When in doubt

Well it’s been a while since I put fingers to keyboard and disturbed the ether in order to express my opinions … mostly because I was lazy and just didn’t do it, but partly due to not being able to figure out what to write about. Not that there was any lack of things to talk about but rather because I couldn’t figure out what, of all the options, I WANTED to talk about.

I still don’t know where this one is going, there are a few things bouncing around in my head, but we’ll just dive in and type and see where we end up.

There was a news report a while back … I don’t remember exactly when … that President Bush had been warned that there could be a problem with the levies in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit. This became a huge news story because President Bush had said after the Hurricane that ‘no one could have predicted that the levies would fail.’ So … according to the media at least … the President had lied again.

Well … not exactly. In the conference call one of his advisors told President Bush that ‘I don’t think anyone can say that the levies won’t overflow.’ The problems in New Orleans, however, were not caused by the levies overflowing … they were caused by catastrophic failure in the levies … they broke in the middle and at the bottom …. Had they just ‘overflowed’ the problem wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it was.

If the advisor had meant that no one could say that the levies would hold, or that no one could say that the levies wouldn’t fail THEN you could make the case that the President had been warned that the levies might fail.

Of course … had the city and state properly maintained the levies and/or if the various environmental groups had let the Army Corp of Engineers rebuild the levies as they had been trying to for the last 50 years or so then maybe the levies would have just overflowed … maybe that wouldn’t have even been an issue.

But by all means let’s blame Bush! And don’t forget to say that he did it because only the poor or blacks would be affected. We all know that Bush only cares about rich white Americans.

Americans in general like to blame Bush. And there are areas that President Bush deserves some blame, or that he could have handled better to be sure … the problem is that many of the people that like to blame Bush for things like to throw out things that just aren’t accurate….

‘The Economy is horrible … it’s Bush’s fault’ – well first off the President has a very limited effect on the economy … certainly an administrations economic policies do have an effect, but there are so many factors in the economy that even that is limited. Secondly … I’m not sure that anyone has really made the case that the economy is horrible. Unemployment is at a 10 year low (keeping in mind that Bush has only been in office 5 years) … and is approaching minimum unemployment (the point where unemployment is so low that it can start having a negative economic impact due to not enough available workers to allow for growth) … home ownership is at an all time high (more people are reaching economic independence of owning rather than renting) … the stock markets are still raising and have recently passed their pre-9/11 highs … investment is up, manufacturing is up, retail is up, growth and the gross domestic product are up.

In short … there’s nothing wrong with the economy so there is nothing to blame Bush with there …

If you REALLY want to blame Bush with something … you CAN blame him with the fact that in addition to all of the economic numbers being up, so is government spending. To date Bush has yet to wield the VETO stamp … not once … if congress will pass it, Bush will sign it … if that means spending more of OUR money so be it … it’s no concern of his.

That swings me around to how the government is funded. Yes, taxes. Okay, we need a government … there are certain things that need to be done for which the government has to spend money. To finance those things the government needs to collect money … it does this in the form of taxes (presently this is primarily the Income Tax). What the government (and Bush as the present head of said beast) seems to have forgotten is that WE pay THEM …

The money they collect is taken out of the money that we have worked for and earned. We have traded our work and effort to others in exchange for our income … in essence we have sold time out of our lives (which we can never replace) in exchange for cash … and the government is taking a portion of that cash (and therefore a portion of our lives) to spend on their programs …

Too often those in the government seem to feel that all of the money in America belongs to the government and that the government gives that money to the people that deserve or need it. Taking from each according to their ability and giving to each according to their need.

There’s a name for that system of government … and it’s not one generally associated with economic freedom or comfortable standards of living … but there are those in this country that believe that is the system we should be using rather than the system that the founding fathers of this country set us up with originally … they would give up their freedom in exchange for the ease and security of governmental control.

But let me ask you … given the glaring inefficiency in governmental programs, and lackluster customer service of the average government employee … do you REALLY want the government to be the ones deciding your economic future? Giving you what they feel that you need and nothing more, taking from you all your work and effort in exchange for what they feel that you need (not what you want … what you NEED … there’s a difference people … and in the eyes of these people anyone that has more than they NEED is evil because they have more than other people do.)

What we NEED to do in this country is force those politicians in Washington DC to stop spending our lives away on programs that the federal government was never intended to fund … we need to put the control of that money (as it was intended) back into the hands of the people that worked and earned it … if we don’t, as a people, start doing something to cut government spending then we will shortly find ourselves past the point of no return watching our economic freedom disappearing before our eyes and the government taking from each according to their ability ….