It's been said of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates that they are abysmally stupid. Their use of facts is scant, inaccurate and always misleading or self-serving. But the blatant nature of these misuses is what troubles most people.
Granted, in the information age, it's a lot easier to look things up and do fact checking than in times past. Playing loose and fast with the facts isn't terribly new. But we're talking facts which they SHOULD KNOW without having a little gnome whispering them in their ear. For example, Rick Perry blasted Obama over withdrawing our troops from Iraq, saying that Perry would send them back. He lambasted Obama as catering "to his liberal leftist base." and suggested that the U.S. could have negotiated staying.
Obama tried on several occasions to negotiate that but was firmly rebuffed by the Iraqis. Any goodwill credit the U.S. had saved up with them for freeing them from Hussein had long since been spent and the Iraqis (not to mention the majority of the American People) wanted us out. Bush negotiated the original treaty and it was Bush who established the timeline that Obama was required to follow.
No one is sorry to see Iraq fade in the rear-view mirror of American history - except the oil companies who were certainly frothing at the mouth at the thought of exploiting their oil (until they, too, were kicked out of the country). Perry, being from Texas which is huge in oil and whose campaign has been driven by oil company funding, is certain to want to go back.
But the American people aren't. Anyone with two functioning brain cells would know better than to say, "I'll send the troops back to Iraq." For a governor trying to get elected in Texas, that may fly. Texas is a reliably right-wing state and no one loves killing people more than Texans do (Except, maybe, Florida, another reliably right-wing state). But this isn't the Texas governorship he's running for. By saying something that retarded, one may as well shoot themselves in the head politically speaking if they want to get elected to the PRESIDENCY. And yet, he said it.
This is merely one of many examples of stupidity among the GOP candidates. Michelle Bachmann finally dropped out after setting a record low for foot-in-mouth disease. Herman Cain dropped out when his lecherous background caught up with him. Both should have known better than to run in the first place.
But why did they?
One could shrug and claim stupidity, but I believe it goes deeper than that.
There is a dichotomy in the Republican party. The "old school" republicans are getting on in years. They were the ones who mouthed the same rightist rhetoric, but they usually knew to put the needs of the country first. They weren't fundamentally stupid enough to actually endanger the stability of the United States.
Then we have the tea partiers. I don't dignify the name with capitals. These are generally younger people who have grown up listening to the poisonous rhetoric the Republicans kept spouting. But rather than taking it for the hyperbole it was, they began to actually believe it. It was never meant as anything more than talk. Campaign promises were famously ignored in Congress. They were whatever needed to be said to get into office. Like saying people would have two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage (yes, a campaign slogan from the past), it was hyperbole: a thing that was not meant to be taken seriously. Most of us know better than to believe them. But apparently, other things got in the way of that message and the rank and file right-wing fringe didn't get the memo.
Religious manipulation of right-wing followers created people who can't think logically or rationally. To them, the facts are whatever they want them to be, because that's what their political leaders have been telling them. Things like "Evolution is just a theory", or "Gays marriage will undermine the the institution of marriage", or even "If we give the negro the right to vote, the whole country will go to hell." These lies were repeated and passed on as facts. These "facts" were blatant catering to the right-wings' prejudices and preconceptions strictly for the purposes of getting elected, of course, but they started to be believed. In believing this kind of nonsense, it creates nonsense thinking. People believe the lie. We call them "sociopaths". Those people grew up and became voters.
And THAT is what caused the schism which happened in the GOP. The younger right-wingers, believing things that weren't intended to be taken to their logical conclusions, having been manipulated by their religion and politics to ignore reason and embrace ignorance, have finally entered the political fray as political leaders.
The politically retarded, and socipathic, are getting into office.
And they can get in simply because they believe their rhetoric - the same rhetoric the right-wing has been spouting all along. Only now, they're seriously into it instead of treating it as a means to an ends. The long and short of it is that we have a bunch of sociopathic people who can't think willing to destroy the country in pursuit of unrealistic and impossible goals trying to become the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth.
And you thought things couldn't get worse?
If someone wonders why the right-wing is out of control, this seems to be a reasonable explanation for it. And this decay, the radicalism of the hard-core right-wing, will eventually destroy the party. It's a terminal cancer within them. They need to either cut it out or be consumed by it. And given that even moderate Republican candidates insist on cleaving to the GOP while simultaneously trying to cater to this increasingly radical - and more importantly more insistent that their elected representatives actually fulfill their unrealistic, impossible campaign promises - fringe instead of telling them to go pound sand and put the good of the country ahead of the radical right's agenda, I believe the GOP will go the way of the Whigs and fade from the political scene as a political power. They will be marginalized, isolated and finally ignored (or arrested as they become increasingly radicalized).
