An Important Debate About Government Spending

The following debate covers all the angles on this important topic. It's only a few minutes long but it sure packs the valid points into that time.




Hat tip to Dan Mitchell at International Liberty

This Story Stinks

Lots of things the government does stinks to high heaven, but a story I read today on Dan Mitchell's excellent blog, International Liberty, sets a new standard on the "malodorous" scale. It's a story about farting, of all things.

This is a polite blog for the most part, but you'll have to beg our pardon for releasing this story. (Pun intended) It's really a story about how goofy, and even dangerous, it gets when government employees - in this case teachers - over-react to the kind of thing that wouldn't even get the disciplinarian involved back when I was in school. Teachers used to handle this kind of stuff with a dunce cap in those days, but I digress.

It seems that a student used some "country" nomenclature to describe what he had done in the library when nature called and it resulted in eleven different government agencies responding to the "emergency" and his arrest for his doodling about "dropping a bomb" among the books. Here is the way the tale appears on Dan's site:

"Harold Wayne Hadley, Jr., 19, was arrested at a Mississippi junior college after he allegedly wrote a note on a piece of toilet paper on Tuesday, containing the word ‘bomb,’ according to Weirdnews.net. The note prompted 11 emergency agencies to respond to the school, but there was no bomb. Hadley and his family contend that he was only explaining the joy of flatulating in the library. “He was in the restroom doodling on some toilet paper … we are from the country, and he calls passing gas, bombs,” said Hadley’s aunt, who wouldn’t give her name to WDAM. ”[He] put ‘I passed a bomb in the library,’ talking about passing gas, and somebody came in and found it, gave it to a teacher that recognized his hand writing and it blew all out of proportion.” …Hadley was arrested and held on $20,000 bail. If convicted of threatening to blow up the school, he faces 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine,according to WAPT."

I'm guessing he won't get a guilty verdict or even face trial once the authorities smell the coffee instead of the gaseous stupidity of their over-reaction. In his piece, Dan goes on to address a lot of very valid questions about the actual issues this whole mess brings up, so I'll let him raise a stink about it over at his blog and I suggest you read the rest of it because like all the of his posts, it's terrific.

Which brings up a perfect segue for my next request. Although many of you already know, for those you who drop by here only occasionally, I have started a new blog and invite you to click on the link and help me launch it. It's called Cheeky History and if you enjoyed the style I wrote this article with you might enjoy it. It's a non-political spot where you can spend about thirty seconds a day learning some tidbits about "what happened on this day in history" with my own cheeky spin on them.

I'm having some fun writing the blurbs and I'm hoping folks might enjoy reading them. If you do, by all means leave a comment and let me know. If you think it stinks as much as what happened in the story above, well, just do what you usually do when you are in the library and someone "drops a bomb", make a squinchy face and leave as fast as you can.

Laughing Your Debts Away

A short while ago my friend Tom - who traded bonds for many decades and knows something about debt -sent me an email that simplified the understanding of the federal debt problem. I'm guessing he thought it might end up on this blog.

Some of you might have seen the email I'm referring to. It has been forwarded all over the net since then. I added it at the bottom of this post for those who might not have seen it yet.

The national debt, as it is sometimes called, is easily thought of as something the government owes, but we all owe the money. Unfortunately, for most people it's more of a concept than an actual problem. It's why they keep voting for people like Barack Obama and George W Bush. It's also why they haven't figured out that Mitt Gingrich won't be the correct answer to the question of how it's going to be addressed.

People have a hard time relating to numbers as astronomical as those the government owes. When the numbers become so big, billions and trillions start to run together into one big imaginary number. But remember folks, a brazillion isn't just a hair removal reference and Greece isn't just a place with goat soup and stinky cheese. If you take a good look while walking along on our national journey, you can see the end of the road that we have been kicking the can along for so long. And you don't have to squint anymore.

You can go back to sleep this election and hope the nightmare is gone when you wake up, but that hope will get you just about as far as the "hope and change" the nation bought into when a bunch of Democratic marketing slicksters sold it to them in 2008.

