Our Children's Eyes

Today I watched C-SPAN. Yeah I can't believe it either. But I found it very interesting to listen to the various Senators speak about the "stimulus" bill. Many of the Senators made good points. Senator Dodd (D-CT) spoke about how this bill will provide increased funding for firefighters in his state. I am all for that. I believe that government should pay for roads, bridges (as mentioned by Senator Klobuchar (D-MN)), schools, fire and police services, and the military. Those are the purposes for which government was designed.

Most agreed our country needs help at this time to recover from the financial crisis we are currently facing. It is currently written to give money to people and projects. I believe it should be written to provide people with opportunities and means to make their own money. We have all heard the adage "Give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime." This bill only gives fish.

Let me use an example. You have just been laid off from a factory. You went to work at a factory right after you graduated from high school. It was good money and took very little if any training. You have worked there for 10 years. During that time you choose not receive and further education or training because you were making plenty of money working in the factory. You may even have had previous generations of your family who worked their whole lives at the factory and you were intending to do the same. Now you have been laid off and are uncertain if you will ever be called back to the factory. You have a choice to make. As many people do when they lose a job.

You can continue to look for factory work while the number of available industrial jobs decreases daily. You can look for work somewhere where you need little education or training but Burger King just doesn't pay well enough. You could go back to school and become trained in another field, possibly a field which is growing like computers, science, or health care. Or now there will be another option. You can take a job which pays well doing construction on government buildings or roads or bridges.

The government is just create a temporary fix for a problem which will just resurface when all of the government buildings are "green" and all the roads have been repaved. The problem is that as a country we are moving away from manufacturing. The simple fact is people need more education to survive in the workplace than they ever have before. People need programs to help them get trained in more technical fields. Potentially, lower interest student loans. Maybe even forgiveness of student loans. Teach them to fish. Give them the tools to succeed in the new economy.

Finally, today on C-SPAN, Senator Coburn (R-OK) spoke. He gave a beautiful and well thought out speech. If you can get your hands on it I recommend you listen to it. He made the point that no one had had a chance to even read the whole bill. He stated that because of the speed with which it was being pushed through Congress it was a sloppy bill. In the upcoming months the bill would just have to be revised to fix all of the problems in it. Then he said that what we were really doing was taking a little bit of hope from our children's eyes tonight. The difference between the our children and those in third world countries is that our children have hope. This bill takes that hope from their eyes by burdening them with debts and problems. We are not making this country better for them. We are just transferring our problems into their pockets. I am disappointed that this bill we pass tonight and I fear the problems we will face from it.