In either case, the fact is, the GOP is fracturing into the old-school conservative pragmatists and the new far-right radicals. Neither can, in and of itself, sustain a political power larger than a small minority (which may be why they make uneasy allies). But if they want to retain any chance at being part of the political process, they will have to divest themselves of the far right and move toward the center to pick up right-of-center former GOP members who no longer recognize their party.
To put it bluntly, the GOP must move left toward the middle in order to remain a viable political power and leave the tea party fringe to fend for itself. If it doesn't do that, a new, centrist party will arise and will continue to draw disaffected Republicans from the old party, leaving behind nothing but radical idealists with no allegiance to anything but their own ideologies as the inheritors of Lincoln's party.
They have sown the whirlwind, and are now reaping a harvest of pain.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Revisit: Why Taxing The Rich Will Save The Economy
Back in September 2011, I wrote a bit about how we should tax the rich in order to save the economy. I still think that's a good idea, but there are other issues that are out there which need to be addressed, too, and I think I know how to do that. Whether anyone in power has the will to do it (which is like saying whether there are belly dancers on Mars) remains to be seen, but my idea is relatively simple, addressing complex issues in what I think is a realistic and workable manner.
The plan is this:
1. Impose a surcharge on the top 20% of income earners so that they, collectively, pay off the national debt, plus today's interest on that debt, over a 5 year period.
2. Reduce taxes on the bottom 80% of income earners by the amount of that interest payment.
3. Remove the maximum taxable income cap on social security.
This will result in a massive transfer of wealth from the wealthy to the rest of us. I realize how socialist this sounds, but bear with me for a bit while I explain how this will work both short and long-term.
First of all, paying off the debt entirely has a multitude of impacts across the financial spectrum. We can buy back our debt (much of the debt is actually bought by the government), meaning the government gets more money to use almost immediately through that investment (preferably to fund education at the collegiate level).
The credit rating of the United States will go way up because there is a viable plan to fund repayment of the debt. We won't have to worry about raising the debt ceiling cap ever again, assuming Congress acts wisely and doesn't spend more than it takes in again. (As if that's going to happen, but that is down a much longer road). The value of the dollar starts to stabilize and grow against world currency, meaning oil gets cheaper. Part of the price of oil has to do with the value of the dollar rather than the oil itself. If the value of the dollar is high, the price of oil is lower.
That could have some negative effects on green tech development since money tends to be put into that only when the price of gas is high, but there will be these kinds of fluctuations in the economy as this plan is implemented. Also, the price of oil isn't going to go down that much since it's a finite resource and the straw is beginning to hit the bottom of the barrel there, so the overall impact may well be pretty low. With European markets being stupid, it's hard to say where the value of the dollar will head, but it can't hurt (except in American exports - which usually runs a gigantic deficit compared to imports) to have a strong dollar.
Still with me? Overall, it's a good thing to have a plan to get rid of the debt. The best thing about it is that we don't have to saddle our great-grandchildren with paying off OUR stupidity.
The reason it's done over 5 years is to reduce the detrimental effects of pulling that much money out of the economy. The wealthy invest rather than spend (see my previous blog for how that works), but if one pulls gigantic amounts of investment out of a company, the company tanks, followed by the economy if enough companies tank. A reduction of invested capital over five years which amounts to about 2% of their total wealth should reduce that impact.
And that doesn't include any potential GAINS a rebounded economy may have.
The second point there is basically letting the people get money to spend. The top 20% don't spend ENOUGH to make a difference in demand. The bottom 80% certainly do. By transferring that amount from them (through shifting the tax burden back onto the wealthy who can best afford it) to the people who spend that money, the economy is stimulated to a slight degree each year.
I don't want to over-state the case, because the interest owed on the debt today is about $200 billion dollars. That may seem like a lot, but to stimulate the U.S. economy, it will take a lot more than that. However there is another component to stimulating the economy - or at least getting people to spend their money. That is the attitude of the people toward the economy.
