Stop the Spending Cuts!!!
That's what I'm hearing from AARP.
If you've forgotten, many months ago Congress agreed to raise the debt
ceiling in return for an agreement to cut spending. That cut never happened. Now we are up against the debt limit again
and AARP is screaming at us that we must just raise the limit again and keep on
spending. Apparently there is no end to
this. We just keep borrowing
forever. Hmmmm, that sounds like
something you would go to jail for if you were a business. Can you say "Ponzi Scheme?"
I don't
claim to be an economic expert but I have the strong feeling that the folks
making these decisions are no better qualified than I am. It seems pretty obvious to me that we can't
just keep on spending, especially when we have a dwindling income due to tax
cuts. It seems just as obvious that all
spending isn't created equal. We owe
certain legitimate debts that must be paid.
These include social security payments and government retirement
pensions that have been bought and paid for by the recipients. They include legitimate debts secured by
bonds, both domestic and foreign.
They DO NOT
include the handouts that have been created during times of surplus by
politicians buying votes. The average
citizen is collecting free money from the government for things that make
absolutely no sense. For instance, we
pay $1000 a year for each child that a family (or person) has. We give out billions of dollars in Earned
Income Credit each year. (That's what
used to be called welfare) We have turned
unemployment compensation into a permanent income destroying any incentive to
take a job.
So where is
the solution to this problem? Well, it's
really pretty simple. We have to cut
spending AND raise taxes. This isn't
difficult math, we all know it's true.
The reason everyone is opposed to raising taxes is the government is
wasting our money already. We don't want
them to waste more of it. That's why we
MUST have real cuts in spending at the same time.
One of the
first things the government should get out of is Ethanol. What a crock!
I was in Kansas last week where they grow all that corn and found that
most stations there carried ethanol free gas.
It was generally at a price comparable to the alcohol diluted stuff and
a LOT cheaper than we pay here on the east coast. I bought mid grade ethanol free gas for $3.19
a gallon last week. My local station
sells it for $4.09. What has the ethanol
thing accomplished? Well, it has destroyed
lots of gas operated tools such as lawn mowers.
It has raised the price of beef substantially. And SOMEBODY has gotten rich off of it.
We are on
the way to an economic boom within the next few years. It will be easy to sit back and say that the
economy will take care of itself with the new income from oil and natural gas. That attitude is how we got to this position
in the first place.
But to return
to my original point, we MUST stand our ground somewhere and force this
administration to make spending cuts. If
there is no way other than closing the government, then close the
government. Hmmm, I wonder how much we
save every day the government is closed?
