True Change

Fred Wilson has a great post up on AVC on what our country needs right now. And it's change. A lot of it. Our country is so screwed in so many ways - broken healthcare and education, crumbling foreign relations, and now this $700 billion (actually the new version is closer to $800 billion, I believe) bailout plan. Not to mention, we don't have the money for any of this, and we're plunging deeper in debt. This paragraph, in my mind, summed up what we need to do:

We have global ambitions that we cannot afford but we still pretend we can. We have tax revenues that do not cover our spending. And we don’t have the will to cut our spending. And in many cases, we cannot afford to cut our spending. We should not cut our spending on infrastructure, we should increase it. We should not cut our spending on finding cleaner and smarter forms of energy, we should increase it. We should not cut our spending on education, we should increase it. We should not live with the terrible health care system we currently have, we should fix it. And we continue to spend money on things like tax breaks for oil companies and subsidies for farmers that mystify me and most Americans. And we spend a lot of money fighting vices like drugs, prostitution, and gambling when we should simply legalize them, tax them, and regulate them and turn them into a profit center.

Interesting thought, especially the last part. It might sound like blasphemy to some, but I think it's coming, sooner rather than later. We're just way too in debt to be worried about spending federal money to enforce laws of morality. They're fairly pointless - not only do they not work (as the Prohibition taught us, people will engage in these activities despite the laws), but they cost the federal government money. The government should making money on this stuff, not losing it.

Very, very interesting times ahead...