Exactly!

Worth reading it all. 

Is This Rock Bottom? America is broken. We need to fix it.

I keep waiting for someone in power or seeking it to say the quiet part out loud: the amount of work required to fix this country is far bigger than “beating Trump” or “restoring norms” or whatever line gets handed to Democratic donors and MSNBC panels. I keep waiting for someone to look the public in the eye and say: we’re not going to vote our way back to the America we think we used to have, because the America we think we used to have never actually existed for most people.

Here’s the reality: we are the richest country in the history of the world — not just now, but ever — and one in eight Americans needs SNAP benefits to eat. Not because of COVID. Not because of a recession. Because our economic structure literally cannot sustain the basic well-being of tens of millions of people without federal food aid.

We spend twice as much per person on healthcare as Japan or Italy, and yet we live shorter lives, get worse outcomes, and bankrupt people for getting sick. Medical debt is the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy, and 70,000 people a year die because they can’t afford care in time. That’s not a healthcare system. That’s an extraction machine.

So yes, the fights over SNAP, ACA subsidies, and shutdowns matter — but they’re symptoms, not causes. You don’t get 40 million people needing food aid and 100 million drowning in medical debt because of one bad president or one unlucky decade. You get there because the institutions that were supposed to protect the public spent decades serving somebody else.