Hard or Hardship Government Economics vs the Household Budget
I sat at my desk today, doing what I do every Thursday. Juggling bills. As I pondered how much I would have left for groceries, after paying the phone bill, and gassing up the old “Silver Toilet”( my very thirsty pickup truck), a thought occurred to me. How is it that so many people have no real understanding of our national debt? We hear about it all the time, ” our grandchildren will be faced with the burden of our national debt”. But do we ever really think about what that means to us as individuals? Household economics is really pretty straightforward. If there is no money left after paying the bills, then you don’t eat. Skip out on your power bill, you sit in the dark, decide you’d rather go on vacation than pay your mortgage, bye-bye home. Real life teaches us that if you continue to spend more than you make, eventually it will all come crashing down around you.
It works the same way with the government. It doesn’t matter what kind of fancy economic theory you adhere to, the simple fact is that our country is broke. I know, you’ve heard that before, so what? Well, what that means to me is that I’ll have to depend on myself more, and government less. It means that the Pell grant my daughter depended on for college isn’t going to be there, my Tricare premiums are increasing, and Social Security isn’t even a factor in my retirement planning. It doesn’t matter what the politicians promise, we have two choices, realize that we are going to have to accept cuts to government programs now, or wait until the government defaults and then completely lose that safety net while the economy implodes on itself sucking us in with it. Either way we will have to become less dependent on to government.
Given that cuts are inevitable, what makes more sense, to have a president that aims to control more of the population by increasing their dependency on government programs? Or a president who can make the tough cuts necessary to balance the budget? We have to ask ourselves, do we want to suffer the controlled hardships of a government learning to live within its means? The way the rest of us do. Or do we want to live through the devastation of a complete economic meltdown?
Americans have a noble tradition of pulling on our boots, rolling up our sleeves, and shouldering the work. We don’t run from hardship, we face it head on, grit our teeth and gut it out. It will be interesting to see, if this new voting generation will rise to the challenge, or if they will just curl up in the fetal position, consoling themselves with You Tube and reality TV, while waiting for a savior to come and bail them out.
Red State Blue State Nanny State
I am not a Catholic. I have no problem with women choosing to use contraception to prevent a pregnancy. I think it’s great when an insurance company covers it.
But just who in the, heck, does the President and his Congressional supporters think they are? How did they come to the conclusion that they actually have the authority to force a religious institution to abandon its tenants of faith? This bill is not about women’s rights, health or contraception.
It’s about a government over reaching its authority and insinuating itself further and further into our private lives.
Who is to blame for this? We are. We have become dependent on the “nanny state”. To many of us are happy to trade away a few personal freedoms, for the government’s promise of a life without worry or want. We want the government to protect us from being offended, or inconvenienced by our neighbors. We want businesses to be regulated so that their profits are handed over to the government and redistributed, so that we can have free health care, a grocery allowance, and subsidized housing. Most dangerous of all, we want the government to be our conscience.
Both liberals and conservatives want the government to restrict behaviors that we find immoral or offensive. We want airwaves censored from sex, violence, and obscene language, yet we continue to tune into shows and buy tickets to movies that contain those very things. Some want women to be able to have an abortion any time, anywhere, for any reason, and some feel that there is never a justifiable reason to abort a baby. Many of us choose our elected officials on this issue alone. Meanwhile we fail to teach our children that a sexual relationship carries with it some heavy responsibilities, and requires a certain level of maturity. We want the government to prevent banks from charging penalty fees when we fail to handle our finances responsibly. We want the police to crack down on drunk drivers, speeders, and red-light runners, but we complain about rogue cops when we are the ones who get caught. We no longer have the ability to make very basic judgments for ourselves.
The Founding Fathers designed our Constitution to limit government. I’m sure they never intended for the Bill of Rights to be twisted and perverted into a device that allows the government to become our teacher, our parent, our God. We need to resurrect our common sense and good manners. We need to stop confusing legal with moral and take responsibility for our own clean living rather than imposing it on others. Most of all we need to use our patronage and our pocketbooks to effect social change rather than placing power that should belong to the people into the hands of the government.