Americans Want America to be a Better Place

It's common for people to be amazed when a new technological achievement is made. I remember reading about a kind of glass Corning made in the 1960s and they didn't find a good use for it until the smart phone revolution of the 2000s. Now it's common. I often read about great improvements in the computing world which are astounding. Tesla's latest improvements in battery storage is fantastic. You would think America is just brimming with ideas to improve things, but only the smart people have these ideas.

Not so. Americans of all stripes have great ideas.

I read a lot of blogs and listen to television and sometimes radio and I hear great ideas all the time. Sometimes they are couched in terms of a problem which exists, but which could easily be fixed -- but it's an idea to improve America.

So, the question which has to be asked is, "why don't all these great things get done?" The answer lies in the way we organize our society and how ideas "move up the food chain" or "are ignored".

Take for example the question of whether there is massive voter fraud. Are people voting in more than one location/city/state/etc.? The Republicans have a project to prevent that by comparing names of voters in several states (about 30 I think) to see if the same name appears in several locations. This sounds like a great idea except that they are only comparing the most common first and last names. The most common names these days belong to African-Americans, Latinos (is Latino-American a phrase?), and Asian-Americans and they vote in high percentages for Democrats. Thus, by finding matches the Republicans are almost singling-out Democratic voters for elimination from the voter rolls. Bad idea. Furthermore, they only look at the first and last names which means Juan Samuel Lopez and Juan Francis Lopez are wiped off the rolls for having the 'same name', even though they aren't the same person. A good idea gone wrong.

Back to the drawing board. Now the Republican plan is clearly inadequate and has to be stopped. But, what would be an adequate way to prevent voter fraud? We can only find good solutions to problems like that by discussing it and letting more people offer suggestions. When the only solution is clearly partisan and intended to eliminate voters from the other party it is just wrong.

OTOH, letting healthcare insurance companies sell insurance anywhere in America if it is regulated by the federal government is probably a very good idea.