Our National Debt; The Madness Must End

I admit that I am not the best at keeping up with personal financial matters. I am not very thrifty with our money. So this task has always been my wife’s responsibility and she has always done the best possible job of it even when the best wasn’t good enough. When we were married I was making after all Federal, State and local taxes a grand total of $127.00, working for the Golden Flake Potato Chip Company driving a truck. I loved that job but was only working as a part time status employee working 39 ours a week. We had an apartment in the Centerpoint area and we were very happy but the money just was not there. Not having money was not unusual because we both grew up very poor but that didn’t matter because we knew nothing different. So anyway it was long before we realized that our income was very low and there were just things we could not afford to buy. We made a rule that we have followed to the present time which was that no matter what we would pay our rent to have a roof over our head and we would always have enough food to eat. All else fell in the order of priority. This system always worked but we had other rules. If there was not enough money coming in I was to work another job in order to create more income. I never left a job until I had a job opening for me. I never quit working to wait for something better to come along and I never under any circumstances left a job to go to another without the new job paying more in salary or per hour. Even when I started my own business I always worked a second job at night to supplement the loss of income during the winter months. My wife also went to work when things got rough. I can’t tell you how many sorry waitress jobs she worked for lousy tips to help us make ends meet. Before too long we had a new member of the family to support which really brought us an underestimated financial struggle. Most parents understand this. So we always tried to make the right and best decisions but we still failed at times and made poor choices such as buying a new vehicle which was murder on the budget instead of settling for a reliable used one at a fraction of the cost. We took vacations when we could not afford them and other such expenses when it would have been better not to but over all we tried to live within our means but it never seemed to be enough although we worked hard. And yes, sometimes we had to go for help during periods of crises to borrow some money. But over all we never went out too far on a limb. We just learned to adjust the best we could with what we had. We still do. What I do not understand is how our federal government never applies these or similar rules to their own methods of finances. We have always had Administrations in charge of this country that controlled the national debt in a roller coaster fashion. The present Administration is a new breed of politicians who have no understanding of handling finances at all. The Obama Administration inherited a National debt in crises and immediately does the opposite of what most sane and mature people would do with their own finances. What do they decide to do? They start spending money that exceeds most imaginable worst case scenarios over and over accumulating an additional 3 trillion dollars in debt that will never be paid off. They do not stop there but keep spending in a madness of irresponsibility that will ensure the children’s children of this country will be burdened down in debt an unable to function in a prudent manner. Knowing this and also knowing that this country is flat broke they decide to print more money to cover the cost of their spending addiction driving down the value of the dollar. They do all of this during a recession the worst since the great depression and unemployment reaching record numbers. Still, they extend unemployment benefits making sure those without work has the incentive to remain out of work. They also propose to take over the best health care system in the world with a plan that in its self will bankrupt the country on its own. This administration seizes every opportunity to take advantage of whatever crises this country is under to spend the tax payer money as a lottery. The Stimulus bill as an example was nothing more than the redistribution of hard earned wealth by the countries working people to those who squandered the money with nothing to show for it. And again Obama has the gall to propose yet another stimulus bill as if the other was a resounding success and most sickening of all is the support he gets from his liberal counterparts in the Democratic Party that go along with this criminal madness of this administration who is suppose to be the Stewards of our money. You would think after such gross failures of this imagination that Obama’s personal approval polling would be as low as congress but it remains in the lower 40s as if the people of this country are still under the spell of Obama being the Messiah who came to save us all. What fools? Either this man has no experience in balancing his own checkbook or he is the worst saboteur in the history of this country. The madness must end.

Bipartisan Health Care Summit:We Waited Over A Year For This?

