Every so often I run across a commentary or published letter to the editor that both infuriates and saddens me. The great majority of them are along the lines of the most recent one I saw, which is why I decided to comment on it and what it represents. The letter in question asked why we’re spending so much money on space programs and research when so much needs to be done on earth. Besides the point that a tremendous amount of good for those of us on earth has come from such programs, the other point is that the amount spent on space programs is a tiny fraction of the U.S. federal budget. In fact, right now NASA spending is one half of one percent of total federal spending.

In past years, the same complaint has been leveled at foreign aid. Even today, polls show that Americans believe, on average, that 26% of federal spending goes to foreign aid, when the total is actually less than one percent.

Americans believe that ten percent of federal spending goes to pay non-defense federal employees. The real amount is a third of that. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another area. Americans believe it takes up five percent of federal spending. The reality is one tenth of one percent.

Interestingly enough, popular estimates of spending for the programs that most people find “worthwhile” are far more accurate, as in the case of Social Security, where people believe, again, on average, that Social Security takes up twenty percent of total federal outlays, which it does.

In short, the figures that people use are the ones that support their beliefs, despite the fact that the correct numbers for foreign aid, for instance, have been published for years. And even when “everyone” knows the correct numbers, they can’t or won’t do the figures. An example of this is immigration. The figure of eleven million illegal immigrants has been printed, denounced, graphed, and presented in almost every way possible over the past several years. The U.S. population is now roughly 320 million people, and “legal” immigrants comprise just over ten percent of the population, so that all immigrants, legal and illegal, comprise less than 14% of the total population of the U.S. – as opposed to the 33% that Americans, on average, believe. [Of course, both the correct and the “popular” figures ignore the fact that everyone in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants, and that includes Native Americans, although their ancestors arrived some 15,000 years before everyone else’s.]

Such distortions abound everywhere politically. One “liberal” group has been declaring that 57% of the U.S. budget goes to defense spending, except a look at the fine print reveals that’s 57% of federal “discretionary” spending, which doesn’t include the bulk of federal spending. Defense spending amounts to around 21% of total federal spending, possibly as high as 24%, given which recent fiscal year’s data is used.

It used to be said that people were entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Apparently, now, everyone is also entitled to their own facts.

There are many ways to define or categorize politics, whether by tactics, structure, customary practices, or other means. One of those other means is categorizing the politics of a system by the basic purpose of such politics. The noted military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” But what is often missed in that definition is Clausewitz tacitly assumes politics is a form of conflict short of war… and that, in my experience, is certainly true.

While there are many purposes behind political conflict, those that are most basic, at least from what I have observed, are the politics of economic conflict, which one might call the politics of avarice, and ideological conflict, or the politics of belief. Historically, these two conflicts have usually been intertwined to some degree, in that economic systems reflect the beliefs of those in control of the economy and that belief systems cannot persist without economic support.

History has shown that when the politics of belief take control of a society and explicitly dictate who may hold power, or even survive, based on their adherence to a particular system of belief, that’s usually when politics get really nasty, and life gets unpleasant, if not fatal, for those who do not share the beliefs of those in control, as witness Spain under the Inquisition, the Taliban, ISIS, Germany during the Third Reich, and other political systems dominated by a requirement for absolute adherence to a belief.

One might claim that it’s just as bad when pure economics reign, but I’d contend that, while an unfettered market system will invariably create great income inequality, the privations created by that inequality generally don’t create the systemic executions, torture, and oppression regularly imposed by the tyranny of political systems that require adherence to a specific belief structure.

That may be why I have great concerns about those individuals, even those with the best of intentions, who wish to use politics as a means to legally impose belief structures on individuals. A true believer, even with the best of intentions, still poses a danger to all society, while a pure free market advocate poses a danger to the poor and disenfranchised.

Both need to be curtailed, but the danger posed to society by not curtailing the true believers is far greater, something that the Founding Fathers felt most strongly, and that was why they insisted on the separation of church and state, something that today’s true believers would have us forget or ignore.

We Americans live in the most technological and complex world society that the world has yet known, and yet, if we’re to be judged by our political rhetoric and campaign slogans, we’d come off as simplistic idiots.

Illegal immigration is a problem? Build an expensive wall thousands of miles long that is largely irrelevant to the problem? Or just deport eleven million illegal immigrants, many of whom have children who are legal U.S citizens, not to mention those who were brought involuntarily as children and who know no other culture? And without those immigrant children, and the U.S. Caucasian birth rate below the replacement rate, who will pay the Social Security taxes and benefits of older Americans in another generation? The current INS bureaucracy can’t even cope with the status quo, let alone attempting to round up eleven million people. Nor do those who propose this seem to consider that doing so would essentially require the establishment of a police state. Let’s see… walls, ethnic purity, forceful removal of undesirables… didn’t that already happen somewhere?

How to deal with the loss of middle class jobs? Increase taxes on the wealthy and give everyone a free college education? Except that ignores the problem that we already produce twice as many college graduates every year as there are jobs that require a college education. Or perhaps impose punitive tariffs on foreign-produced goods that will double the price of imports, which means further impoverishing those millions of Americans who are underpaid? That also ignores the fact that the greatest percentage of formerly middle class manufacturing jobs that were lost were not outsourced, but automated so that, even if foreign outsourcing were prohibited, all that would happen would be greater automation.

Income inequality? Just pile huge taxes on the “rich”? How long would the super-rich remain in the U.S.? Even the egalitarian Swedes had to scale back on their confiscatory taxes to stop the flight of wealthy individuals. Then what happens when the confiscatory taxes hit the merely affluent, who tend to be generally productive individuals?