Even if the economy shows all the"on-paper" indications of health, if the people think times are bad, they don't spend as much. Previous stimulus packages were one-time tax breaks. One-time infusions don't create the kind of attitude boost a permanent tax cut can create. Permanent means the extra money will always be there, even if that extra money isn't a lot. Extra money will be spent, even if people save it (which in itself will help strengthen the economy and ease up credit for businesses and start-ups).
And over 5 years, that mounts to one trillion dollars of spending power. THAT is a lot of spending power. Toss on the positive effects of tax cuts for the POOR (instead of the wealthy as is usually the case) and you get a much brighter picture.
Finally, the thing about social security is that we don't tax everyone ENOUGH. Shortfalls are expected very soon and they will grow as the large minority of the population - the baby boomers - age. So cut out the cap.
No, the wealthy don't need social security. I agree. But without a lot of us minions supporting their wealthy life-styles, their wealth would never have happened.
Is it taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor? Yes.
Do I have a problem with that? No.
Is it unfair for the rich? Not really.
Without a hell of a lot of poor people, they wouldn't be rich in the first place. It's time to pay that back once these poor can no longer work, or have reached the age where they shouldn't have to continue to work so stay in cat food and kitty litter.
It's called being humane.
The amount of new funds coming in should be sufficient to fund social security for the foreseeable future. The wealthy may not LIKE it, and call it welfare, but their lifestyles are supported by those people. Those people paid into it, too, and they didn't get the lion's share of their income exempted from it.
The most important point in this is that the wealthy can AFFORD TO DO IT. An extreme example is that the SIX family members of Walmart founder Sam Walton, between them, have more wealth than the combined wealth of 90 MILLION of the poorest Americans. It takes the combined wealth of the next 2.1 million richer Americans to equal it. (Their wealth is equal to the wealth of the poorest 30% of Americans, with a population of 307 million people, that means these six people have the same total wealth as the poorest 92.1 million Americans do combined.)
They will not miss meals, worry about whether they'll have a roof over their heads or wonder if they can buy clothes for their kids. They may not be living as large as they might want to, but the inconveniences will be comparatively nonexistent to the troubles facing the vast majority of Americans. And it's not as if they'll lose their money in the long-run.
Longer-term the wealthy will do fine. As the economy grows, so, too, will their fortunes. It may not grow as much as it would have had the economy recovered like that on its own, but indications are that the economy won't be stimulated enough to do that on its own now. So the upshot is that the wealthy will pay a lot to get a lot more, or they pay nothing and get a lot less. My bet is once it's explained that this surcharge is a one-time thing, that funding social security will also help the economy and that both will stimulate the economy generating greater wealth for them in the long-run, they may be a lot more willing to come on board for it. If they think of it as an investment in the future, rather than a burden, they'll be in a much better frame of mind.
In short, everyone wins in the end. That's the kind of solution to a problem I like.
The plan is this:
1. Impose a surcharge on the top 20% of income earners so that they, collectively, pay off the national debt, plus today's interest on that debt, over a 5 year period.
2. Reduce taxes on the bottom 80% of income earners by the amount of that interest payment.
3. Remove the maximum taxable income cap on social security.
This will result in a massive transfer of wealth from the wealthy to the rest of us. I realize how socialist this sounds, but bear with me for a bit while I explain how this will work both short and long-term.
First of all, paying off the debt entirely has a multitude of impacts across the financial spectrum. We can buy back our debt (much of the debt is actually bought by the government), meaning the government gets more money to use almost immediately through that investment (preferably to fund education at the collegiate level).
The credit rating of the United States will go way up because there is a viable plan to fund repayment of the debt. We won't have to worry about raising the debt ceiling cap ever again, assuming Congress acts wisely and doesn't spend more than it takes in again. (As if that's going to happen, but that is down a much longer road). The value of the dollar starts to stabilize and grow against world currency, meaning oil gets cheaper. Part of the price of oil has to do with the value of the dollar rather than the oil itself. If the value of the dollar is high, the price of oil is lower.
That could have some negative effects on green tech development since money tends to be put into that only when the price of gas is high, but there will be these kinds of fluctuations in the economy as this plan is implemented. Also, the price of oil isn't going to go down that much since it's a finite resource and the straw is beginning to hit the bottom of the barrel there, so the overall impact may well be pretty low. With European markets being stupid, it's hard to say where the value of the dollar will head, but it can't hurt (except in American exports - which usually runs a gigantic deficit compared to imports) to have a strong dollar.
