I'm Tired of the Theatrics, We Need Functioning Government

Enough is enough with the circus sideshow, it's past time to get serious

Last night’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was about what I expected (with some unpredicted twists—i.e. Haitians eating pets in Springfield, OH). Trump was unhinged, displayed a fragile ego, lacked anything resembling substance, and showed (for at least the millionth time in the last 9 years) that he is unqualified for any job, let alone the presidency.

Kamala was well-poised against the clown to her right and spoke confidently with a well-rehearsed message, though she was dodgy, deliberately light on policy, and was clearly there to bait the carnival barker more so than set out anything we hadn’t already seen. It’s a strategy I admittedly appreciated in that particular forum.

All that said, I’m tired. I’m struggling. Like most Americans I have debt issues ranging from credit cards to student loans. Unlike many Americans, fortunately, I haven’t resorted to obtaining desperately needed capital via home equity loans and lines of credit or refinancing, or had to declare bankruptcy. Millions of homeowners have taken out hundreds of billions of dollars by borrowing against the value of their home or payouts from refinancing. As of the second quarter of 2024, Americans owed $1.74 trillion in both federal and private student loan debt, according to lendingtree.com. The website also includes information showing that Americans have $1.142 trillion in credit card debt.

I need to lose a substantial amount of weight, at least 100-120lbs. The only way I have been able to accomplish weight loss in years is with the help of the injection drug Ozempic, used for the treatment of diabetes but also obesity. Drugs like it that have hit the market (Mounjaro, Wegovy, Zepbound) are incredibly popular as anti-obesity treatments that also help prevent or treat diabetes and heart disease. I was on Ozempic for a year-and-a-half, only to be kicked off because I was no longer prediabetic or a type 2 diabetes patient. I lost and kept off almost 40lbs in that time and lost several inches of fat, all of which I’ve gained back.

My health insurance premiums were going through the roof, so I switched to my wife’s plan so that we pay just one monthly insurance premium as a household and because her premiums, even adding me and my daughter, were cheaper. Just as I did so, I found out that her plan does not cover these drugs. The plan I left does, but we can’t afford two health insurance premiums monthly, especially since mine went up dramatically with inflation. These drugs cost just $5 per injection to produce and in countries like the Netherlands where the government can negotiate drug prices, they can be obtained very affordably. In the U.S. however, producers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk charge about $1,100 for a one-month supply simply because they can.

In West Virginia, our state’s cultural love affair with coal (we still get 91% of our grid energy from coal-fired power) is driving our energy rates through the roof, all while creating literally tons of coal slurry, coal ash, causing mountaintop removal and valley fill, and contributing massively to global climate change. West Virginians are supposed to have access to a program that helps us afford home energy efficiency improvements like new windows, doors, appliances, and insulation, and helps us install heat pumps for cheaper and more efficient heating and cooling, but the West Virginia Office of Energy is dragging its feet rolling that out over two full years after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided something like $44 million for these efforts in WV alone.

In addition to slow or nonexistent implementation of such programs, the programs overly rely on tax credits. For people who don’t itemize their taxes and just get the standard deduction, that’s not much help. For people who lack access to the capital to cover the upfront costs of these efficiency improvements, tax credits are no help at all. Even point-of-purchase rebates can provide little help if no funds are available to begin with, but at least they offer some assistance closer to when and how it’s really needed.

Going solar in West Virginia has become much easier, with multiple installation companies and financing options like leasing with no credit checks and no money down. But just so they can keep screwing us, the West Virginia Public Service Commission has decided to alter the net metering rates (the size of the credit solar customers get toward their energy bills for the energy they contribute to the grid) to offer solar customers less. I’d have to get a solar installation completed by or before October 31st to get grandfathered in on the better net metering rates and I am in no position to do so right now financially, even with leasing options.

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

My wife and I have both been part of the workforce in one way or another, and/or been putting ourselves through college, since we were 15-years-old (at least when my wife wasn’t forced on to disability via post-partem cardiomyopathy in her teens, which she had to fight for years to get, and then pay the attorney who fought for her, all for about $700 a month). We’re now in our late 30s with multiple degrees and certifications between us and great careers as public employees, mine a union job (I’m a union steward and recruiter). We’re both enrolled in Public Service Loan Forgiveness and I’m less than a year from hopefully achieving it.

Both individually and as a married couple, our per capita and household gross incomes put us firmly in the upper middle-class where we live. We’re bringing home far more money than ever before. Even still, we’re often broke and overdrawn at the credit union between pay days. We do everything we can even beyond our full-time jobs to make ends meet, from paid work with nonprofits (within lawful boundaries for public employees) to my writing these Substack pieces and trying to get paid subscribers, but none of it helps much.

I look around our community and see so many folks suffering addiction issues, unhoused, living with fixed retirement incomes far below what they earned while working, working multiple low-wage jobs because that’s all there is, struggling to pay skyrocketing rents and grocery bills and out-of-pocket healthcare costs, often having to pick and choose which of these gets paid each month, and worse. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be where I am in life and have the strong network of familial support I have when times get particularly tough. In the wealthiest and most prosperous country in the history of the world, none of this should be a reality.

I’ve written all this not to whine and throw a pity party but to provide real world, first-person examples of why politics matter. What have I covered here? Earnings (wages & salaries) that don’t keep pace with inflation and fall far below the real value of our labor in terms of productivity gains and the value we provide corporate America; healthcare and higher education costs that treat being healthy and well-educated as privileges for the wealthy instead of fundamental human rights; avoidable energy costs for consumers because we stick with climate destabilizing and public health and environment threatening fossil fuels; costs of being retired or living with disabilities that leave particularly vulnerable people poverty-stricken; a nation drowning in debt trying to access capital through any and every means possible, while a handful of billionaires hoard wealth and resources and galivant around the world avoiding taxation (we’re on a path to seeing the world’s first trillionaires); healthier, happier lives being made impossible because giant pharmaceutical companies can’t resist profit margins that make their execs and shareholders richer than the kings of old.

