Permanent link to archive for 2/6/05. Sunday, February 6, 2005

A Wild Idea

Catching up on my reading of periodicals I developed a unifying solution to several disparate problems. The New York Review of Books had a lengthy article entitled' China:Wiping Out the Truth': How the Chinese government goes to great length to prevent their journalists (both print and internet) from revealing the truth about their corrupt leadership. There is little that we can do about this overtly but we could do one thing that might well hurt the fast becoming wealthy Chinese burocracy, consume less of their output. If we buy less of their products their economy has to falter.

In The Nation there are two articles that lend themselves to this same solution. 'Taking the Offensive on Wealth' which encourages state legislatures to reverse the Bush tax cuts and appropriately tax the very rich. Some states have decided not to repeal estate taxes. New Jersey will be taxing earnings of more than $500,000 to offset regressive property taxes. The consume less princlple is less obvious here but our government certainly needs to be more frugal. Perhaps we can impact on the wealthy industrialists who command salaries in the hundreds of millions and pay minimal taxes. We can target their companies to drastically reduce our consumption of their products particularly.

In another article in The Nation Your Money or Your Life the author, Dan Frosch discusses the cost of not having health insurance. A family can be bankrupted by a serous illness. We should have universal health insurance. However, in the meantime we need to save (if possible) for such an eventuality. Again, consume less.

In general consuming less has many positive ramifications. 1. We can begin to save money 2. We do not deplete the world's resources so rapidly 3. If we eat (consume) less we will be healthier 4. We will simplify our lives. Do we really need another pair of shoes?

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

# Posted by Eve Winer on 2/6/05; 8:37:55 AM - --