Still with me? Overall, it's a good thing to have a plan to get rid of the debt. The best thing about it is that we don't have to saddle our great-grandchildren with paying off OUR stupidity.
The reason it's done over 5 years is to reduce the detrimental effects of pulling that much money out of the economy. The wealthy invest rather than spend (see my previous blog for how that works), but if one pulls gigantic amounts of investment out of a company, the company tanks, followed by the economy if enough companies tank. A reduction of invested capital over five years which amounts to about 2% of their total wealth should reduce that impact.
And that doesn't include any potential GAINS a rebounded economy may have.
The second point there is basically letting the people get money to spend. The top 20% don't spend ENOUGH to make a difference in demand. The bottom 80% certainly do. By transferring that amount from them (through shifting the tax burden back onto the wealthy who can best afford it) to the people who spend that money, the economy is stimulated to a slight degree each year.
I don't want to over-state the case, because the interest owed on the debt today is about $200 billion dollars. That may seem like a lot, but to stimulate the U.S. economy, it will take a lot more than that. However there is another component to stimulating the economy - or at least getting people to spend their money. That is the attitude of the people toward the economy.
Even if the economy shows all the"on-paper" indications of health, if the people think times are bad, they don't spend as much. Previous stimulus packages were one-time tax breaks. One-time infusions don't create the kind of attitude boost a permanent tax cut can create. Permanent means the extra money will always be there, even if that extra money isn't a lot. Extra money will be spent, even if people save it (which in itself will help strengthen the economy and ease up credit for businesses and start-ups).
And over 5 years, that mounts to one trillion dollars of spending power. THAT is a lot of spending power. Toss on the positive effects of tax cuts for the POOR (instead of the wealthy as is usually the case) and you get a much brighter picture.
Finally, the thing about social security is that we don't tax everyone ENOUGH. Shortfalls are expected very soon and they will grow as the large minority of the population - the baby boomers - age. So cut out the cap.
No, the wealthy don't need social security. I agree. But without a lot of us minions supporting their wealthy life-styles, their wealth would never have happened.
Is it taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor? Yes.
Do I have a problem with that? No.
Is it unfair for the rich? Not really.
Without a hell of a lot of poor people, they wouldn't be rich in the first place. It's time to pay that back once these poor can no longer work, or have reached the age where they shouldn't have to continue to work so stay in cat food and kitty litter.
It's called being humane.
The amount of new funds coming in should be sufficient to fund social security for the foreseeable future. The wealthy may not LIKE it, and call it welfare, but their lifestyles are supported by those people. Those people paid into it, too, and they didn't get the lion's share of their income exempted from it.
The most important point in this is that the wealthy can AFFORD TO DO IT. An extreme example is that the SIX family members of Walmart founder Sam Walton, between them, have more wealth than the combined wealth of 90 MILLION of the poorest Americans. It takes the combined wealth of the next 2.1 million richer Americans to equal it. (Their wealth is equal to the wealth of the poorest 30% of Americans, with a population of 307 million people, that means these six people have the same total wealth as the poorest 92.1 million Americans do combined.)
They will not miss meals, worry about whether they'll have a roof over their heads or wonder if they can buy clothes for their kids. They may not be living as large as they might want to, but the inconveniences will be comparatively nonexistent to the troubles facing the vast majority of Americans. And it's not as if they'll lose their money in the long-run.
Longer-term the wealthy will do fine. As the economy grows, so, too, will their fortunes. It may not grow as much as it would have had the economy recovered like that on its own, but indications are that the economy won't be stimulated enough to do that on its own now. So the upshot is that the wealthy will pay a lot to get a lot more, or they pay nothing and get a lot less. My bet is once it's explained that this surcharge is a one-time thing, that funding social security will also help the economy and that both will stimulate the economy generating greater wealth for them in the long-run, they may be a lot more willing to come on board for it. If they think of it as an investment in the future, rather than a burden, they'll be in a much better frame of mind.
In short, everyone wins in the end. That's the kind of solution to a problem I like.
Monday, January 2, 2012
The Fall of the LEGO Legacy
I don't normally peruse the toy aisle in a department store - especially during the "holiday season". But I had the occasion to go looking for a Nerf Gun recently (Yes, it was for me. God forbid you equip one of today's Munchkin terrorists with one of those things.) and was struck by what I saw in the LEGO aisle.
There were Star Destroyers and Castles and Cities and other themed (and to my budget expensive) sets. They had LEGO people, too, and all things LEGO with some correlation to a real-world item. All in neat sets so you could build what you saw on the box.
