In 5 days we will elect our new President, along with many of our state and federal representatives. The polls seem to indicate that Barack Obama will likely be elected as President, and that Democrats will make gains in congress. While today's GOP, on average, is not really all that much more fiscally conservative than today's Democrats, I think we will now see the country dive closer to socialism than ever before, and do so faster than we have ever seen it before.
I have already started using a new term for what this era will bring us to...
Obamunism
Yes, Obama has been making promises and comments that would make Karl Marx himself smile with glee. The back door has been open to socialism in this country for a long time... but I think this election will be marked as the date when the front doors were thrown wide open and the red carpet was rolled out in welcome of socialism in America.
It's sad really. This country once was unique in that people had a small and non-intrusive government, they were accountable for themselves, and wanted to work hard to get ahead in life. That was the American dream, wasn't it? That you could come to a place where if you worked hard, you could actually own stuff, and not have the government take most or all of your property from you? Well, the American dream has slowly been pushed aside, and within the next 4 years it is likely to be thrown under the bus.
Aparently it is ok to take from people who work more hours to give to people who actually choose to work fewer hours so they can still qualify for other taxpayer's money. Aparently it is better to be stupid and untrained, and not improve one's self, because if you do you will get punished by higher taxes so that the lazy among us don't actually have to do anything productive. Aparently the American dream is not all that great after all, since the new American dream is centered on how the lazy can get the government to steal other people's money and give it to them.
Welcome to our new country, the USSA. Where Obamunism is the main ideology, and where Comrade Obama is our newly elected dictator. A bloodless revolution that has been 100 years in the making. And one where people still have the illusion of freedoms and choices.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
For Good Men To Do Nothing
It is Edmund Burke who is credited with saying, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I have never known another statement to be so true, so applicable, and yet so unheeded.
I firmly believe that the majority of the people in this country are basically good people. Yet I also believe that too often all these good people "do nothing" about the things going on around them. Part of it, I believe, is the inherent fact that good people are often busy taking care of themselves, their loved ones, earning a living, doing the everyday things that need to be done. And while that is certainly not "doing nothing" it often means that nothing is being done about the big picture around them. And that is the challenge. How to continue to fulfil our obligations while yet still making a difference for good in the larger world?
Human beings are funny things when we get together in groups. We most often try to act like the group, and take our cues from the group as a whole. When the group doesn't seem to have much of an opinion or action, then the group takes its cues from the 1 or more people who actually speak up and/or do something. Then the group tends to adopt that viewpoint or action. Take politics, for example. In politics it is often the obnoxiously loud minority who is heard the most, and therefore sways many of the fence sitters. It is the relatively few people who will gather for a street protest who gain the attention and the political focus. It is the few individuals who show up to caucuses, party meetings, and primary elections who really guide what happens in their parties.
Is that bad? Sometimes it is. Why? Because it is not always a representative sample of the whole. When an opinion poll is taken, in order to get a result that is 100% correct with 100% degree of certainty and no margin of error, you have to sample every single person. But that is hard and expensive. So we take sample sizes, and with mathematical formulas we determine that if we interview a certain number of people, we can be 85% confident that their answer (plus or minus the margin of error percentage) is representative of the whole. However, 15% of the time the answer is different, and not even within the margin of error. And those numbers go up even higher when the sample is a "self selecting" one. That means people choose themselves to be part of the sample group. So what you end up with, politically, is the most vocal people are seen as a representation of the whole, and the silent majority is assumed to be represented by these people.
In today's day and age, our government is HUUUUUUUUGE! It does many things which most of the country's citizens would likely oppose if they got into the details and saw what was actually happening. For example, I just downloaded our current tax code from a government web site, and to print it out would take 8,590 pages. It contains about 3.7 million words! Now honestly, I have yet to meet a single person, regardless of party affiliation, who feels like we actually need an 8,590 page tax code, nor the hundreds of thousands of employees and contractors needed to maintain it, update it, and (most of all) enforce it. Nobody wants a tax code this long, confusing, and in many cases blatantly unfair to some people.
What's the point? We are allowing evil to triumph by doing nothing! Whether it is bad government, bad people, bad media, or whatever, we sit around and do nothing most of the time. We should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, not just assume that we can let that duty fall on others. The elections are coming up next week, many can vote now. Let's all do our homework, look at the MANY candidates and parties (not just 2) out there for president and for the other offices. Let's vote for the one that REALLY represents us. And what's more, let's be active in promoting those things to the others around us.
