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A hard Dose of Reality
A few years ago Yogi Berra said one of famous his "Yogi -isms" " when you see a fork in the road take it". Well we seem to be at one those forks and given the inertia of the modern American political scene - we are stuck. As a whole host of lingering problems smolder we are mired in a sea of do nothing irrelevancy. It s easy fodder and much easier gamesmanship to hurl barbs back and forth across the various ideological fault lines, to grumble and to give cursory argument and affix blame, but blame - who?

Our American system is not without its benefits or rewards. Most people live in some degree of comfort considered largely affluent by world standards. Even as the economy falters a bit we still have the largest economy the world has seen, and it appears that it will stay that way even with the rise of Asia and Europe for many decades to come. We enjoy a popular culture (the envy of the world) springing, as much from our insistence on personal freedom as our diversities and tolerances. We are by most measures still a dynamic vibrant innovative society. Yet if we are besieged by abundance we are equally besieged with festering problems; problems that the political process has abandoned, not by rhetoric, but by evidence's of action.
We have an enormous annual budget deficit, trading away the future for what can be obtained today (9.4 Trillion dollars that is Trillion or 9,000 billion!), a huge annual trade deficit (763 billion approaching that Trillion district),
A Medicare and Social Security funding problem that has the potential to break the bank.
An immigration policy that is unrealistic and so buried in bureaucratic officialdom that its wonder anyone gets in that is not carried on the back of a "coyote".
A crime problem that sends 2.3 million persons to prison or jail with another 5 million on some form of parole or probation, more than anywhere else on earth, and a stalled justice system that is, on its best day so overburdened that it can take years to bring closure any particular crime.
An exploding gang problem with as many 750,000 members, 66% of which reside in large urban areas.
A drug problem inner woven with crime in such a way that it is almost impossible to parse it from crime, and so pervasive that it exhausts the spirit among the very group with the least of advantages. With 15.9 million users it's a "plague influencing society as much as the industrial revolution did".
Poverty rates some

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