Drizzle’s Policy Musings

Hi, I’m back after long hiatus due to overwork, subsequent vacation and overall laziness. I will try to be shorter with my newer posts as an attempt to be more Krugmanesque.

I mention Krugman because he was on Colbert tonight. Professor Krugman sucks at television and, while a great writer, isn’t even a master of the Op-Ed. His books are excellent but where he truly excels is at the short and punchy blog post. I’m far from his skills as a blogger but I hope to better emulate him and the other greats as I return to this enterprise.

Colbert also mentioned a little article highlighting that foreclosure rates at military towns grew at almost four times the national rate since last year according to this Bloomberg piece. There are many causes of this increase – soldiers suffer from weak credit and face the kinds of life disruptions that can cause mortgage payments to go unpaid.

Those problems can be fixed with various measures that enhance the financial stability of our troops, I personally feel this is an important fix and that the cost of war should be paid by all of us, not just deployed troops. A separate and more complicated problem is that soldiers are considered a vulnerable population in terms of financial fraud and abuse. This is known by the unscrupulous individuals who target our men and women in the armed forces and it is known by policy makers.

In fairness to policy makers, they have tried to fix this. And this fix makes me deeply uncomfortable. Because, a soldier has more rights in this country than a civilian like me. The law offers certain protections towards our fighting men and women, offering them more rights and protecting them from certain practices. While I approve of the intent, this proves false the statement that all men and women are equal under the law. I’m not positive I want these protections repealed, veterans are explicitly targeted and I feel strongly that we don’t do enough for our veterans. But I am saying that I would support a search for alternative protections in some cases and an expansion of some of these protections to all citizens. After all, if it is an abusive practice when applied to a veteran, maybe it shouldn’t be used on us civvies. I’m still mulling this over but I feel it is something that we as a nation should be aware of, so we can do more without risking the creation of multiple classes of citizen.

Sorry about my extended hiatus and welcome back my loyal readers.

Love,
Drizzle