Red the Full Text Article in the Huffington Post

Benjamin Franklin saw America as a democratic society: middle class, largely urban, technologically sophisticated, family centered, joyful, and upwardly mobile. The America we try to present to the world was largely Franklin’s vision. But recently we have been oriented more towards Ayn Rand than Benjamin Franklin. And we have been that way long enough that on the basis of data and not ideology we can evaluate how these anti-Franklinian policies have performed. What has been their success at nuturing and perpetuating the vital democratic middle class that has been America’s greatest strength — as important as its military prowess? There are many factors one might use to make this evaluation. Here are seven chosen across a broad spectrum of American society:

Tax Cuts:

Just as they did in 2000, the Republicans are running on an economic platform centered on tax cuts, and proposing that the Bush cuts be made permanent for the richest Americans. The 2008 income tax data are now in, so we can assess what their economic theory is worth, and how it fulfilled its promise that tax cuts would produce widespread prosperity by looking at all the years of the George W. Bush presidency.

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It was Benjamin Franklin’s view that where justice was absent, civil society was impossible. He and the other Founders agreed on the essential importance of justice in a democracy. I feel the same way, and you probably do as well. If you do you will probably be as appalled as I was when I read the World of Justice Project report: Rule of Law Index 2010.

I will not deny that it has left me shaken.

To understand why I think this report is such a big deal, perhaps it will help to say who funded it: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Neukom Family Foundation, the GE Foundation, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Lexis Nexis. I list them to make the point that this is the pinnacle of non-partisan philanthropy, not some political think tank with an agenda. We can trust the data.

The project, involving 900 researchers from 35 countries, who have polled 35,000 individuals, in addition to searching each nation’s records, presents itself in a way that Benjamin Franklin would have understood and endorsed.

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No founder had as detailed a plan, or worked more diligently to create the kind of country he had in mind than Benjamin Franklin. Two things he knew were important were healthcare and having enough to eat. He was a founder of the first hospital on these shores, and worked tirelessly to create opportunities so that more and more poor people could move up into the middle class, thus assuring hunger would not be an American issue. As we prepare to vote it is worth considering where we are on Franklin’s goals on the eve of the election.

Physical Health

In 1950, before the inception of the present illness profit industry, the United States, compared with the world’s other leading industrial nations was fifth with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands.

In 2010 the United States position concerning female life expectancy had fallen to forty-sixth. And when both men and women were combined it fell to forty-ninth. Americans live 5.7 fewer years of “perfect health” — a measure adjusted for time spent ill — than the Japanese.

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The sense of spiritual consciousness, connecting to something greater than oneself, is one of the most intoxicating realms a human can enter. Across the millennia, such experiences have shaped the lives of individuals and, upon occasion, whole cultures. The question for science is not to deny them, but to seek to understand the processes by which they occur and the domain into which they lead us. Central to these true stories is a special state of mindfulness, what the psychologist Charles Tart described in his classic 1972 Science paper as a state of consciousness.

Although these experiences, when they happen spontaneously, are often one-time events, almost every human culture on earth has developed practices, usually in a spiritual or religious context, for attaining this state. Similarly, all the martial arts have this component of mindful discipline, a practice of focusing intentioned awareness. Collectively, we have come to call these practices meditation.

Of all the things that you can do to know yourself, nothing will serve you as well as developing the practice of meditation. Although meditation is often associated with Asian cultures, it is not Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Satanic or any faith at all. It can be done in the name of any of these faiths, or without faith in a religion — as distinct from a spiritual sense. Meditation is a single term defining many practices.

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Once, years ago, walking across Louis Kahn’s magnificent campus designed for the Salk Institute, Jonas Salk answered my question about how he had seen so clearly what others had not seen. He said, “The answers are not the hard part. It is the questions. Asking the right question. That’s hard.”

We are about to enter yet again into the great debate over American health care, and the discussion once again will be mostly couched in financial terms. I want to suggest money is the wrong question, and it leads us to the wrong debate. Here’s what I think we should be asking: Is the health of the American people an essential part of our national security and prosperity? Is America better equipped to deal with the challenges of the 21st century when it has a healthy population more capable of working at its full potential? If the answer is “Yes,” then the next question to ask is: Why is our health care system so very bad — 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization? To answer that, we need to accept this reality and to start fixing it by telling the truth to ourselves about money.

The Center for Defense Information estimates the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will total over $1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2010. We have almost nothing to show for these wars, and the sacrifices made by young men and women motivated by honor, duty and a call to serve. Yet we have made these wars such a priority that in the midst of the worst economic downturn in two generations we continue to fund them at a cost of tens of millions each day. It’s not about the money.

We have a defense budget that is larger than the defense budgets of every other nation in the worldcombined – $683 billion, going to $743 billion in 2015. It’s not about the money.