The article below lays out a good reminder about who works for whom under our system of government. While our elected officials are responsible for creating much of today's governmental mess, we the people are responsible for electing these clowns in the first place. Our greed at looking for what our Senators and Representatives can bring home to us and our indifference about qualifications for the highest office in the land have led us to where we are today.
545 PEOPLE vs. 300,000,000 PEOPLE
By Charlie Reese
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations, the House of Representatives does. You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does. You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does. You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred Senators, 435 Congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court Justices…545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country. I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a Senator, a Congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the Speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto, if they agree to.
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red. If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ, it's because they want them in IRAQ. If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.
There are no insoluble government problems.
Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.
Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people and they alone, are responsible. They and they alone, have the power. They and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.
Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees. We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!
Charlie Reese is a former columnist for the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.
Showing posts with label Congress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Congress. Show all posts
Friday, March 13, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Government We Deserve
During the recent US elections, I made no secret of my disdain for Barrack Obama. There were a number of reasons for this including the fact that the man has absolutely no record that we can look to in order to discern his intentions. He has no body of work to balance against his “spread the wealth” comments that might allay fears that he is really a Communist intent upon destroying the US. I still don’t trust the man and so far, he’s proving to be every bit as dangerous as some on the far right postulated.
So where are we now? One month into his Presidency we have a $787 billion “Porkulus” Bill that targets very little money into anything that will actually stimulate the economy and which virtually no member of Congress, or the President bothered to read. To top it off, only about 15% of that monstrosity will even be spent in the coming year…too late to have any impact on saving the economy in 2009. Given that last bit, what was the bloody hurry?
That same bill is also one of his broken campaign promises. During the campaign, Obama talked about the wonderful “transparency” we could expect from his Administration. All spending bills would be posted on the White House website for five days before he’d sign them. Well, the bill was not posted on the White House website and he signed it within three days. He would have signed it even sooner but this bill, without which the entire free world economies would collapse, had to await the Obamesiah’s leisure due to his vacation plans. You can get a copy of this theft by Congress here. Read it and weep.
Other goodies coming out of this Administration and the Pelosi and Reid cabal in Congress include an additional $410 billion that the House passed on 25 February, an Obama proposal for and additional $634 billion for nationalizing healthcare as part of his over $3 TRILLION budget, and an additional $2.5 TRILLION to nationalize the nations banks, as proposed by his Treasury Secretary. Can you say, “DRUNKEN SAILORS?”I would have posted a link to the actual budget, but in this new age of complete transparency in government of The One, the budget is not available to the public yet. The Budget is now available on the White House web site.
Allies in the MSM say all this is to pull the economy out of the “deep” recession. Except that it’s not a deep recession and most analysts were already predicting that the upswing indicators started at the end of December and the country would begin pulling out of the recession as early as the second half of 2009. This is hardly the catastrophic scenario sold by Obama to justify all this profligate spending of other people's money.
Obama is also not very good with history. Let’s leave out the possibility that his misrepresentation that this is the worst recession since the Great Depression was deliberate. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt of simply not being all that bright on history, since he’s demonstrated that on numerous occasions already. Then again…
Point being, the recession in 1991 had unemployment at 7.8% (higher than today) and during Jimmy Carter’s recession unemployment hit 10.2%. The current recession is nowhere near the levels of economic misery of the Great Depression, but Congress and this Administration are doing their best to make it so.
Then there is the ongoing foreign policy train wreck. Sending John Kerry to talk to Hamas? Lifting high tech restrictions on Syria? Ceding nuclear power to Iran? Sending Nancy Pelosi…Pelosi…to Afghanistan? Closing Guantanamo with no alternatives to house the prisoners there? And wrapped in this, let’s return to the recently released budget where the military and intelligence services are gutted. And you feel safer with this man as Commander-in-Chief?
In the middle of all this are his continued efforts to destroy the nation’s economy through all his carbon reduction schemes based upon a rapidly disintegrating “consensus” about whether human emissions cause global warming. To this add efforts to restrict free speech by reimposing the “Fairness Doctrine,” find ways around the recent Supreme Court ruling on gun ownership, subject US troops to International Tribunal (where they would never get a fair trial), offer the UN over $65 billion in additional US taxpayer money, force US soldiers to serve in a proposed UN army, and provide billions in assistance to illegal aliens. Now to be fair, not all these are specifically Obama proposals. However, his allies in Congress are feeling emboldened by what they perceive as his “left-leaning” tendencies.