But that was the problem. You could only build what you saw on the box.
I couldn't help but look at them with a strong feeling of sadness and loss. It's not that I wouldn't have killed to have gotten something like that when I was a kid. It was the fact that these newfangled sets could NOT be used the way we used to play with LEGOs in my family when we were growing up.
WAY back then, shortly after the ice retreated for most of you reading this here, back in the 1960's, we used to play with LEGOs. Back then, they were just small, choking-hazard-sized, plastic blocks of different size, shape and thickness. The round ones were one pin thick. Others ranged from two, four or eight pins in a block, up to two pins wide. They had others which were exactly one third as thick as a regular block. They had two, four or eight pins and were two wide if they had more than two pins. There were others which were longer (always an even number of pins), and wider. They were "platforms" or "logs" - at least that's what we thought of them at the time.
You didn't buy kits. You just bought more LEGOs in bunches by the number of pieces, with a variety of pieces in each bunch you bought. And what you could make with them was anything your imagination said it was.
I used to make cruisers, myself. These weren't Star Cruisers. They were Navy Cruisers from World War Two (and a little later). The kind with large naval guns on the decks. Special "wheel" blocks had a pin in them which you would insert into special blocks for rolling LEGO toys. I used them to create gun turrets that would elevate and rotate and spent hours having navy battles with my siblings, along with authentic "battle damage" by tearing apart little bits that got "blown off" during the heat of combat.
All of this was made from generic blocks of LEGOs. No kits. No instructions. Nothing to tell me how to build it one way and not another. Hours and hours of fun and when you got bored with the Cruisers, you could make something NEW out of it.
Today, not so much.
These kits are apparently intended to be theme-based. Each kit makes something specific. Yes, it takes some time to put it together, but the imagination factor, and the "Hmmm..." factor in figuring how to do it on your own, is utterly lost.
To me, the introduction of LEGO people was the beginning of the end for LEGO. The first time I saw that on T.V. (back when I still watched T.V. when networks showed 12 to 15 minutes less in commercials than what they show today), I knew something vital had been taken away from kids.
We used to take the thinner ones - an eight, a four and three two pin ones - and make our "people". It took imagination to come up with this and time to find them in the LEGO bin. Necessity breeds invention and ever since the introduction of LEGO people, kids no longer had to think about how to make people out of little blocks of plastic. The whole LEGO experience went down hill from there - to the detriment of the imagination of children everywhere.
Back then there were no sets, no kits, no schemes. If you wanted to make something that looked like something "real", you had to use your imagination. We didn't worry about genders. We used them howsoever our little imaginations told us they needed to be used. If we wanted "girls", we could add a fourth two pin one across the arms in the middle - or get naughty and add two one pin round ones, creating a little LEGO Dolly Parton. It was rather disturbing to our mom to see that, but it was using our imaginations in using a generic set of building block options in order to create them. We did not have any gender identity issues. We made anything our minds and the blocks could be made into and if it wasn't exactly right, imagination filled in the gaps.
Today's LEGOs seem little more than three dimensional puzzles. Yes, you can put something together and play with it like a toy, but deconstructing it and rearranging it and getting an entirely DIFFERENT toy seems not to be part of the equation anymore. Perhaps they just became too "goal oriented", with the object of the little blocks to make one particular thing out of them, or adhere to a particular theme with particular LEGOs. But in my mind, the imagination factor has been taken out and that is what made them the most fun.
Be it marketing, legislation (I wasn't kidding about the choking-hazard-sized blocks), a generation or two of unimaginative kids (or parents) or simply catering to the average human being's ability to think creatively (which seems not to be all that high), LEGOs today are too easy and, sadly, BORING. Once the new LEGO kit smell wears off, that toy is tossed into the play-bin of obscurity from which no LEGO kit ever emerges wholly intact. And once a piece or three are lost, that kit becomes mostly worthless to a kid. When we lost pieces, we just got more pieces, not a whole new kit.
Today's LEGOs are unimaginative, expensive, easily made obsolete or less than what it should be and don't encourage the kind of play that made my childhood so much fun. It's time to bring back the basic LEGO and have kids develop their minds without adhering to an externally-imposed standard or expectation. Let them make their toys THEIR WAY and let them feel that sense of accomplishment in creating something special from the ordinary.
