OK, let's get some ugliness off my chest. First off, I do not think that everything President Obama did was wonderful. Contrary to the Republicans though, I do not think his entire agenda was wrong and should be undone as quickly as possible. Starting with medical care, do we live in a country that actually believes everyone doesn't deserve affordable medical care? By affordable, I don't mean that getting cancer leaves you a choice of treatment which will bankrupt you, or choosing no treatment, because it will leave your family in better financial position. I recall reading that "for profit" medical centers have a higher issue of welfare fraud than "non profit," and if this is true, perhaps the government is wrong in just looking at insurance as a solution. (This link isn't the article I had in mind, which was read a bit ago, but shows the various medical frauds from 2015, both of the insurance industry and medicare. It also doesn't say which are for profit or non profit. Regardless, the amount of fraud is staggering.) Since all the fraud mentioned in that article wasn't just against medicare, but also against insurance companies, it isn't something that can simply be put to government incompetence, as private industry has a problem with it as well.
Back to my original point, do we really want to live in a country that can't or won't provide basic medical care to people. Broken bones happen, but for fast food workers or retail employees, if they don't happen at work, prior to the Affordable Care Act, they didn't make the money to pay for treatment without going into significant debt. I know a lot of people bitch and moan about the minimum wage, but if you are working for it, there isn't much chance that you are saving anything, after rent, utilities, and food, and if you are saving for something, an accident will put you back at nothing, whether that money was for school, a vacation, or, ironically, helping out family with medical bills. Republicans began to really get an earful after the election, and while they are still going to try and dismantle the programs, their voters at least have them doing it with a bit more thought and a bit less glee. They care about the vote, not the voter, which is to say they don't really care.
Another gross example of not caring is Trump executive order on immigration. He did not vet this with the agencies involved and he did not think about how it would impact our allies, or those living, working, and studying in this country. He didn't care and just made his proclamation, with the fallout damaging pretty much everything. Follow that up with his conversation with the Australian PM, in which he argued about a refugee agreement Obama had made. The agreement, according to the Australian PM, was for 1250 refugees to be accepted in the US after proper vetting. Trump was arguing 2000, which is a significant overstatement. Trump does have a way of exaggerating things. While the women's march was a scheduled event, last weekend's spontaneous airport protests were brought on by Trump's callous handling of immigration regulations.
Government has almost always been accused of being cold and faceless, insisting on the regulations, regardless of if they made sense. Trump is giving his face to this ugly bureaucracy by showing no care whatsoever for his actions or their consequences. He has a steep learning curve, and he is still carping about Schwarzenegger and his "The Apprentice" ratings.
I guess that is it for now, though I may try to write something a bit later about something other than politics. In my opinion, since private industry was unable to affordable insure all Americans, then the government does have the obligation to step in. We are not a pure capitalist society, because if we were the robber barons and monopolists from the nineteenth & early twentieth century would still have their mini empires; instead, we are a mixed system, capitalist principles tempered by government restrictions, lest we live in a polluted world working 80 hours weeks for below a living wage. Americans are better than that, and our government needs to be as well.
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