Locking in on change

Last Sunday I talked about chocolate chips that mysteriously won’t melt in 180-degree cake batter but will start to dissolve in about five seconds in your hand.
That was just too much for my prefrontal cortex, especially when you factor in the anomalies that take place in Fred Winke’s former home.
So in an effort to get away from the mundane and unexplainable, let’s have a small civics lesson this week.
Don’t pitch your coffee in the sink and head to the living room, just yet. This could be interesting and I’m on a high wire here, so don’t hate me for this. It’s about provoking thought and giving pause to make sure we’re locked into the right things.
I’ve been watching, listening, and even writing about the house cleaning Elon Musk is engaged in under the tutelage of President Donald Trump.
And there's No 'Oh no, here comes a raging left spin’. I’m not there on this.
I believe there is waste, and I believe there is cause for an intense review of government spending. I have a serious doubt we’ll get to the $1 trillion in savings he said could be realized in the first year.
But it’s never a bad thing to review spending and root out poor policy and behaviors. If you look at that on a household basis, we all do that occasionally. We redirect funds and savings or eliminate superfluous expenditures when needed. Live like this now, so we can live like that later, right?
Some are better at that than others.
We should take a harder look at the department of education, state and federal. I wouldn’t, at this point, profess that they need to go away, but we certainly are seeing some sludge in educational progress. Public school teachers regularly have to chase ever-changing standardized tests in an environment where costs are being reigned in and funding isn’t keeping pace with cost of living.
But that’s the same in local government. People are literally screaming about property taxes and wanting them reduced. Sure, we all do. I looked at my escrow statement the other day and it’s going up another 300 bucks. I sighed, but I’m a different dude. I’d much rather pay that extra money and watch our community get back in line with infrastructure, make sure there’s police, fire, and, yes, ambulance service that is in line with our population needs.
Personally, I’m not sure there’s anyone to blame in any of this. I still think we’re digging out from underneath COVID. We changed society almost overnight, and as a government, both GOP and Democrats, we set a very high bar, albeit probably realistic, for what an American citizen should make at a minimum to live with health insurance, food, shelter, et. al.  That was over $20 an hour, if you look at the stimulus provided.
People changed and we started thinking more about our time vs our pay. More jobs than people who won’t to go back to work. That’s still a thing. Iowa has done things to get people back to work, but that’s still a thing.
But the juice here is that government can be a place where no one gets left behind. This theory that big government is over is still too far away. I’m getting closer than ever to some conservative views on finance, socialism, environmentalism. I see how hard farmers work as we do more with agriculture news, and I still read about subsidies.
I still have trouble balancing those subsidies to keep our ag economy robust, which they are aimed to do, while hearing those same people full-throated against student loan forgiveness, which no one would argue would also help the economy. You go into farming, God bless ya, and you have a bad year and the government, in many cases, does what it can to make you whole.
Students get out of school where tuition is absolutely insane and the government charges you 7.5% after they took over the system. The government should make 1% on student loans and then refund that 1% to the student without interest when the loan is paid off.  But 7.5%? Come on, man. For-profit dealerships will sell you a car or a home at less than that.
But that’s government, right? The argument isn’t that it's in the way, it’s that it's not being done correctly. Without government, I’m convinced we’d have an elite class that lives on the backs of the working poor, and they would want it that way.
Government protects against that. It assures that those who have worked their whole life and raised a family have a safety net. It’s charged with protecting every American citizen and, for about 250 years, has done a pretty damned good job.
It should be helping find the happy grass on health insurance so people working in New York City or Denver, or Des Moines, or Fort Madison can afford good insurance. It should also be getting the middle of these markups in health care that make the landscape look so bad and are putting more and more pressure on patients to dig into savings. If government gets leaner, it should get stronger, right?
It should stand by and let the market dictate economic failure and success per company, but it's there to police stacking the deck.
I don’t think we should decry or herald it as Big Government anymore, but Good Government and maybe this recent scrutiny, although very, very heavy handed will produce that government. It’s going to reset and reset as we’ve seen. Musk’s DOGE group has made some mistakes admittedly and put people back because they are slashing with a medieval battle ax and not the scalpel that probably should be used.
Government, if you look at the root, means to “govern”. It doesn’t mean to dictate, but give direction in a sovereign state. Give direction. That direction has to include what is in the best interest of everyone, not the few. And it certainly is disengenuous to be heavy handed in it. But sometimes that's what it requires. As a country we must be open to that.
What I witnessed watching President Trump’s address to Congress the other night was akin to the circus that is the British Parliament. Trump does have a mandate for four years and, if you stand there and disrupt tradition with nonsense, you should be blown out of there, but those that sang “Hey, Hey, Hey, Goodbye" are just as sophomoric.”
This is who we are right now, and it’s a shame. But with close to four years left of the Trump Administration, we could end up with something that’s more efficient and accountable. We could also end up with our shoulders slouched and hands in pockets thinking, ‘What happened?”
Speaking of thought-provoking and getting locked in. You all should read Senate Study Bill 1208 or its identical House bill 313, the Iowa legislature’s most recent sweeping property tax proposal. They are looking for feedback and I would assume this proposal would, and should, generate plenty of feedback – But that’s Beside the Point.
Chuck Vandenberg is editor and co-owner of Pen City Current and can be reached at Charles.V@PenCityCurrent.com.