUR COUNTRY IN THESE TIMES AS OUR VIEWS EFFECT ON THE USA

Our decisions should include a review of our our forefather's thoughts including admonitions http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/federalist.html

Four charts follow which allow you to vary some things such as state or other variables depending upon the chart and see our country's parameters which a partial indicator of its fiscal health"

1. Historic Federal Deficit

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1903_2010&view=1&expand=&units=p&fy=fy10&chart=G0-fed&bar=0&stack=1&size=m&title=US%20Government%20Spending%20As%20Percent%20Of%20GDP&state=US&color=c&local=s

2. Local Government Spending As Percent Of GDP

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1903_2010&view=1&expand=&units=p&fy=fy10&chart=F0-local&bar=0&stack=1&size=m&title=US%20Government%20Spending%20As%20Percent%20Of%20GDP&state=US&color=c&local=s

3. State Spending As Percent Of GDP

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1903_2010&view=1&expand=&units=p&fy=fy10&chart=F0-state&bar=0&stack=1&size=m&title=US%20Government%20Spending%20As%20Percent%20Of%20GDP&state=US&color=c&local=s

4. Federal Government Spending As Percent Of GDP

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1903_2010&view=1&expand=&units=p&fy=fy10&chart=F0-fed&bar=0&stack=1&size=m&title=US%20Government%20Spending%20As%20Percent%20Of%20GDP&state=US&color=c&local=s


If the essay, Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose. By Scott W. Atlas.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/49525427.html

which discusses the following list of points:

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.

2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.
3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.
4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.
5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.
6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. 7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed.
8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians.
9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain.
10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.
is accurate, a major revamp of the system would be unwise.

There are several less dramatic and potentially disruptive changes that can be implemented in an attempt to improve what we currently have in place.

1. Work with Massachusetts and/or Tennessee who have problems with a government healthcare program to experiment on smaller scale
2. Solve the problems with MediCare/MediCaid to establish a better system which can be scaled up once it is accomplished
3. Implement tort reform to help lower the errors & omissions exposure and unnecessary work to avoid exposure
4. Streamline paperwork requirements to maintain the compliance requirements, but reduce the percentage of a medical professional's time required for compliance instead of patient care
5. Protect medical professional's ability to be rewarded in return for their commitment of time and money to become a medical professional or give them incentives. A heavily regulated medical profession will discourage people from going into the medical profession and lower the ratio of professionals to patients.
6. Allow people to shop for health insurance nationally so that competition creates a better market for the consumer
7. Keep the government out of the competition so that the competative market is not skewed by an entity supported by tax dollars rather than performance.

One of the biggest mistakes which I have seen over the past years is our failure to look at fiscal policies of a state like California which has very good public employee benefits and whose policies are heavily influenced by unions. I concede that there are a lot of variables, but the high percentage of public spending is what the federal government is now increasing and that, along with government spending as a percentage of GDP are two critical indicators of the health of our nation. The nation is not identical to California, but some of the policies affecting those ratios seem like they would be modeled by California.

Tom McClintock warned California long before the current crisis about the impending problems, but no one wanted to do what was necessary at a cost to them. There is a serious issue with private enterprise and government in that they will sacrifice the long term good to look good in the short term and that can create devastating long term results.

http://mcclintock.house.gov/2009/06/tough-love-for-california.shtml

McClintock wrote on June 9, 2009, "Today, California faces a paradox: despite record levels of spending and borrowing, it can no longer produce a decent road system, educate its children, or lock up its prisoners. Those who blame the recession for California’s budget crisis profoundly misunderstand the nature of that crisis. Even before California’s revenue began to shrink, the state government was running a chronic $10 billion deficit and piling up unprecedented debt. The recession is merely the catalyst; the underlying cause is rampant mismanagement of the state’s resources. California spends $43,000 to house a prisoner while many states spend just half that. California spends over $11,000 per pupil, but only a fraction of that ever reaches the classroom. California has one of the most expensive welfare systems in the country and yet one of the worst records of moving people off welfare. "

I like “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” -- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand - Encourage private enterprise and competition without tainting the market with to much government interference and reward success. I cannot believe that collected tax revenue would increase dramatically and it would be from non-public burden jobs.

We would do well to move slowly after a clear definition of reality and analysis of the information rather than moving incredibly fast with a huge volume of unread changes to the way our system functions. I suspect the Trilateral Commission comprised of Politicians, Big Business men and Union Management know more about how some of the changes develop than they would like us to know. Our country is in the shape it is in because the attitude has been, "He may be a crook, but he is my crook." That feels good only until we experience what we currently have and we are sliding over the world economic cliff to a lower position on the ranking of economic powers. The parameters above are what determine the price we pay to borrow money in the international market and the effect of paying borrowing with additional borrowing is like paying credit cards with draws on other credit cards.