I will start this post out by simply saying that I don’t like taxes. Now it’s not that I don’t want to pay my fair share of taxes but it’s that I don’t like giving my money up to be controlled by, shall we say, certain people who may not be very trustworthy. Right now in Washington we have several examples of those whom I don’t want to give my money up to. I believe that I am one of those people whose philosophy is in the mold of Jefferson and Franklin when it comes to government, politics and taxes. I believe that the governments’ responsibility is to protect the people and that in order to do that they must levy taxes to pay for those protections. The important point of this is that it is the obligation of the government to utilize those funds entrusted to them in the most fiscally responsible manner possible. It is called guarding the public trust. Now what I have read in the last few days about the budget I have to say greatly concerns me. (That’s an under statement if you didn’t catch it.) For the last 5 years I have watched, and protested, as the Republican controlled Congress has spent our nation into the deepest deficit hole in our history. (I know it’s really bad when the Fed Chairman says he’s “concerned”. When he says that he’s “concerned” about the budget deficit, it probably means the sky really will fall.) That’s right the “conservative” Republican Party has spent our country into near bankruptcy. Now the other thing that ‘sticks in my craw’ is that these are the same conservatives that railed against the democratically controlled Congress that, along with the previous President, helped to bring to fruition the biggest budget surplus in the nation’s history. So how did this happen you might ask yourself. Or not. Well let’s just take the infamous “pork”. During the previous administration the average number of pork issues in the budget per year was a few hundred. That number skyrocketed after the Congress came under the control of the Republican Party and a veto pen-less President to over 6,000 this year. (Let’s count the number of vetoes done by this President right here: _____. Okay then, now that we’ve solved that math problem let’s move on.) That’s right, the number six and three zeros after it which translates to way more billions of our dollars than I care to think about that paid for pet political projects to repay political debts and none of which serves to “protect” the citizens of this country. Now this is the same Congress that has voted big fat tax cuts for very rich people. (During that same five year period mine and my wife’s tax cut together bought us a pretty good steak dinner but I hear that the Presidents tax cut and those of a few of his friends could have purchased them new vacation homes near Kennebunkport. Now I’ll trade that steak for the house if he’s interested. I digress.) Let me give you an example of how it works when they are cutting the budget alias swapping pork. They want to make permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and they want to show their fiscal prowess to their constituents and “reduce spending” so they throw out a 50+ billion dollar budget cut bill with the permanent tax cuts in it. Where do all the budget cuts come from? They come from social and educational programs (which are programs that fall into my definition of protecting the citizens.). So they decide they have to show that they really are tightening the belt by cutting pork too. Classic example. There is money in the budget appropriated for two bridges to ‘nowhere’ in Alaska (alias pork) so they take it out of the budget. Now the Gentleman from Alaska threatens to quit if it’s removed. Now they go back and remove just the earmark for the projects but not the money. That’s great for the gentleman from Alaska because now he doesn’t have to quit. The only problem is they only removed the earmark and they left the money in the budget and it’s still going to Alaska. Net budget reduction is zero. So now the State gets the money with no strings. How cool is that? We got happy campers all around. They can say they are cutting taxes which they did (for the very rich). They can say they reduced spending which they didn’t really do but took money from the poor and poor students and they can say they cut pork which they didn’t. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the politician gets reelected.
I believe it is time to elect a Congress that is capable of doing the morally correct thing and stemming the flow of blood before our nation loses its children’s future. We cannot afford to put any more politicians in Congress that are going to continue to hold their self interest above the interest of the nation.
Those are The Sergeant Majors thoughts on that.
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