Immigration is enriching our American economy and culture.  The falsity of this proposition has been demonstrated so often and so conclusively that it belongs in the same category as 1) Islam is a religion of peace, 2) politicians don’t lie and steal, and 3) Elvis is alive and well in a monastery in Bolivia.  It is accompanied by the dominant but unstated assumption that the U.S. can have a First World economy and military with a Third World population.  Given the American penchant for sanctifying pretty lies, this allows politicians to bask in an aura of benevolence while destroying your grandchildrens’ future.

“A public debt is a public blessing.”  At the time of Alexander Hamilton’s famous statement in the early days of the U.S., everyone knew what he meant: Government debt is a blessing to the rich and to politicians who want to push their schemes while postponing payment for them.  The Jeffersonians detected the evil and held it in check until Lincoln’s time.  Since then it has been the Standard Operating Procedure of the U.S. government, though never so forthrightly stated.

Thomas Jefferson was anti-Christian.  Thomas Jefferson had a capacious, active, and questing mind, wrote prolifically, and lived through a more than usual number of years of more than usually full history.  To understand his religious beliefs requires careful and extensive inquiry.  Jefferson never scoffed at Christianity.  He never denied its divine inspiration or its importance or that man is made in the image of God.  He did want to remove the miracles from the Scriptures because he thought it made them less believable rather than more so.  He did believe, quite reasonably, that, historically, religious dogma had sometimes assumed the guise of superstition that had stifled intelligence and that religious establishments had suppressed freedom more than was justified.  His statement about the desirable wall of separation between church and state, though later hyped by haters of Christianity, was merely a standard American and Protestant  position and emphatically did not advocate the banishment of faith from public life.  When all is said and done, Jefferson’s belief, though not meeting strict definitions of Christianity (which disagree among themselves), differed little from that of many another Anglican gentleman then or later.  Curiously, the same people who calumniate Jefferson have sanctified the village atheist Abe Lincoln, who once wrote a treatise ridiculing Christianity and who, according to his closest associates, was never a believer.  The political context explains much about Jefferson’s thinking.  He thought that Calvinism was responsible for the peculiarly malicious and domineering nature of Massachusetts and Connecticut, which had introduced a distorting element into the American polity.  Calvinism, he wrote, was the mother of atheism because it presented God as unchristian, unloving, and unlovable.

Medicare and Medicaid can be fixed by electing the right people to implement the right policies.  It is theoretically possible to design a national medical system that is fair, workable, and affordable.  However, Congresspersons, who are owned by drug and insurance corporations, will  never enact such a system, nor can it ever be made affordable as long as the  immigration of new  unpaying clients rages unchecked.