What Americans Care About

The job description of the U.S. government is to serve the people, largely by doing the will of the people.  It is a Republic, and a Democratic Republic at that.  What this means is that the government represents the people and is lead by people who are democratically elected to represent the people.  Now that this is out of the way, let us consider what Americans actually worry about.

According to Pew Research, the second biggest concern of Americans is religious hatred.  Obviously, this plays directly into religious freedom, and it is, in fact, one of the most major elements of religious freedom.  Religious hatred is what ultimately caused our Founding Fathers to be so explicit in protecting religious freedom and in prohibiting preferential treatment of any religion by the government.  As the second biggest concern, we should see a lot of discussion in Congress over this issue, given that it is the second most important thing Americans seem to care about.  Sadly, Congress is more worried about things that Americans seem to find trivial.  This is not the most disturbing part of the situation though.

The research indicates that the first biggest concern of Americans is income inequality.  This subject has gotten some attention in Congress, with the most prominent result being a health care law that forces those at the middle and lower ends to spend a larger percentage of their income on health care insurance than those with much higher incomes.  Technically, this is making income inequality worse, not better.  While this subject seems to come up a lot in Congress and in Presidential press conferences and such, little is being done to actually address it.  This is currently the most important issue to Americans, and Congress cannot be bothered to give it serious consideration long enough to actually do something about.  Instead, Congress is doing things like harassing our (admittedly poor) education system, repeatedly forcing it to adopt untested techniques to improve test scores.  Income inequality has consistently been proven to affect education outcome more than any other factor.  Income inequality is the primary reason than a significant percentage of Americans cannot afford health care insurance (and making laws requiring them to purchase it does nothing to fix that problem).  Income inequality is also very strongly linked to our recent and current economic problems.  It also seems to have strong links to crime as well.  Income inequality also has links to many types of self destructive behavior (drug and alcohol abuse, for instance).  Income inequality is closely related to a vast majority of the big problems Congress keeps failing to fix.

There is a field of medicine that is starting to get more attention recently called "functional medicine."  Traditional medicine treats symptoms.  If there is pain, pain killers are administered.  If there is skin dryness, lotions are administered.  If there is depression, medications designed primarily to make a person feel good are administered.  The catch with a vast majority of these treatments is that they treat the symptoms, but they do not treat the cause.  Chronic headaches, which are often treated with ever stronger pain killers, are typically caused by something that can be treated to eliminate the problem entirely.  Skin dryness, even chronic types, can often be cured by functional medicine, when normal dermatologists would prescribe a life time treatment of lotions and moisture buffers.  Instead of treating symptoms forever, functional medicine aims to cure the underlying cause of the symptoms, eliminating the symptoms for good.  Now, apply this to income inequality.

Income inequality is a known cause of many of the problems we currently face.  It is a likely cause for many other problems that we have either not researched or have not gathered enough supporting evidence to constitute proof of a causal relationship with.  The evidence indicates that this one thing could solve nearly all of the big problems Congress has been trying to fix over the last half century.  It is also currently the biggest concern of Americans.  Congress should be tackling income inequality head on, instead of skirting around it trying to cover up the symptoms.  Congress needs to stop flirting with special interests and start taking care of its primary responsibility: The people it is sworn to serve.