In the rat race, prosperity, in products, is easier to obtain than finding home. Quality, fairness and community should be what counts.

For decades we have been scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get more prosperity. Prosperity is usually measured in the flow of goods and services. As for goods, how many products do we need? The smartphones most Americans have are miraculous compared to the transistor radios we were lucky to have back in the 1960s. So what more can we want? Our landfills and second hand stores are overflowing. Our food supply leads us to obesity. In many ways even our poor people live in material abundance. What many people don't have, these days, is the ability to be able to afford a place to live. A home is becoming un affordable in many parts of the country.

College education has gotten more expensive along with medical care. Some of these problems are related to the widening income gap in society. As for education, our colleges have gotten more expensive as they try to catch up the salaries they pay their top staff to bloated salaries at the top of private sector business. Medical costs are effected by this rat race to the top also. A problem of the income gap. Housing is going up also due to inflated markets driven by the push for more prosperity. Also our public institutions could use more discretionary spending for things like infrastructure. This is suffering from rising costs for labor, land and so forth pitted against tax ceilings.

Maybe we need to tax high incomes more and change the focus of society toward higher quality of life. Higher quality with the great technologies we now have at our disposal. Don't worry, even if we tax the rich more, we can still look forward to even better smartphones in the future. At the same time, maybe we can slow down the rat race just a bit and have more quality of life and a bit more peace of mind along with the latest our technology has to offer. A society with less income discrepancy could be a somewhat more relaxed and less neurotic society. I assume even prosperity will still inch forward as it has for the past few years. Just find a way to have us feel like we are living the "good life" without destroying the environment as well. The challenge we face. The good life can also mean, in part, a good and fair community.