And So It Begins

The Iowa Caucuses are in the books, and things are no more clear this morning than they have been up until now.  Ted Cruz won the Republican side with a rousing 4% margin over the Donald, who was in a virtual tie for second with Marco Rubio.  Only the pundits were surprised by any of this, given the fact that Trump has pretty much been giving Iowa the old Jersey salute for the past month, and Cruz has been campaigning there with furious intensity.
Bernie Sanders proved that he is a legitimate contender by coming in only 0.3% behind Hilary Clinton, and that is what really matters to me, because I'm beginning to get the feeling that this election has the potential to be an important moment in our history.  I really want Bernie to win, but I am becoming convinced that he doesn't need to win to push us as a nation in the right direction.  His insistence that income inequality and the concentration of wealth at the top of the food chain is the great evil that we must combat through our politics, is shaping the Democratic debate.
It strikes me as a little bit odd that he doesn't have a Republican counterpart.  Cruz was talking about the support he felt from the grassroots conservatives, which to me conjures up an image of the working class of the midwest.  Also, Cruz's victory came amidst a record turnout in overall participation at the Caucus, which might indicate that he is able to mobilize the masses to something more than hooting and hollering at a rally (Trump).
Now, let me be clear, Cruz creeps me out for reasons that have little to do with his political agenda, but his ultra-right wing politics strike me as delusional, more so than Bernie Sanders' would if I put myself on the other side of the aisle (which as a recovering conservative, I think I can still do).  Cruz himself used the term "failed liberalism" to describe the past seven years under Obama.  Now you probably know that I do not agree with that assessment of Obama's legacy.  If anything, my critique of Obama is that he needed to be more forcefully radical than he was, but his tenure has seen the economy steady and begin to recover from the mess that deregulation, and several wars caused. Of course conservative folk tend to want to ignore this progress, or frame it in a way that would indicated that it was despite Obama's "failed liberalism" rather than give him any credit for it.
I understand our political system well enough to know that the President doesn't actually have as much power as people want to ascribe to that office, and the fact that an economy rises or falls is dependent on large forces and complicated factors, of which the executive branch is only marginally effective in either supporting or contravening.  It's sort of like the way humans herd large animals, you nudge them and try to get them to follow the course you want them to follow.  If there is chaos, i.e. a stampede, like the housing bubble, or the crash of 1929, no matter who you are, you had best get out of the way, and get ready to clean up the mess.
In all observable recent instances, deregulation leads to a stampede of some sort or another.  Businesses need to be regulated, capitalism must be tempered or else it becomes dangerous and toxic.  That's not communist propaganda, that is cold hard fact.  Greed is a high ranking sin in pretty much every religion I can think of for a reason (oddly enough except for some perversions of Christianity, but that's for another day).  The difference between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders is simply the level of regulation that they think is necessary, Cruz thinks nearly none is necessary, Sanders thinks quite a bit is necessary.  The evidence of this need is income inequality and the disappearing middle class.  I heard Cruz say this morning that his policies are focused on "living within your means," however, I see some major structural impediments to "living within your means" if your means are within the range that defines the middle class, by most accounts, this is getting more difficult.  One of the most telling, but not the only indicator of this is the way that wages have not kept pace with inflation (sorry for all the statistics).
Conservative policies tend to anathematize the very things that enabled the American middle class to grow and thrive in the wake of World War II:

1.  Labor Unions: which gave employees the power to stand up to powerful economic forces. And yes, unions do make it more expensive for businesses in terms of operating costs, but do you want to make the rich richer or sustain the "grassroots?"  And yes, unions have and can become corrupt and bureaucratic, but do you throw the baby out with the bathwater?
2. Social Security: including the social safety net of welfare and unemployment and food assistance, etc. The sort of safety net that tries to ensure that people do not fall through the cracks and end up in abject poverty.  This is hard work, and it is always in need of improvement, but that doesn't make it wrong.
3. Public Education: the best way to improve society over the long haul is to educate it's members.  The changes that have taken place in the world over the past 50 years have changed our educational needs, but the system has remained rooted in an old model.  An undergraduate degree is the modern equivalent of a high school education from 1950.  Couple the increasing cost of "higher" education with the decline of manufacturing and trade work and you have a witches brew that poisons the middle class.  In addition, manufacturing and trade work increasingly require higher levels of training and intelligence, which can and is fostered through education.
4. Healthcare (single payer option): Bernie has pointed out that while his plan for a single payer healthcare system would indeed be expensive in terms of tax dollars, it would be offset by the removal of what amounts to a rather large expense, both to individuals who must self-insure and businesses who provide insurance programs to their employees.  This is not technically socialized medicine, the government does not own hospitals or the means of providing care, they essentially become the one who pays the bills, giving them massive bargaining power in keeping the cost of services down and the quality of care up.  Medicare already exists and functions this way.  Again, this is something that would be in constant need of innovation and refining, but because it's a difficult challenge doesn't mean that the status quo is okay.

These are the things I'm paying attention to as this circus gets rolling.  Oh yeah, and I don't want any more wars. I'm so tired of wars. I'm not voting for anyone who starts saber rattling or warmongering.  Actually that might be the biggest deal breaker in all of this.