2011 Spare Change

These days the sky hangs like a wet gray sheet over the Central Valley. My cats use the outdoors now only for private business practices, and then scurry back inside to snooze and munch some treats as their daily ritual of marking the calendar one repetitive scratch after the other. The overcast beats record rainfall, but crummy days and the same forecasts dampen the spirits.

A new year, 2011, with so much old moldy laundry from years past still hanging on the lines or soaking the hampers. The nation passed a health care reform bill in 2010. No one in America can say it was a perfect solution to the giant mess that health care costs and practices evolved into over a couple of centuries of neglect, but it moved the cylinders in the right direction while working to include more people who had been separated from the insured pile and were excluded from the health care cycle. Estimates peg those without health insurance at over 50 million right now.The reformed health care legislation does not fully start until 2014, so the nation will stagger for three full years before any real impact will be felt. This knowledge has not stopped the Republican Party from campaigning to repeal the reforms because they cost too much.

Yes, covering everybody with health insurance in a nation does cost a bundle. Ask the European nations and Japan, or Canada and Australia. The tax rates in those countries are significantly higher than the tax rates found here in America for all classes of people and trade. But, in those nations everyone gets covered and gets reasonable care. Here, we have a very small segment of our population in control of all the wealth, and these very elite people argue they are taxed too much. I would ask any of you reading these paragraphs how the Bush tax cuts made America a better place from 2002 to today's 2011. Leave a comment, and I'll read it and respond.

So, as 2011 gets fully underway we see the Bush Tax cuts extended. We see the small health care reforms enacted in 2010 threatened with repeal, and businesses showing no signs of adding significant numbers of jobs for all those displaced from the past three plus years of economic contraction. What is interesting to note is that those on Wall Street appear to be doing just fine. The Dow-Jones now stands at 11,700 points, which is a 44% gain over the low that occurred in March of 2009. As Tom Petty would say, "It's good to be King."

Here's an old dude who knows the score.



I hear my big cat call me. I need to rustle some dry salmon, and work on the chord changes of this song.