Provide affordable health care? Exactly how is that possible without totally restructuring the entire health care, medical technology and pharmaceutical industries? And, oh, yes, the financial sector as well.

Make America militarily strong again? With the strongest and most powerful military force in the world and a huge annual deficit, exactly how do you propose to finance greater military expansion… and for what purposes?

Global warming? What problem? Is it just a hoax or an over-reaction, despite the fact that 99% of all glaciers have diminished or vanished over the past 50 years, that Arctic sea ice is smaller than at any time recorded, that CO2 levels are higher than in tens of millions of years?

These are just the top headliners in the current political campaign, and there’s precious little consensus on the total nature of the problem, aside from the fact that in some cases, there’s not even agreement on whether there is a problem. Solutions to any single one of them will require complex multi-faceted approaches over years.

And given the tens of millions of Americans believing in simplistic answers and/or denials, as well as simplistic political slogans, I must confess to considerable doubt as to whether we, as a people, are really interested in solutions, or even recognizing the problems.

Over the last six months or longer, we’ve had the assorted candidates for president make various promises stating that, if they were elected, they would expel all illegal immigrants, provide a free college education for young people, create Medicare for everyone, build a wall the entire length of the U.S. southern border to keep out any more illegal immigrants, end “birthright” citizenship, abolish the IRS, lower U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in ten years, “wage a real war on terror,” and… about a hundred other promises, the majority of which have been tossed off and out by Donald Trump.

Speaking as someone who spent twenty years in national politics at the federal level, I can say, without much fear of contradiction by subsequent events, that none of the promises I listed will happen and most likely only a handful of the less “comprehensive” promises have any chance of being considered, let alone enacted or successfully promulgated through executive orders.

So why do politicians knowingly make such empty promises?

Because they’re appealing to people’s fears, greed, or dreams… or some combination thereof.

In a way, such promises are little more than a way of saying, “I understand what concerns you, what you want out of life, and what you want for your family and children.” The fact that such promises have gotten more and more outrageous over the years, at least here in the United States, is, I believe, a reflection of people’s distrust and disbelief in politicians. They no longer believe a simple statement like, “I understand the problems you face.” So the politicians make even bigger promises, with the underlying hope, one that has some reality behind it, that a grandiose promise might just translate into some smaller action in the same area. Or that the politician will at least attempt something.

It’s clear from the results of the presidential primaries so far that very few of each candidate’s supporters care very much about the actual impracticality of such promises. Only those opposing a candidate consider such impracticalities or impossibilities, even while they tacitly accept the impractical promises voiced by their own chosen candidate.

The only problem with all this is… what happens if a candidate does get elected with enough support to try to build a wall, throw out all illegal immigrants, or fund college educations for everyone? Or… what happens if the candidate tries… and is stopped?

After a year of political unrest and anger, those may not be rhetorical questions. And then what?

The other day several friends and I were having a discussion about a number of things, and the issue of health insurance came up. One friend said that one of the problems with the Affordable Care Act was that it made people pay for coverages they didn’t need. And he’s absolutely right… and totally wrong.

The entire point of insurance is to spread the risk among a large number of people and over time. If people were allowed to buy insurance only after they needed it, then there wouldn’t be any insurance, because the insurers would be broke. For better or worse, that was the reason why insurers refused to cover “pre-existing conditions,” or would only do so with a far higher premium, unless the insured had already been covered by the same insurer prior to the discovery of that condition [and some insurers wouldn’t even do that], which often tied people to a given job or resulted in huge problems when they were laid off or had to switch jobs because an employer went out of business. No matter what one thinks about the Affordable Care Act, it is a plan based, if less than optimally, on commercial insurance, and that means that the costs of health care have to be covered by premiums. Those premiums also cover the high salaries and profits of the insurance companies, and the trade-off between the ACA and a single-payer, government-backed system is whether the “efficiencies” [about which I have certain doubts] of the private sector outweigh the costs of a profit-making enterprise enough to make the cost to the insured lower than would be the case in a government-backed single-payer system.

The second problem of understanding is simply that the principal problem underlying the insurance costs is and will continue to be the rising cost of health care in the United States. So long as those costs rise, so will the costs to anyone who is insured, and if there are large numbers of uninsured people who need health care, those costs will be added to the costs of the insured, either through higher premiums and/or greater co-pays because, at present, the vast majority of hospitals are required to treat people who need care, whether or not those individuals can afford it or not.

The third problem is that no country in the world, even the United States, has the resources to provide the ultimate in high-tech health care to every single individual in the country. There isn’t enough funding, enough medical personnel, and enough equipment to do that. So, like it or not, health care is effectively rationed. The “traditional” way of doing that in the United States has been through the market system. If you have enough insurance and money, and enough intelligence to deploy the insurance and money effectively, you can generally get the best health care. If you don’t, you get less, and in some cases, you effectively get nothing. In countries with government-mandated systems, most people get coverage for what the system determines is “equitable” for everyone, although, in some of those countries, if you have great resources, again, you can get better care.

All the political rhetoric about health insurance boils down to how society will pay for the rising health care costs of those who either cannot afford it or choose not to afford it, and how this impacts each person. In our extended family, my wife and I have ended up paying more and more out of pocket every year as the insurance costs, deductibles, and co-pays go up, but we have relatives who work long hours who now have better coverage for less.

But there isn’t a “magic” answer. Health care costs. It’s that simple, and all the political rhetoric in the world won’t change that. That political rhetoric is merely “code” for saying who should pay more.