Normally, I do not make public political statements but times, they are a-changing and it is important to make up one’s mind and have reasonable arguments on various issues.
Today we have had a busy day, the annual tax data was made public in Finland. This is a funny tradition that some people take too seriously. As far as I’m concerned, I would vote for full transparency for all money transfers between public actors, the state and municipalities, and the ordinary private people, including also the support money the public actors distribute. I do not mean that all the metadata should be released but the annual consolidated figures only. And all the details should be made available to the people themselves.
I believe the night may be even busier. The people in the USA are making a big decision by electing either Biden or Trump to the White House for the next 4 years.
Personally, I do not quite understand that such a great nation is not able to find any younger candidates. In Finland we have prime minister, a female prime minister who was only 34 when she took over the office. For the US election, I do not want to make predictions even if it looks rather clear that Biden is leading. Anything can happen in such a big country with such a complicated election system. We have been able to observe the actions of Trump’s administration for almost 4 years now and in many ways I believe that from now on things will only gets worse. The way he has acted in covid case is a disaster. I do not want deny his achievements for instance in exposing Europe’s high dependency on the US military power or making noise on questionable geopolitical ambitions of China. But I think he has shown his pro’s and con’s and the balance look quite bad. America is not any Greater than it was 4 years ago, quite opposite. The US people should say: You are fired.
IMHO, I wish, we could normalize our life, get rid of covid, get rid of populism, get rid of all bad behavior in ourselves, too. The recent developments do not look too good. Anywhere. On the other hand, our difficulties, if we compare those to the problems of the previous generations, so far, our problems are small, very small. So many things are much better today than, say 50 years ago, or 70 or 150 years, or almost anytime in the history.
This is bit gloomy writing, Hopefully the next posting will be different.