Smart Bombs: Ready, fire, aim

We live in a country where:

“Nicotine isn’t considered a drug and thus isn’t regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, because the government fears that would be a tacit endorsement of a deadly product, which it subsidizes via payments to tobacco farmers and then taxes to the hilt when sold as cigarettes to pay for various health care programs, whose costs are driven up, in part, by smokers who are addicted to nicotine, which is not considered a drug, even though nicotine skin patches must be approved by the FDA.

“We spend more per person on health care than any other country, but put up with the fact that 16 percent of the people aren’t covered because doing so is deemed too expensive. Meanwhile, all that spending doesn’t prevent us from ranking low in key health categories when compared with other countries.

“An estimated 18,000 people die prematurely each year because they don’t have health insurance, but the president can say, as he did last week, “People have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

“Government officials and their attorneys think it’s more important to protect institutions than, say, hurricane victims living in government trailers laden with dangerous levels of formaldehyde.

“Only a small fraction of cargo containers headed to U.S. ports are inspected, but everyone must remove their shoes and Zip-loc their carry-on lotions at airports.

“We scramble to pay for body armor for troops and health care for the wounded, but continue to pump billions into a missile shield that hasn’t worked after more than 20 years of trying and was designed to deter a superpower that no longer exists.

“The government ramps up its snooping on us while locking down more information on itself.

“The government subsidizes borrowing for homeowners, which increases the demand for housing, which drives up the price, while at the same time cutting funding for low-income housing because the government isn’t taking in enough money.

“The level of certitude some business leaders demand of global-warming science is unheard in their own world, where far fuzzier data are plugged into computer models and – voila! – billions of dollars are risked on investments.