Finally, after one year of the worst partisan sales pitch ever given by the Democratic Party in the history of American politics this group decides to invite the Republican’s to the “table” to search out ways to bring them aboard on the health care bill to make it a “bipartisan” effort to pass this junk bill that nobody “American Voter’s” knows what all is in it. The big question is why? Does the president not have executive powers and the “nuclear option” to shove this bill down the throats of the American people, the only ones who will be paying for it? Did the president not say in his closing arguments that they would do this if Republicans will not sign on and contribute to his current plan without starting over? Again why? It isn’t as if the Democrats do not have the full majority control over every aspect of the government of Washington. All they need is full Democratic support and they could pass this bill. But they cannot even achieve that much due to the Democratic losses in Virginia, New Jersey and now Massachusetts that haunt those Democrats that seek re-election. It is painfully obvious that they are unable to garner the support of the American people because they simply cannot earn their trust. Why? Because they fail to understand that the American people are far more intelligent than this Administration believes them to be. Quite frankly, they believe we are stupid. Well, the reality is that the American people understand finances far more than the President and his Administration. Most American’s were not born to rich grandparents, given a free ride on a college education and spend their early adult lives being fed utopian ideology in prestigious Ivey League schools. No, the majority of American’s live on a shoe string budget trying to make ends meet with what was left over of their meager paychecks after the government over taxed them. These American’s were working to raise young families, going to community college at nights after work or serving their country in the military in order to provide themselves with the means to chance the American dream. It sure wasn’t handed to them on a silver platter by either rich parents or the government. The American people who dared to dream went out in the world and secured employment and were forced to provide for themselves. They had real budgets. The kind where you took what earnings remained on your paycheck and did what you could with it in order to provide food, water, and shelter for your family. They understood that when the money was gone, it was gone! They also understood that if you allowed yourself to go into debt and could no longer afford the luxuries of life that there were real people who would come and take away your possessions and home. These American people also see that those who they have chosen to send to Washington to represent them end up doing everything but represent them. The American people are very bright indeed because for decade after decade they see those politicians become rich and powerful and have spent this country into unbelievable debt that can never be paid. They also understand that it is those representatives that seek to solve this problem by digging deeper and deeper into the American Taxpayer’s pocket in order to pay for it all while 45 % of the nation never pays any tax at all. The American Taxpayer pays it all while the very rich continue to get richer, the “entitled” non taxpayer gets more and the lower and middle class taxpayer is asked yet again to sacrifice more of their earnings under an unfair tax code that even the government doesn’t understand. All the while those smug politicians continue to act concerned about the uninsured yet refuse to come together with a plan to eliminate the true reasons why health care is not affordable to the working family much less the jobless. Frivolous lawsuits, massive class action torts against the private business sector has driven the cost of providing health insurance so high that the average family and small businesses are no longer able afford it. Yet this Administration does nothing to cap and limit these in many cases bogus lawsuits that tie up the system and drive up costs even more to the taxpayer and consumer. No, because many of these politicians got rich themselves by being trial lawyers. This Administration also refuses to do anything with the Unions but reward them for driving manufacturing and many other jobs and businesses overseas to the very countries we borrow from in false and inadequate attempts to bring down the deficit they themselves cause. These are just a few of the big money and big deficit problem casers that make this health care bill nothing but an unprecedented money pit the taxpayer will have to shoulder on top of an impossible deficit that exists now. The American people refuse this piece of legislation because they know not only that it will be them paying for it, but their children, their children’s children and possibly further on down. No, this Administration doesn’t get it because they have never experienced the burden of taxation and hard work themselves without someone else’s helping hand. For the love of god, this Administration should be working on cutting taxes and eliminating the waste of uncontrollable frivolous spending so the working people can pull themselves up by the bootstraps in order to bring us out of this economic crisis that all previous politicians, Democratic, Republican and Independents have put us in.   

We Elect Politicians Below Our Own Standards

I worry about the future of our country mainly because of the lackadaisical attitudes of American voters coupled with their inability to stand on their own principals by demanding their own representative’s vote in accordance with those principals. The mainstream media who has been in bed with those politicians or political parties who oppose traditional American values have forsaken their own creed to report facts in order to bolster support for these in opposition or simply spin their stories to defend them while the American public continues to accept a press that has lost all credibility. Too many American’s even fall for the deceit although time and time again their interpretations prove false. Either Americans are easily deceived or they are too lazy to examine the facts and make an educated deduction of which source of current news or political rhetoric they should accept to be true. It is truly amazing how many corrupt and crooked politicians control the policy in this country from local town seats all the way up to the Presidency, and yet we American’s allow it. The politicians have no power that the voters do not allow and dissatisfaction in our government is reaching record peaks. What will the voters do? I would guess that they will do what they have been doing for the last fifty to sixty years in this country. They will believe that the politician seeking office is being truthful about what they promise and fall for every lie that is spat forth from their mouths leaving us in even far worse condition than before. Why? Because we do not hold our politicians to the traditional standards that we hold ourselves to. People seem to believe that it is okay for politicians to be crooked as long as they throw us a bone from time to time. Our government expects us to pay our taxes in full and on time from our earnings while under the threat of having the IRS to come take away everything we own yet the government has no constraints on how they spend our hard money. In fact, every tax dollar that is deducted from your payroll has already been spent years ago due to the incredibly insane deficits that they keep increasing because the tax money they have collected is 12 Trillion dollars short of what they have spent. And we allow it! Think on this for a moment. The current congress has voted to raise the debt ceiling by 1.9 Trillion dollars because they are afraid the country will not be able to pay its bills. No, the country cannot pay its bills because it is spending our hard earned tax dollars at an enormous rate higher than they collect! In other words they voted to spend 1.9 Trillion dollars more that the country does not have on top of what our deficit is now! That is 14.3 Trillion dollars in debt! Imagine if your family earned $50,000 per year and you were in debt to the tune of $250,000 then you decide that you still need more things so you decide that you are going to raise your debt ceiling to 1 and a half Million dollars. How long would it be before everything you owned was sold off in a public auction? Not long at all. But we allow our representatives to do this? Well who are the stupid ones? We are! I don’t have to even mention the tons of social issues that have placed this country in tremendous debt or weakened the moral fabric of this country. All of this and more because we do not hold our politicians to the same standard we have to, and choose to live by. What a crying shame!