I firmly believe that the majority of the people in this country are basically good people. Yet I also believe that too often all these good people "do nothing" about the things going on around them. Part of it, I believe, is the inherent fact that good people are often busy taking care of themselves, their loved ones, earning a living, doing the everyday things that need to be done. And while that is certainly not "doing nothing" it often means that nothing is being done about the big picture around them. And that is the challenge. How to continue to fulfil our obligations while yet still making a difference for good in the larger world?
Human beings are funny things when we get together in groups. We most often try to act like the group, and take our cues from the group as a whole. When the group doesn't seem to have much of an opinion or action, then the group takes its cues from the 1 or more people who actually speak up and/or do something. Then the group tends to adopt that viewpoint or action. Take politics, for example. In politics it is often the obnoxiously loud minority who is heard the most, and therefore sways many of the fence sitters. It is the relatively few people who will gather for a street protest who gain the attention and the political focus. It is the few individuals who show up to caucuses, party meetings, and primary elections who really guide what happens in their parties.
Is that bad? Sometimes it is. Why? Because it is not always a representative sample of the whole. When an opinion poll is taken, in order to get a result that is 100% correct with 100% degree of certainty and no margin of error, you have to sample every single person. But that is hard and expensive. So we take sample sizes, and with mathematical formulas we determine that if we interview a certain number of people, we can be 85% confident that their answer (plus or minus the margin of error percentage) is representative of the whole. However, 15% of the time the answer is different, and not even within the margin of error. And those numbers go up even higher when the sample is a "self selecting" one. That means people choose themselves to be part of the sample group. So what you end up with, politically, is the most vocal people are seen as a representation of the whole, and the silent majority is assumed to be represented by these people.
In today's day and age, our government is HUUUUUUUUGE! It does many things which most of the country's citizens would likely oppose if they got into the details and saw what was actually happening. For example, I just downloaded our current tax code from a government web site, and to print it out would take 8,590 pages. It contains about 3.7 million words! Now honestly, I have yet to meet a single person, regardless of party affiliation, who feels like we actually need an 8,590 page tax code, nor the hundreds of thousands of employees and contractors needed to maintain it, update it, and (most of all) enforce it. Nobody wants a tax code this long, confusing, and in many cases blatantly unfair to some people.
What's the point? We are allowing evil to triumph by doing nothing! Whether it is bad government, bad people, bad media, or whatever, we sit around and do nothing most of the time. We should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, not just assume that we can let that duty fall on others. The elections are coming up next week, many can vote now. Let's all do our homework, look at the MANY candidates and parties (not just 2) out there for president and for the other offices. Let's vote for the one that REALLY represents us. And what's more, let's be active in promoting those things to the others around us.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Paying the Piper
You have a certain debt. You may have thought you knew about the debt. You were most likely wrong. Your personal portion of the debt: $186,667
Are you surprised? Did you honestly think that the current $10 TRILLION dollar national debt was the only government debt we had? Well, you should probably check your figures, because it is closer to $53 TRILLION as of the end of the last fiscal year. That was the sum of our country's public debt, accrued civilian and military retirement benefits, unfunded but promised Social Security and Medicare benefits, and other financial obligations. And that number was as of about a year ago. By now it is probably closer to $56 TRILLION!!
Can we even wrap our heads around how big that is? If you had to give someone a $1 bill every second (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) until you gave them $56 trillion, it would take you 1,775,748 YEARS to give them that much money. By the time you are done, you have enough dollar bills to stack them (flat, like a regular stack of bills) up from the ground to the surface of the moon more than 16 times! And they would weigh (on earth) almost 62 million tons, which is about the same as 637 fully-loaded modern (Nimitz class) US aircraft carriers. Getting a better picture of how big this number is now?
Your portion of that debt (equal for every man, woman, and child in this country): $186,667
Have a family of 4? Congratulations! Your family owes close to $750,000! What an exciting thought!
Yeah... we're in trouble.
The fact of the matter is that we are going to have to pay the piper sometime. As much as we would like it to, debt will not just go away. At least not without massive war and bloodshed. No, it will not go away. We will have to pay the piper every penny, with interest. All of us will. We must get our country's fiscal irresponsibility under control, and we must do it now. Our country is moving towards communism faster than most of us realize or would like to think. Just think how different we are from that bright time not so long ago when our founding fathers liberated us from such government oppression. Oh, how far we have come from those times.
