Everybody deplores the state of the nation these days. Fingers get pointed at immigration, gay people, drag queens, critical race theory, general “immorality.”
I never hear anything about the real state of the nation. A nation in which 3.4% of all non-farm employment is in the insurance industry, and the combined insurance and finance industry employed an estimated 6,430,000 people in 2019, at an average salary of $91,866, with more than 1.5 million Realtors as of April this year.
Can we thrive when almost 20% of our GDP goes to health care, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 429,800 people were employed as “medical and health services managers” in 2020, at a median salary of $104,280 a year, with expectations that the number of these jobs will increase by 32% between 2020 and 2030?
Is this even close to sustainable when more than 2 million people are incarcerated, about 5 million more are out on probation or parole, and more than 700,000 make their living in the prison industry?
What happens when a society like this elects leaders whose main — often sole — goal is to reduce taxes for those who are prospering, greatly reducing the funds available to government to try to redress some of the deep harm inflicted on the people who are in the lower half of this economy?
This is a country? The state of the nation is, indeed, dismal, but not because of the reasons people scream about.
Lee Russ
Bennington