You Win Some, You Lose Some

Okay, you win this one. I can't seem to poke any holes in your argument. Maybe you're getting better at it, or maybe I'm still off my game because of my traumatic weekend. All today I've been trying to think of an alternate proposal to abolish poverty, but I haven't come up with anything yet. Maybe that's because poverty, like the weather, is affected by a multitude of variables, so there is no "magic bullet" with which to fight it.

Speaking of the weather, how did you city folks weather the storm? I've heard that tall buildings actually sway perceptibly in the wind. Is that true? Were you guys rockin and rollin on  Sunday? According to our local newspaper there was some damage around our county, trees down, roads washed out, and some flooded yards and fields. Almost 2000 homes lost their electric power, but not ours.

When you think about it, poverty is all relative, isn't it. I'm sure the poor people in the U.S. today are  better off than the poor people who lived through the Great Depression and, compared to the poor people in Africa, they're actually pretty well off. My father in law used to say that, if he and his neighbors hadn't read about the Great Depression in the newspapers, they wouldn't have known anything about it. Their lives were pretty much the same before, during, and after the Depression.

I haven't heard this old cliché for awhile but, whenever somebody screwed up at work, people used to say, "You keep that up and you're going to end up selling apples on street corners." I don't think they would let you sell apples on street corners nowadays and, even if they did, nobody would buy them from you because they could get them cheaper at the local supermarket. See, that's what we need, some way that people could make money without working for the man. Okay, you could sell drugs, but that's kind of a high risk business. I read somewhere that more drug dealers are killed by other drug dealers than are caught by the police. Talk about your cut throat competition!

I never was all that excited about Medicare because the part you pay is more than the whole bill used to be before Medicare was passed. Of course some of that is due to inflation, but it was about the time that Medicare was passed when medical costs started rising faster than inflation. Okay, that doesn't prove cause and effect, but it kind of makes you wonder. I've been on it for three years now, and I haven't been to a doctor in all that time. I haven't needed to, and I'm certainly not going just because I'm on Medicare.

One thing good about Medicare is that it keeps us off Obamacare. What a joke! I'm glad now that the Republicans weren't able to repeal it because then the Dems could have said that it would have worked if the Reps had let it. Now everybody can see what a piece of crap it is and, hopefully, will remember it at election time. Don't count on it, though, people have short attention spans nowadays, and some different crisis or scandal will likely have distracted them by then.