COVID-19 is creating the biggest crisis in America since Pearl Harbor.
The long-term ramifications that COVID-19 will have on American society will be significant. More people will work from home; people will wash their hands more; the government will care more about global health. All of these changes will happen naturally — the train has left the station.
The real question facing America is: Can our country use the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to address the big, hairy problems that our government has failed to deal with in the past? Or will we focus on petty, party politics and spend our time and energy blaming each other for one of the greatest leadership debacles in American history?
Will this experience help us to prevent the next COVID-19 crisis from bringing our nation to its knees?
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, the company was 60 days from running out of cash. Jobs used Apple’s dire financial straits as the impetus for massive changes in a short period of time, laying the groundwork for what would become one of the most valuable companies in the world. President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same, during the Great Depression. He used the crisis to initiate programs that would protect our citizens, including the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Social Security.
If we want to see beyond the current pandemic crisis to move the country forward, I would suggest we start with these five big problems, each of which can be addressed with simple solutions that would have a massive effect on the future success of our country.
First: If you think COVID-19 is big, try climate change. The temperature of our planet has risen 2 degrees over the past 100 years; Houston suffered three 500-year floods between 2015 and 2017; and 15 of the biggest fires in California history have happened in the last 18 years. Adopt the bipartisan Baker-Shultz Carbon Dividend Plan, which taxes companies that emit carbon into the atmosphere, then gives the tax collections back to the people.
Second: Let’s address the risk of accidental nuclear war. If you don’t think this is a possibility, I am guessing you didn’t think that a virus could bring the economy of the world’s richest nation to its knees. On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight. This announcement marks the most severe security threat in nuclear history. One nuclear warhead today is 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Our government is planning to spend $494 billion over the next ten years to update the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities. That, even though General Colin Powell – who also served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Secretary of State – said, “The one thing I convinced myself of, after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons, is that they were useless.”
Let’s save the money, reduce our nuclear arsenal from around 6,500 warheads to around 300 warheads, and let’s set the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the earth by 2024.
Third: Let’s address the growing income inequality issue in America. Between 1950 and 1980, the top 1% of income earners received 10% of the country’s pre-tax income. By 2012, the wealthiest Americans were pulling in 23% — nearly one-fourth – of the nation’s pre-tax earnings. Today, one out of every eight Americans lives in poverty, including 13 million children. How can we accept this, in a nation with so much wealth?
Let’s rebuild the middle class in this country by passing a law – I’m calling it the War on Poverty Act — which raises the minimum wage to $15 and lets people earn their way out of poverty vs. government handouts. In addition, my Every Kid Has a Chance Program would provide every child in poverty three meals a day, free health care, and free education until the age of 22. How do we pay for this? Today, everyone pays 6.2% of their income to Social Security up to $132,900. Over that amount, you pay zero percent of the additional earnings toward the Social Security program. Let’s scrap that cap and have all income be taxed at 6.2% to fund the War on Poverty, so those who make more, will pay more.
Fourth: Let’s fix the health care system. We spend more money on health care than any other country in the world, and we get the worst results. We are tied for 54th place out of 56 countries surveyed in Bloomberg’s 2018 Health Care Efficiency Index. Why? Because the health care industrial complex makes so much money that it uses a small portion of those profits to lobby Congress to keep the same crooked game in place. From 1998 through 2012, lobbyists spent $5.36 billion to persuade Congress to pass laws benefiting health care and pharmaceutical companies. That’s nearly four times as much as the $1.53 billion lobbyists spent pitching Congress on behalf of military contractors during that same time period.
But are corporations and lobbyists to take all the blame? No! We need to be at the head of the line when it comes to who really is responsible for our health care crisis. The average American, over the past 60 years, has gained 30 pounds! It is predicted that by 2030, 50% of Americans will be obese. We are eating ourselves to death. What simple changes can we make?
1. Provide government health care to those who want it. Combine Medicare and Medicaid into one simple program. Let the government negotiate with the drug companies and the hospitals, provide the best care at the lowest cost, and hire the best managers in the world to run the program.
2. Introduce a health risk assessment program for all Americans who are on a government- subsidized health program — today, that amounts to more than 135 million people — to measure their health and make recommendations to improve their health.
3. Provide basic nutritional information on every food item for sale, whether it is in a restaurant, a grocery store or at the ballpark. The government played a big role in getting Americans to quit smoking in the 1960s and 1970s by requiring warning labels on cigarette packages that said smoking can cause cancer; it can do the same today to help Americans get healthy.
Fifth: Let’s rebuild America. Our nation’s infrastructure is rated a D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers. If we want to have the most competitive economy in the world, we need to have the best transportation system in the world. We are way behind China, Japan, and Europe. Why? Because our nation’s leaders have decided that it is more important to keep taxes low than it is to have great roads, bridges, water pipelines, airports and railroads. America’s infrastructure is funded through the gasoline tax, which has not been raised since 1993. Since 1993, inflation has increased by 76%, the population has grown by 69 million people, and the number of registered vehicles has jumped by 42%. Meanwhile, the gas tax has stayed the same, and our roads are crumbling.
The simple solution: Raise the federal gas tax from 18.4 cents a gallon to $1 a gallon. This would increase revenue from $35 billion to over $190 billion per year and provide the money necessary to launch what I’m calling the Eisenhower Two Transportation Act, a significant infrastructure program to rebuild America and to create millions of great-paying jobs.
Now is the time for our government to learn from the failures that resulted from sitting on our hands and not addressing the serious threat of a global pandemic – even though many people, including George W. Bush and Bill Gates, have warned about the danger for years. We should create the same sense of urgency that we currently have in dealing with COVID-19 and tackle these five big challenges. If we do that, we could make more progress as a country in the next 30 days than in the last 30 years.
Let’s come together and urge our leaders to address our big problems – before they destroy us.