Then there’s what happens when you can no longer care for yourself and become infirm from age or disease or injury, etc. My maternal grandmother, my only living grandparent, is paying about $6,000 a month to live in an assisted-living facility as an 86-year-old dementia patient. If she has to be placed in a skilled nursing facility, that cost will rise to more like $16,000 a month. The homeplace where my grandmother and grandfather lived together as a married couple for 62 years, where my mother and her brother were raised, and that has been in my family for the better part of a century is being sold to help fund her care for the remainder of her life, alongside what my grandfather was able to leave her after military service and a union job.

Oftentimes, places like the assisted-living facility where my grandmother resides are owned by private equity firms out to suck the places dry like the vulture capitalists they are while screwing labor and consumers before just ditching these assets they’ve successfully picked clean. My grandmother’s facility is quite nice with mostly competent and caring staff, but many are far from it. We reach the end of our lives or at least any quality of life and this is what we’re left with? Once our assets drop to below $2,000 in value, Medicaid takes over and reimburses itself by taking almost everything we have left of value that we may have wanted to leave as inheritance. This, not estate taxes that apply only to the exorbitantly wealthy, is what everyday people are faced with, even as they face disability and death.

POLITICS IS LIFE AND LIFE IS POLITICS. It is the absolute height of shitty privilege to say that you don’t care, you don’t vote, you’re indifferent to it, it doesn’t concern you. We pour between $800 and $900 billion a year (that the public is allowed to know about) into the military industrial complex (aka “defense” budget), when the Pentagon has failed six audits and cannot provide an accounting for 61% of its assets, while all of the aforementioned is day-to-day life in America for millions!

We don’t need “concepts of a plan.” We don’t need a Republican Party that can’t perform the most basic functions of Congress and the White House, including passing a full fiscal year budget prior to the start of a new fiscal year, even when they have complete control of the federal government, because too many of them want draconian appropriations cuts that will decimate what’s left of the social welfare state and literally kill the socioeconomically disadvantaged—disproportionately people of color. We don’t need to be concerned about nuclear-armed colonizer Israel’s right or ability to defend itself from the colonized it’s engaging in a genocidal campaign to eradicate in Gaza and the West Bank. We don’t need “the world’s most lethal fighting force,” this isn’t a goddamn Chuck Norris movie from the ‘80s. Undocumented migrants crossing the border with Mexico aren’t the cause of anything I’ve discussed in this piece and, in fact, they more often than not contribute to solutions to these woes, while receiving nothing in return but prejudice and living in constant fear.

I appreciate Kamala’s willingness to pursue helping first-time homebuyers, new parents/guardians, and small businesses. It’s a start. I appreciate Kamala at least paying lip service to the need to put a stop to corporate price-gouging under the guise of “inflation” because it’s a serious and ongoing problem. All of this, though, is the subfloor, not the ceiling, metaphorically speaking.

We need so very much more. We need a universal healthcare system. We need total student loan forgiveness and tuition-free 2-and-4-year public college and university and trade school education. We need to exponentially raise or eliminate the cap on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax and provide seniors and people living with disabilities the kind of income stability they deserve, even if they have no other form of retirement or personal savings or investments (which employers should also have to help them make with guaranteed pension plans instead of 401k-style investment vehicles). Employers could afford to do this if relieved of the burden of providing health insurance.

Our veterans and active duty servicemembers deserve the best possible compensation and care, but the vast majority of private defense contractors and all global weapons traders do not deserve funding using our tax dollars. The Pentagon should have to successfully pass an audit and provide a full accounting for 100% of its assets to Congress, which has the power of the purse. Pharmaceutical companies should have to negotiate the prices of all drugs with the U.S. government for all Americans. The federal government is going to have to step in more on the transition to renewable energy, maximized energy efficiencies, and sustainable agriculture and development because too many states, especially West Virginia, will not.

We’re not going to see third-party viability without public funding of elections (or at least minimal and contained private funding coupled with mostly public funding), truly independent redistricting after census years, and ranked-choice voting in every state and territory. Until then, we’re stuck with the two major parties and Democrats are the only major party that will pursue any of these crucial solutions. Republicans are a MAGA cult and nothing more. They will continue to expand our late-stage capitalist hellscape driven by nativist xenophobia, white supremacy, and Christian theocracy. They should not be considered a viable political party, but unfortunately millions of Americans keep voting for them.

I’m so exhausted with performative campaign bullshit and the endless tyranny of the minority. It will take fundamental reforms to address the constitutionally-ingrained inadequacies of our government, namely the reform idea known as inclusive constitutionalism spelled out by author Madiba K. Dennie in her incredible book “The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We The People Can Take It Back.” Before we can turn the ship of state around, though, to help solve society’s dire problems using public policy, we have to get the right people at the helm. Democrats represent the only people we can elect to that helm at this time who will even begin to turn the wheel.

The debate last night showed there’s only one remotely competent and compassionate individual at the top of the ticket—Vice President Harris. Down ballot races matter just as much though, if not more, and we in West Virginia have got to act like it. We can’t go on like this. It’s no wonder we have mental health crises that play such a huge role in our addiction crises. Material deprivation is not a character flaw or personal failure nine times out of ten. We’ve got to hold those we give power to account before we the people lose all ability to do so peacefully.