The reason I'm so heavily entrenched with this military/ Veteran thing as you call it is, my parents lived as children during the Great Depression. They also worked with everyone else during WWII to defeat the Axis powers. Even before this my grandparents and relations fought the Central powers during WWI. I can trace professional soldiers in my family back to the founding and settling of this country. That is how my ancestors came to America from Scotland, they were sent to the colonies because of rebellion against the crown. See in those days being sent to America was sort of like Australia, sort of a form of punishment. I have always felt that the cost of freedom isn't free someone always has to pay the price.I'm not really a Libertarian, I'm more of a Pragmatic Progressive like Lincoln, Teddy R., Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. I think that government has a role in making life better for all Americans. We have sort of lost our way with all of these wars, we have troops in countries all over the globe and most of the time we don't even know why they are there. I think it is stupid to spend so much on the military while letting our infrastructure rot away. Why should this country be the only major industrialized nation without single payer health care, we pay twice as much per person as other nations who do have single payer. Most of our political hacks are beholding to the interests that raised the money to put them in office, they are as corrupt as any other country. There was a time when serving the people was a scared trust, sadly those days are gone.
Before we spend money on having a military so large we out spend the next 13 countries put together, we should maybe take care of this country. Before we tell other countries how to run a Democracy maybe we should clean up our government first. If I were President I would do five simple things.
1. Shore up the Social Security and Medicare to make sure it is there for future generations.
2. Make sure that all citizens are covered by a single payer health system, and end special interest influence of big insurers, and big drug manufacturers.
3. Make education available to all either trade school or college, since it is an investment in the future of this country. Of course if you get public funding for education you should have to perform two years of public or military service in payment for education and vocational training.
4. Make sure that all citizens have secure access to food. In a country as rich as ours no one should go to bed hungry. After all we feed the other countries of the world. If we care about the children in other lands shouldn't we care about the children here?
5. Make sure that all persons that want to work can, there is plenty of work to be done just rebuilding this country's infrastructure will take trillions of dollars and will provide work for millions of Americans.