In the last 5 years I have come to the full realization that the more we are in debt as a nation, and the more services we provide for people, the more we give up our personal liberties to do so. We are brainwashed into believing that we must choose 1 of 2 political parties, and that they are vastly different. But in reality, both of those political parties are very similar. Just 2 sides of the same coin.
I have seen enough to know that as a fiscal and social conservative, voting for anyone in either of those parties is just a vote to slide further into socialism and debt. While no political party can ever match a person's beliefs exactly, the two major parties aren't even close to mine. And honestly, I don't think they are the closest match for most people who vote for them. But we have this desire to fit in with the crowd, to be a winner, to vote for a winner. And so we stay with 2 parties, most of us do. It is like the movie "The Matrix" except that instead of being used to power machines, We The People are being used to power other power-hungry people.
I choose to unplug myself from "The Matrix" and to do the hard work necessary to find the political party that most closely matches my actual opinions. And for me, that is the Constitution Party. Their views center around a return to the limited government instituted by the US Constitution, around family values, and fiscal responsibility. I would be willing to bet that in a blind test, if asked to choose between what the Republican party actually does, and what the Constitution party espouses and does, that most of the registered republicans I know would actually choose the Constitution Party viewpoint.
So in the end, I'm going to stick with the only people willing to bring us back to the limited and controlled government that we started out with. I'm voting Constitution Party.
Are you surprised? Did you honestly think that the current $10 TRILLION dollar national debt was the only government debt we had? Well, you should probably check your figures, because it is closer to $53 TRILLION as of the end of the last fiscal year. That was the sum of our country's public debt, accrued civilian and military retirement benefits, unfunded but promised Social Security and Medicare benefits, and other financial obligations. And that number was as of about a year ago. By now it is probably closer to $56 TRILLION!!
Can we even wrap our heads around how big that is? If you had to give someone a $1 bill every second (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) until you gave them $56 trillion, it would take you 1,775,748 YEARS to give them that much money. By the time you are done, you have enough dollar bills to stack them (flat, like a regular stack of bills) up from the ground to the surface of the moon more than 16 times! And they would weigh (on earth) almost 62 million tons, which is about the same as 637 fully-loaded modern (Nimitz class) US aircraft carriers. Getting a better picture of how big this number is now?Your portion of that debt (equal for every man, woman, and child in this country): $186,667
Have a family of 4? Congratulations! Your family owes close to $750,000! What an exciting thought!
Yeah... we're in trouble.
The fact of the matter is that we are going to have to pay the piper sometime. As much as we would like it to, debt will not just go away. At least not without massive war and bloodshed. No, it will not go away. We will have to pay the piper every penny, with interest. All of us will. We must get our country's fiscal irresponsibility under control, and we must do it now. Our country is moving towards communism faster than most of us realize or would like to think. Just think how different we are from that bright time not so long ago when our founding fathers liberated us from such government oppression. Oh, how far we have come from those times.In the last 5 years I have come to the full realization that the more we are in debt as a nation, and the more services we provide for people, the more we give up our personal liberties to do so. We are brainwashed into believing that we must choose 1 of 2 political parties, and that they are vastly different. But in reality, both of those political parties are very similar. Just 2 sides of the same coin.
I have seen enough to know that as a fiscal and social conservative, voting for anyone in either of those parties is just a vote to slide further into socialism and debt. While no political party can ever match a person's beliefs exactly, the two major parties aren't even close to mine. And honestly, I don't think they are the closest match for most people who vote for them. But we have this desire to fit in with the crowd, to be a winner, to vote for a winner. And so we stay with 2 parties, most of us do. It is like the movie "The Matrix" except that instead of being used to power machines, We The People are being used to power other power-hungry people.
I choose to unplug myself from "The Matrix" and to do the hard work necessary to find the political party that most closely matches my actual opinions. And for me, that is the Constitution Party. Their views center around a return to the limited government instituted by the US Constitution, around family values, and fiscal responsibility. I would be willing to bet that in a blind test, if asked to choose between what the Republican party actually does, and what the Constitution party espouses and does, that most of the registered republicans I know would actually choose the Constitution Party viewpoint.So in the end, I'm going to stick with the only people willing to bring us back to the limited and controlled government that we started out with. I'm voting Constitution Party.
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