Round and round they go in Washington and absolutely nothing gets done to solve the nation’s problems. Ooops, there’s the problem. We’re still looking to Washington to solve our problems and they are incapable of doing the one thing that will instantly make things better for the American people.
They refuse to shut up shop and go home! That’s only partially a joke.
The current crisis is, of course, the soon to be upon us reaching of the government’s debt limit. Day after day (that’s a cycle, just to clarify the title) the same men meet in private to stake out the same positions (that’s a cycle) so they can adjourn and step before the cameras and point fingers at the other side for being intransigent (cycle). The administration and the Dems want to raise taxes on the wealthy as part of their “shared sacrifice” theory of government.
Where is the Republican who stands up and says: “Okay…take it all. Every penny the top one or two percent earned last year. You’ve still got a $2 Trillion deficit for the year. Where do you propose to get the rest of the money? And, oh, yes, where do you expect the capital to start new companies and grow existing companies to come from once you’ve done that? Oops, no jobs!”
Instead we hear the same tired rhetoric day after day. “This is not the time, with the economy in bad shape to raise taxes on anyone.” Hey, GOP, when almost half the population doesn’t pay a penny in Federal tax that’s a really lame argument.
The President is asked if social security checks will go out on August 3rd if the debt ceiling isn’t raised and he responds that he can’t guarantee they will, or that the veteran’s checks will go out either. If he had any guts he’d say, “We’ll pay the debt obligations, then social security and the vets…and, if there’s any money left over we’ll pay the other government obligations like salaries for the bloated bureaucracy and the stupid grants like studying how shrimp run on a treadmill.”
For 40 years or more, through the oil crises of the 1970s, the intermitent soaring gas prices (cyclical in case you didn’t notice) of the 80s, 90s and 2000s, we’re told, by both parties at various times that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign energy. Instead it goes up and we ship trillions of dollars out of the country, create countless jobs in foreign lands and, it is generally, acknowledged provide capital for our enemies. We shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, block offshore drilling on both our coasts and…in a blatant act of stupidity give something like $4 billion to Brazil so they can drill off their coast and, to quote our President, “become a major customer of theirs.”
There are so many more instances of stupidy it’s like trying to count the flies on a pile of dung.
What it is really all about, of course, is cupidity–the abject desire, the lust, to acrue more and more power. On the Dems side its really the ideological concept that government is the arbiter of first resort…that they, the intellectual elite (synonym: those with the ability to con the public into putting them into office) know better than anyone else how people should live, who should get and who shall give. Honesty demands that we also acknowledge that on the Republican side they just want to take the power from the Dems so they can decide how the money sucked out of the pockets of the taxpayers will be spent. But, rest assured, if history is any teacher, spend it they will. Remember we’ve raised the debt limit something like eight times in the last eight years. If memory serves, five or six of those years there was a Republican in the White House.
There’s enough duplicity to go around and here, in the deceitfulness of speech, of talking out of both sides of our mouths we have to add another group to the denouncing of Republicans and Democrats. We, the people, are equally guilty of saying one thing and meaning another. As a Tea Party rally attendee I’ve seen the makeup of the crowds and the signs. Forget what the lame stream media and the demogogues on the left have said. The people aren’t all rich white folk, they aren’t racist or white supremecists and they aren’t all Republican operatives just there to embarass the nation’s first black president (assuming we can now overlook that Clinton was thought to be).
But, generally they were a bit older than the average and while they claim to be concerned about the future of their children and grandchildren (I have three) they also generally seem not willing to give up anything that’s “rightfully” theirs. Well, nothing, is rightfully theirs. When I started my post-college working career my maximum contribution to social security was two percent of the first $5,000 earned. I didn’t max out until my second year of work. So, I put approximately $96 into the fund the first year and $100 the second year. Yes, my contribution certainly increased over the years as I earned more and as the rate and earning limit was raised.
But, and this is really important, when I was born my life expectency was just under 64 years. I’ve been on social security (and I’ll admit that without it I’d be hard pressed to survive which is why I still work over 32 hours a week) for over seven years. I don’t know this for certain but it is likely that I received every penny I paid into the system within the first three years. Since I have an aunt who passed away at 96, another who died recently at 94 and an uncle who will be 97 in December, there’s a good chance I’ll be taking money out of the system for another 10, 20 or 30 years. I have the right to say (stupidity) that I paid into the system and expected to be able to live nicely in my old age (cupidity) and that you don’t have any right to touch what was promised…which would, of course, make me guilty of duplicity in compounding the problem.
The point is we have to break these cycles. We have to stop doing stupid things with taxpayer monies–funding ridiculous research, paying out billions of dollars in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims and generally shredding the Constitution to advance political agendas. We have to stop ourselves and our elected officials from being guilty of cupidity…this is after all a republic–if we have the courage to keep it. And, finally, we must stop being duplicitous and allowing others to deceive us with empty rhetoric.
So easy to say…so difficult to achieve.
