Where, Oh Where Did the Issues Go?

Quiz for today: What do the following have in common:

- Hillary's emails
- Trump's tax returns
- Plagiarized speeches
- The Clinton Foundation
- Gold Star families (even if they're immigration lawyers with ulterior motives)

If you answered "Things we're talking about these days", you would be kind of right but not the answer I was looking for, and it's my column so I pick the answers.

No, the answer I was looking for was "Things other than issues that actually affect the country and the people of the USA."

Now, I'm not saying these things aren't actually important -- at least the emails and the Clinton Foundation scandals, both of which point to criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton and her expected corrupt conduct, were she ever to be president.  Those, at least, are.

But for the most part, these things are detracting from the national dialogue that this campaign should be holding in regard to the country and our real problems.  And I really want that dialogue, if for no other reason than to get back to the idea that solutions for our problems and issues should be based on approaches that have actually worked before.

What are those issues?  What would I like us to be talking about?

Lots of things.  For example, we can start with the fact that Milwaukee is a mess, like many other cities, and the black population is rioting because the conditions are lousy.  But we can -- and should, but won't -- talk about why, if the city is a mess, if there are no jobs, and most children are born out of wedlock into homes with no fathers, has Milwaukee continued to elect Democrats to run the city for 100 years? Why, for that matter, is the situation pretty much the same in Baltimore, Chicago, Washington and every other city with the same issue?

We can continue with the fact that our government has put the nation $20 trillion (with a "T") in debt, and is not even paying principal back.  We are paying hundreds of billions (with a "B") per year in interest on that debt, yet we continue to have whole Cabinet departments paid for by the taxpayer for purposes not granted by the Constitution to the Federal government.  Can we discuss why Washington can do that when you and I cannot?

There are not enough jobs in the country to accommodate all the people who want to work, and wages are seriously low for many of the ones that are available because the labor force is so much larger.  Yet our current immigration policy is encouraging more unskilled and semi-skilled people, many of whom don't even speak our language, to cross our borders -- we're even proactively importing some of them.  Can we talk about that?

Our foreign policy has achieved nothing at all for a long time.  Where we were the foremost power in the world, let alone just the free world, in 1990 after the fall of the Soviet empire, we have devolved into an inept laughingstock in our engagement with pretty much every other nation.  We have lacked a coherent foreign policy for decades.  Can we talk about what a foreign policy even is?

College costs an incredible amount of money even though it is almost a necessity for a professional life these days.  Yet the Federal government is so free with student loans that it continually drives up that cost by boosting demand.  And colleges and universities are replete with useless offices and superfluous administrators.  Is anyone actually looking to see if the money lent by the taxpayers for those educations is being wisely spent?

The Constitution guarantees a free press.  But right now, only seven percent of journalists say they are Republicans.  I'm for a free press as much as the next guy, but Russia had more diversity of opposition when the only paper was Pravda.  The left isn't going to do anything about that; who is?  Can we discuss?

People are screaming bloody murder about global warming, and threatening to shut down production of coal and other fossil fuels.  Hillary Clinton has pledged to "put coal miners out of work."  Yet when the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar 2 plant goes online later this year, it will be the first nuclear plant opened in the USA in twenty years.  Is it just me, or is there a disconnect there?

I don't suppose it ends there, but those are some real issues that we could talk about.  Those are things around which the moderators of the upcoming debates should be formulating questions -- and about which the press should be asking and the candidates speaking -- regularly.

It's not just me.  But the lack of real discussion of these things suggests that perhaps the media may not want to be discussing them.

Or, sadly, perhaps the nation does not.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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