During the campaign, Obama promised “change,” but nothing more specific. He gave us sweeping hand waves of how he would accomplish things. The true believers in the socialist agenda were locked votes, but the sad thing is, the idiots in the middle fell for the smooth talk. He promised “ice cream” and no one bothered to ask how he was going to pay for it. 52% of the American electorate acted like nine-year olds drooling over promises of getting “stuff” from The One.
As you watch your rights get taken one-by-one by this cabal of Fascio-Communists who think they know better how to spend your money and run your life, remember that you got the government you deserve…the government you elected. You might have a chance to fix this come 2010, if they haven’t by then rigged things so that you can’t vote them out.
So where are we now? One month into his Presidency we have a $787 billion “Porkulus” Bill that targets very little money into anything that will actually stimulate the economy and which virtually no member of Congress, or the President bothered to read. To top it off, only about 15% of that monstrosity will even be spent in the coming year…too late to have any impact on saving the economy in 2009. Given that last bit, what was the bloody hurry?
That same bill is also one of his broken campaign promises. During the campaign, Obama talked about the wonderful “transparency” we could expect from his Administration. All spending bills would be posted on the White House website for five days before he’d sign them. Well, the bill was not posted on the White House website and he signed it within three days. He would have signed it even sooner but this bill, without which the entire free world economies would collapse, had to await the Obamesiah’s leisure due to his vacation plans. You can get a copy of this theft by Congress here. Read it and weep.
Other goodies coming out of this Administration and the Pelosi and Reid cabal in Congress include an additional $410 billion that the House passed on 25 February, an Obama proposal for and additional $634 billion for nationalizing healthcare as part of his over $3 TRILLION budget, and an additional $2.5 TRILLION to nationalize the nations banks, as proposed by his Treasury Secretary. Can you say, “DRUNKEN SAILORS?”
Allies in the MSM say all this is to pull the economy out of the “deep” recession. Except that it’s not a deep recession and most analysts were already predicting that the upswing indicators started at the end of December and the country would begin pulling out of the recession as early as the second half of 2009. This is hardly the catastrophic scenario sold by Obama to justify all this profligate spending of other people's money.
Obama is also not very good with history. Let’s leave out the possibility that his misrepresentation that this is the worst recession since the Great Depression was deliberate. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt of simply not being all that bright on history, since he’s demonstrated that on numerous occasions already. Then again…
Point being, the recession in 1991 had unemployment at 7.8% (higher than today) and during Jimmy Carter’s recession unemployment hit 10.2%. The current recession is nowhere near the levels of economic misery of the Great Depression, but Congress and this Administration are doing their best to make it so.
Then there is the ongoing foreign policy train wreck. Sending John Kerry to talk to Hamas? Lifting high tech restrictions on Syria? Ceding nuclear power to Iran? Sending Nancy Pelosi…Pelosi…to Afghanistan? Closing Guantanamo with no alternatives to house the prisoners there? And wrapped in this, let’s return to the recently released budget where the military and intelligence services are gutted. And you feel safer with this man as Commander-in-Chief?
In the middle of all this are his continued efforts to destroy the nation’s economy through all his carbon reduction schemes based upon a rapidly disintegrating “consensus” about whether human emissions cause global warming. To this add efforts to restrict free speech by reimposing the “Fairness Doctrine,” find ways around the recent Supreme Court ruling on gun ownership, subject US troops to International Tribunal (where they would never get a fair trial), offer the UN over $65 billion in additional US taxpayer money, force US soldiers to serve in a proposed UN army, and provide billions in assistance to illegal aliens. Now to be fair, not all these are specifically Obama proposals. However, his allies in Congress are feeling emboldened by what they perceive as his “left-leaning” tendencies.
During the campaign, Obama promised “change,” but nothing more specific. He gave us sweeping hand waves of how he would accomplish things. The true believers in the socialist agenda were locked votes, but the sad thing is, the idiots in the middle fell for the smooth talk. He promised “ice cream” and no one bothered to ask how he was going to pay for it. 52% of the American electorate acted like nine-year olds drooling over promises of getting “stuff” from The One.
As you watch your rights get taken one-by-one by this cabal of Fascio-Communists who think they know better how to spend your money and run your life, remember that you got the government you deserve…the government you elected. You might have a chance to fix this come 2010, if they haven’t by then rigged things so that you can’t vote them out.
Feeling Changed Yet?
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