So how can we laugh while our money burns? It's easier if you use the tragicomedy video below as a teachable moment to make it clear just how ludicrous the debt has become as the politicians spend us into oblivion in order to buy our votes. The numbers, listed below, are the correct ones with some of the superfluous zeros removed. I was laughing at the end of the video, but only because I know the joke is on us.



The email reads;

"This rather brilliantly cuts thru all the political doublespeak we get. It puts it into a much better perspective."

Lesson # 1:

* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let's now remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts: $385

Got It ?????

OK now Lesson # 2: Here's another way to look at the Debt Ceiling:
Let's say, You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood....and your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.
What do you think you should do ......
Raise the ceilings, or pump out the crap?

Just in Time for "Bill of Rights Day", The Police State Has Arrived In America

Do you think the title to this piece is over the top? I'm sure some of you do. But I can assure you that I'm serious. And as you celebrate Bill of Rights Day today (12-15) you might want to give some thought to the irony of what is going to happen to one of those rights as things unfold on the glorious national holiday that no one has ever heard of.


There are quite a few fundamental rights that we all used to take for granted because we lived in a "free" country. Many of those rights have been watered down so much by various laws that they have effectively been taken away from us. The list is pretty long, but even if there were just one item on it, it would be too long for crazy, inflexible people like me.


The President is about to sign into law a power he has coveted for some time. You can read what others are saying,The Guardian in the UK has an excellent piece.  The vast majority of Americans are clueless about what just happened in congress and even if they did know, I'm not convinced they would care. 


Just as many were not opposed to rampant wiretapping in the past, because "if you don't do anything wrong, you have nothing to fear", many will not be alarmed by this new law because, "I'm not a terrorist, so the government won't revoke my right to a fair trial by a jury of my peers."


In case you were distracted by events in the Russian elections recently, I'll tell you what you missed here at home that might remind one of what happens routinely in Russia. The right of Habeas Corpus was just suspended.


As part of the defense authorization bill that funds the US military, the President himself can decide to detain anyone, American citizens included, indefinitely - perhaps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - if he suspects that they are a terrorist.  And he would use the military itself to do so. On suspicion alone, no formal arrest, no rights given, no attorney, no arraignment, no trial, no judge, no jury. 


People as diverse as Senator Rand Paul and Senator Dianne Feinstein opposed this bill, the latter saying; "Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge," she went on, "We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge."


But those that prevailed, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, argued otherwise. The latter saying; “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” remarked Graham. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”


Even Comedy Central got this one right when they summed it up by saying; "while the Bush administration just assumed that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force empowered them to imprison people without charges, the Obama administration will have these provisions formally codified. Rule of law, baby!"


So, happy Bill of Rights Day. You needn't worry too much right now about whether you personally will be detained indefinately and denied your rights as an American citizen. Most likely, you will not be. What will happen in the future is anyone's guess.
  
But if you are as concerned about this as I am, and if someone asks you what state you live in, just answer, Police. That way you can go "over the top" with me without taking the trouble to explain it all.

It's Almost Too Late Already - Special Interests Gone Wild

The biggest special interest group in America is right on the edge of the "No Turning Back" point.

Like the city of Chicago, where almost everyone has a relative or friend who might be negatively impacted by any meaningful reform of government, the country is about to be caught in the same downward spiral.

Most people claim to want reform but are understandably unwilling to put their livelihood or that of their friends or family on the line to get it. It's the reason there is one party rule in Chicago. And now the whole country is in danger of heading down that path-of-no-return.

There is always a lot of talk about the evils of partisanship and "gridlock" in government, but in my view, there is broad agreement among those inside the Democratic/Republican combine about one thing: big government is good for both sides of this same political coin.

It only looks like gridlock. It's actually just a squabble about which group of clowns has the power to operate  the circus. And in this circus, you and I will be left to shovel up after the donkeys and elephants when the tent finally folds up.



Thanks to Dan Mitchell for this excellent video. Be sure to read his post today at International Liberty where the title is Bureaucrats Gone Wild.