“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
-Thomas Jefferson
As many of you are quite aware now, the state of California is now broke. The politicians are turning to their same old games once again on blaming each other so as to keep us well distracted. The state in order to operate is now passing out IOUs, the same ones we use to hand out as children. I am lucky to not live in California at this time, because all an IOU really is, is leveraging this money on the children of the state. These young children in grade school, playing kickball have no idea the debt that we are shoving upon them or the poverty which we are going to shove upon them. The even sadder news is, this isn’t just California many states are being forced into the same situation, and California is just the first in the series of dominos.
The major problem is, is that the states want to help everyone, and as they stretch their dollars thin, they need more taxes to fill the gaps. Now rather than cut their plans and ideas down, they opt for the more destructive plan, they tax more. The problem is that at a certain tipping point, the voters fight back, and they hold off. This is where we currently are at, politicians have pushed taxes as high as they were going to go, and we don’t want to pay anymore. State recently tried taxing the rich more, and the rich have moved from those states, causing less revenue. This situation has run into the proverbial end of the line, they are running out of money, yet they just keep spending. To me it seems like they just can’t help themselves, they are spending themselves out of existence. Their amount of IOUs will only keep growing, and when people realize that they are worthless, they will stop accepting them. Once the IOUs are gone, then they have two actions, tax more or cut spending drastically….and if history dictates, they will tax more until the politicians and the absolute poor are the only ones left.
This isn’t just a state level problem, even though many states are experiencing the same problems, the federal government is doing the same thing. There is just one catch though, the federal government can just keep printing the money and keep circulating it…this doesn’t solve their problem, just makes it harder to see…though we’ll all pay when the dollar is worthless. Our politicians spending are ruining this country…and we are the ones who all pay. Why should children playing in a school yard today be held with the frivolous spending of us currently? When did they agree to be saddled with our debt and our mismanagement? I think politicians need to wake up slash all spending by 75% and cut their juicy benefits. Then get this country out of debt and make sure I, you, and our children get as much of our hard earned money as possible. Politician’s pet projects need to be stopped, and instead of adding more laws they need to be cutting useless laws.
We need to watch California, so that we all don’t make the same mistakes in our states. With the Governor blaming one and the democrats blaming him…and nothing gets done. With the 4th of July that just passed, think about freedom, because freedom and protecting everyone’s liberty will cut spending…even if we don’t agree with it.
By now most of us are use to the fact that congress doesn’t read most of the bills they pass, and how could they? They pass so many laws, that if they were to stop and read them they’d get nothing done. They generally get some staff member to glance through the bill, make sure they won’t get attacked the next time for elections. Well this has been surpassed by and even scarier trend that is even less known…the ability to put stuff into a bill, after it has been passed. Yes you read that right; congress now has the amazing ability to place “placeholder” text into a bill. When that bill gets passed with the “placeholder” in there, congress can then add text in that placeholder spot, once they have everything figured out.
Right now there isn’t much misuse of this special “placeholder” ability that congress has apparently just granted themselves, they generally just use to for pointless nonsense. Yet, I can only imagine some time where a congress person (I’m sure trying to be helpful) will put a placeholder in a bill and then, force a law down our throats. Now I’m not sure how many congress people are aware of this new special ability, but I do know that one of them is…Representative Waxman of the 30th district of California, because this placeholder appears in his bill.
Below is an excerpt of HR 2454 (entire bill can be found here). In the table of contents you can find this little gem:
Placholder in HR 2454
Now I thought that was weird, but when you actually go to the section mentioned, you can see that it indeed is part of the bill:
Well there you have it; obviously it still is in the bill. Though like me, you must think that I am making this us…but the link to government web page can show you I’m not making this stuff up (link). Well like me, you think, hey this bill didn’t pass yet and is still a work in progress; no one would sign a bill where anything can be inserted? Well you’d be wrong, according to govtrack.us; the bill has passed the House of Represent ivies on June 26th, 2009 with a roll call vote of 219 for and 212 against. “The American Clean Energy and Security Act” passed one of the steps needed to become a law…and it isn’t even completed yet.
To find out who voted for an incomplete bill…or really a bill where they can insert whatever they want if it passes, you can visit this site: opencongress.org to see the roll call vote on this. Though this generally falls along party lines, this is a scary prospect and shouldn’t happen in future bills. I wouldn’t go above to call for all these politicians to resign for letting such a threat to liberty get through their ranks. To me, this seems a treasonous act, to leave something so open that anyone can add anything to a passed bill. Not sure how long this was going on, or how many bills have this placeholder in it, but it’s scary. It’s only a matter of time, until this is used against the American people as a weapon against our freedoms.
When I was watching a movie called “Hunger” by Steve McQueen at a film festival here in Philadelphia, The film is about Bobby Sands a political prisoner who dies of starvation. He mentions the word “Republican”. I had known the meaning of the word, and have heard it several times, but for some reason this time, it really stuck. It’s not a republican in the way that you or I as American would use it. Republican is someone who advocates a republic form of government…and that kind of government is…political unit governed by a charter and individual states combined under that charter. Which is what you may think we are? Except that our government arbitrarily decides when, when and how that pesky charter should be followed or even if it fits that situation. Yet, when this country was founded there where Federalists and Republicans (often called Jeffersonian Republicans) and that line of thought wanted the States to hold the ultimate power and loosely form a republic based on a Constitution. Which doesn’t really define the current Republican Party?
Now the Democratic Party doesn’t get off from this rant. A democrat is someone who advocates a vote for everyone, and that the outcome of the majority should be the law. So it’s a simple majority vote would make something law. Now this could be cumbersome in the current political times…where every time the country/government was going to do something you would have to vote on the outcome. The problem with this, is the majority who wouldn’t be experts on everything, could be swayed by a charismatic speaker…which is fine…because it’s mob rule.
Now I hope you can see my confusion on this matter. Neither the current democrat nor republican parties, stand for what their name says they are for. The democrats would want their jobs to be pointless and the republicans have long since fought for limited federal government and more powerful state government. Instead they both push their own agenda. Now in my explanation of both political systems, you may see glimmers of what the current parties, but it’s not the central platform of the parties. When you see Nancy Pelosi saying that the people should have the vote, and the majority of the people’s feelings should be law and when you see Carl Rove saying that the federal government is too big and is stepping on the toes of the state, then I would say they can keep their names. But in the current times, I think that democrats and republicans need to change their name, and they should switch to their newer labels of Conservative and liberal…and drop their pretend caring of the form of government…because they only care about themselves, raising money and themselves.