TED Community » Brian Ross

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Social justice, jazz music, cooking, investing, seeing amazing places, sampling and creating amazing cuisine, and learning about anything and everything new.

An idea worth spreading

We need to innovate the United States government into forward thinking strategies. Universal Health Care could be easily paid by putting our health care savings into an account which the Federal Reserve lends out to banks and other large institutional customers, just as it lends directly from the Reserve itself. Retirement funds should likewise be collected as part of payroll and set aside in funds that private enterprise can draw on, and pay back. Right now Wall Street gets its money for next to nothing, and makes a fortune off of it. It would be nice to take a piece out of that cash cow and put it back to public purpose rather than gifting it to companies worth trillions.

Talk to me about

Anything you want. I'm always interested in learning something new.

People don't know that I'm good at

I'm pretty fair juggler.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +0.50 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Conversation: Is the conservative movement at a point of historic realignment that will dump or marginalize the Republican Party?

  Nov 19 2012: Will the country exist? Unless you've taken a recent course in Sarte and Camus and decided that nothing is real, yes.

• A reply on Conversation: Ignorance Plagues Progress: Finding New Avenues to End It

  Jul 17 2012: Our systems of learning only channel a select few into schools and programs where we teach people to challenge assumptions and rethink the world. The vast majority of those educated learn by rote, are trained to fill lower-level task specific jobs, and are given very few tools to think for themselves outside of narrow parameters.

• A reply on Conversation: Ignorance Plagues Progress: Finding New Avenues to End It

  Jul 17 2012: And how do you achieve that in a mass media where liberals distrust it because they believe its owners have an agenda of keeping stupid and complacent, and extreme conservatives don't trust anything other than Fox because they have been conditioned for 35 years to believe that the media holds a liberal bias?
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  A comment on Conversation: Ignorance Plagues Progress: Finding New Avenues to End It

  Jul 5 2012: I've spent the last couple of months researching more root causes to the highly partisan political turmoil in the United States. It all keeps boiling down to a pair of articles that I wrote, one on ignorance in America and how it shapes the political discourse ( http://truth-2-power.com/2012/06/29/why-negative-political-attack-ads-work-5-in-10-americans-cant-read-8-in-10-cant-process/ ) and one on how academia is being changed by state and federal budget cuts, increased placement of non-academics and business faculty into the management of colleges and universities, and the cash ceiling that is making higher learning too expensive for more poor, middle and upper-middle class American families. (http://truth-2-power.com/2012/07/03/as-much-education-as-they-can-afford-romney-remark-renews-a-different-kind-of-voter-suppression/) Most disturbing was this report on adult literacy: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012045.pdf
  
  Our education system creates a sub-group of 3% of the population that is natively smart. 6% that are higher functioning and get most of it all, and 94% that just don't. Some because of aptitude, on the bell curve won't understand much. The vast majority of Americans, though, on that same bell curve, should be doing far better. Ancient cultural moires are a huge drag on learning, and a huge wellspring of ignorance.
  
  So how do we leverage our huge advances in information technology, and develop new methods of education? How do we culturally educate the population to be broader-minded socially, politically, and economically? Is it possible to bring religious people "forward" to embrace faith in the scientific realities of the 21st century?

• A comment on Conversation: What do you think is the biggest technological challenge the human race will face in the next 30 years?

  Jul 5 2012: Overcoming ignorance. There can be no technology without education. There can be no real education without stimulating the imagination. In the most "literate" country in the world, the U.S., 51% of American adults can barely read, write and think well enough to add up a check and follow instructions. 96% of American adults have varying degrees of problem synthesizing information.(http://truth-2-power.com/2012/06/29/why-negative-political-attack-ads-work-5-in-10-americans-cant-read-8-in-10-cant-process/ ) As our machines get "smarter" ignorant people become increasingly leery of them, and politics which drive funding for advanced technology turn their back on it as the practice of the less-controllable "elites." Until we can find a way to harness technology to overcome ignorance, rather than entertain, amuse and distract us, there is a clash awaiting the technocrats with a population increasing fearful of what it brings to their limited world views.

• A comment on Conversation: Poltiical Giving Should Be Left to the Living

  Dec 18 2011: The damage is largely done, but they have to be stopped. They counter that unions are big givers, but again it is in the face of this kind of onslaught that they've had to.

• A comment on Conversation: Put the collection of health care and retirement funds at U.S. Treasury and use funds to lend to banks and states for infrastructure.

  Sep 12 2011: The Congress would need to pass legislation that changes the funding procedures for Social Security and Medicare. Instead of the current Trust fund, the funds in trust would be moved to Treasury in national trust, and give Treasury the right to loan out monies from the funds to banks and to state governments for high-rated municipal bonds on public works projects. The Congress would also expand medicare to cover everyone, and should allow participants to pay more into Social Security where the additional funding plus interest on that money goes 100% back to the contributing citizen.

• A reply on Conversation: Put the collection of health care and retirement funds at U.S. Treasury and use funds to lend to banks and states for infrastructure.

  Sep 11 2011: The banks borrow from the Treasury at the prevailing federal funds rate. The Treasury could lend monies from the health care and pension funds first to put the money to work. Also, funds could be made available to States by way of higher yield state infrastructure municipal bonds that the states sell to Treasury. The state pays off the interest to the feds, and it goes back into the fund. Essentially it is not altogether different than a 401K invested in the mutual fund, save the Federal government has no profit motive and can be bound to keep risk factors low.