Taylor Swift and America's Future

I loved this blog post from the NYT so much I just had to post it here. It's a conversation between columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins. Brooks explains his worries about the state of American government:

In addition to the swiftboating of Swift, there is this fact: there is a broad consensus on what we need to do to solve many of our major problems, but no political way to get there. Most experts of left and right believe we need a gas tax in order to address our energy problems. No political way to get there. Most believe that we need a flatter, fairer tax code, probably based on a consumption tax. No political way to get there. Most agree that the fee-for-service system drives up health care costs and the employer based insurance system is unsustainable. There is apparently no political way to change these things. Most experts agree that teacher quality is crucial to the schools and that bad teachers need to be fired. Again, no political way to do this. [...] Normally I reject declinism. But seeing Ms. Swift up on stage at the MTV awards, speechless and shocked, has quite obviously shaken me to my core.

Collins responds:

Countries go through stages. If they’re lucky they start out poor and raw, and then they grow. The political challenge is to give the people government services that make their lives better without strangling economic development. That’s hard, but it’s not nearly as hard as the next stage, which is reforming the programs we’ve already got to make them more efficient. Everybody is in awe to this day that Lyndon Johnson got Medicare through Congress. But that was an addition — a snap compared to what we’re trying to do now, which inevitably involves taking stuff away, whether it’s unnecessary medical tests or income via higher taxes. [...] But tough reform does happen if there’s enough sense of public alarm pushing it.

Don't agree with all of that, but what does it matter? Informed and interesting nonetheless. All amidst hilarious pop-culture satire like this:

As a member of the sentient world, I am obviously aware that Kanye West dissed Taylor Swift while she was trying to accept her MTV award. This was extremely impolite. Maybe not as impolite as calling the president a liar during a Congressional address, but still. It reflects badly on the manners of rappers everywhere.

Humor, politics, conversation, criticism, hope -- this is writing I love.