There were Star Destroyers and Castles and Cities and other themed (and to my budget expensive) sets. They had LEGO people, too, and all things LEGO with some correlation to a real-world item. All in neat sets so you could build what you saw on the box.
But that was the problem. You could only build what you saw on the box.
I couldn't help but look at them with a strong feeling of sadness and loss. It's not that I wouldn't have killed to have gotten something like that when I was a kid. It was the fact that these newfangled sets could NOT be used the way we used to play with LEGOs in my family when we were growing up.
WAY back then, shortly after the ice retreated for most of you reading this here, back in the 1960's, we used to play with LEGOs. Back then, they were just small, choking-hazard-sized, plastic blocks of different size, shape and thickness. The round ones were one pin thick. Others ranged from two, four or eight pins in a block, up to two pins wide. They had others which were exactly one third as thick as a regular block. They had two, four or eight pins and were two wide if they had more than two pins. There were others which were longer (always an even number of pins), and wider. They were "platforms" or "logs" - at least that's what we thought of them at the time.
You didn't buy kits. You just bought more LEGOs in bunches by the number of pieces, with a variety of pieces in each bunch you bought. And what you could make with them was anything your imagination said it was.
I used to make cruisers, myself. These weren't Star Cruisers. They were Navy Cruisers from World War Two (and a little later). The kind with large naval guns on the decks. Special "wheel" blocks had a pin in them which you would insert into special blocks for rolling LEGO toys. I used them to create gun turrets that would elevate and rotate and spent hours having navy battles with my siblings, along with authentic "battle damage" by tearing apart little bits that got "blown off" during the heat of combat.
All of this was made from generic blocks of LEGOs. No kits. No instructions. Nothing to tell me how to build it one way and not another. Hours and hours of fun and when you got bored with the Cruisers, you could make something NEW out of it.
Today, not so much.
These kits are apparently intended to be theme-based. Each kit makes something specific. Yes, it takes some time to put it together, but the imagination factor, and the "Hmmm..." factor in figuring how to do it on your own, is utterly lost.
To me, the introduction of LEGO people was the beginning of the end for LEGO. The first time I saw that on T.V. (back when I still watched T.V. when networks showed 12 to 15 minutes less in commercials than what they show today), I knew something vital had been taken away from kids.
We used to take the thinner ones - an eight, a four and three two pin ones - and make our "people". It took imagination to come up with this and time to find them in the LEGO bin. Necessity breeds invention and ever since the introduction of LEGO people, kids no longer had to think about how to make people out of little blocks of plastic. The whole LEGO experience went down hill from there - to the detriment of the imagination of children everywhere.
Back then there were no sets, no kits, no schemes. If you wanted to make something that looked like something "real", you had to use your imagination. We didn't worry about genders. We used them howsoever our little imaginations told us they needed to be used. If we wanted "girls", we could add a fourth two pin one across the arms in the middle - or get naughty and add two one pin round ones, creating a little LEGO Dolly Parton. It was rather disturbing to our mom to see that, but it was using our imaginations in using a generic set of building block options in order to create them. We did not have any gender identity issues. We made anything our minds and the blocks could be made into and if it wasn't exactly right, imagination filled in the gaps.
Today's LEGOs seem little more than three dimensional puzzles. Yes, you can put something together and play with it like a toy, but deconstructing it and rearranging it and getting an entirely DIFFERENT toy seems not to be part of the equation anymore. Perhaps they just became too "goal oriented", with the object of the little blocks to make one particular thing out of them, or adhere to a particular theme with particular LEGOs. But in my mind, the imagination factor has been taken out and that is what made them the most fun.
Be it marketing, legislation (I wasn't kidding about the choking-hazard-sized blocks), a generation or two of unimaginative kids (or parents) or simply catering to the average human being's ability to think creatively (which seems not to be all that high), LEGOs today are too easy and, sadly, BORING. Once the new LEGO kit smell wears off, that toy is tossed into the play-bin of obscurity from which no LEGO kit ever emerges wholly intact. And once a piece or three are lost, that kit becomes mostly worthless to a kid. When we lost pieces, we just got more pieces, not a whole new kit.
Today's LEGOs are unimaginative, expensive, easily made obsolete or less than what it should be and don't encourage the kind of play that made my childhood so much fun. It's time to bring back the basic LEGO and have kids develop their minds without adhering to an externally-imposed standard or expectation. Let them make their toys THEIR WAY and let them feel that sense of accomplishment in creating something special from the ordinary.
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