Ensuring a Future

Tony DeLorger © 2016

What two things, apart from a healthy economy, does a country need to maintain to ensure the future prosperity of its people? Education is the first, ensuring future generations can embrace technology and change as the world changes. Second is healthcare, ensuring the next generation is fit and able to cope with an uncertain world, and the elderly, who have already worked their entire lives, are taken care of in their twilight years. Yet in many countries, countries with the supposed highest living standards in the world, these two areas of responsibility are sadly neglected, as the struggle with economics and keeping balance sheets in the black force decisions to cut basic needs.

As the great divide increases between upper and lower classes, poverty is becoming a disease within many first world countries, who spend more on weaponry than education, and whose health systems are failing catastrophically. The failure of economic policies force leadership to strip these areas of necessity to bolster their own perceived successes and the people suffer as a consequence. Surely education and healthcare are together the most important means by which any government ensures a positive future for a country. But sadly politicians are more interested in their own careers rather than the future of the constituents they represent.

The so called middle classes are diminishing, either forging ahead in ascension or becoming poorer than they could have ever imagined. Yes they may have a nice car in the drive, and a huge mortgage on their house and pool, but how safe is their superficial lifestyle, if the economy goes belly up? In this day and age, the possibilities are far more a threat than they used to be. In a world where war is commonplace, and refugees by the millions strewn across the globe, the stresses of economic instability are taking a toll. War costs money, supporting refugees costs money, and when third world countries become the hub of manufacturing, traditional industries in first world countries are lost. Change dictates drastic measures and many governments in desperation are slowly picking away at essential services to try to maintain the coffers.

In Australia, we have slowly been losing our manufacturing industries for years, lost to cheap labor in our neighboring Asian region, and as the mining boom begins to fade, we are faced with huge problems, desperately seeking innovations to fill the holes than manufacturing leaves in our ability to trade in world markets. So where does the money come from, to maintain essential services like healthcare and education, if we are not selling more than we're buying? More taxes?

I don't want to be the voice of negativism, but to what do we invest our thinking: war and righteous quests or taking care of our people? Do we keep paying CEO's and politicians ridiculous amounts of money, while half the populations can't afford health insurance, and must wait up to four years to have a necessary operation like a knee replacement? Inequity in capitalist society is beginning to look a lot like communism; those at the top living is absolute luxury, the rest of us bordering on poverty. It's really not much of a stretch if you think about it.

The world is continually evolving, and the changes can bring about much upheaval, but common sense seems to have been lost on many levels. It's something to think about.