Copyright © 2015 Matt Jordan
Formerly 16 20 24: A Path to Consistent Conservative Victory
All rights reserved.
6 GOOD STEWARDS: SWIMMING WITH SHARKS
Government is not the solution to our problem. Government IS the problem.
- Ronald Reagan, 1981.
Who knew, in 2000, that "compassionate conservatism" meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief?
- Christopher Buckley, 2008
On This, the Media Will Always Be Your Enemy
Gold is an element. If you could melt it down and pour it through a filter, what comes out the other side is gold. It can’t be reduced down to something else. Put more correctly, it is irreducible. So must be our message if we are to win multiple elections.
We have seen time and time again, when discussing taxes and the economy, that the mainstream press, and not a small chunk of the alternative media, will look facts straight on and report something other than the facts. Whenever a Republican outlines a tax or spending bill, no matter what numbers are used, he will always be accused of favoring the rich.
So please candidates and handlers, don’t distract yourself by trying to please the media, especially on such important issues as these. You will not be given a truthful minute of coverage. Instead, recognize that the media is a filter and will try block your message. Make a case strong enough and simple enough that the media will not be able to change its nature. Your message will leave the bullshit machine in basically the same state as it entered.
But don’t try to tailor a message that you think the media will like and cover accordingly. They won’t do that – ever! Certainly not during the campaign. They eventually will, years after your plans meet with success, as they were forced to do with Reagan’s economic juggernaut. And you are going to have success, right? Because you are going to have loooong coattails [1], right?
Reagan’s plan was far too complex and not as strong as the options out there today. Despite this, we rode the Reagan wave from the early 80s until 2008. We weathered the damage the economy endured with Bill Clinton, 9/11, two wars and “compassionate conservatism”[2].
What we need desperately in this economy is simplicity and clarity. The simplicity should be the easier sell for the vast majority of voters. Some will be skeptical because of a lifetime of being told that government programs must be complex. Only the governing class likes complexity. It allows the elites to build little empires around their programs to manage the endless minutiae that federal law excretes by the wagon load. For examples, look at Dodd-Frank and Obamacare. Combined, they represent almost 40,000 pages of Orwellian untruth. The Financial “Reform” act was an intentional maze written to preserve the status quo among friends of Democrats, disguised as a bill to help consumers. All it did was make life more indecipherable for everyone and create thousands of careers in compliance and enforcement. Obamacare by itself is just shy of 30,000 pages of regulation. And as we all know by now Obamacare cannot and will not do anything for anyone except for the chosen few insurance companies that wrote the goddamn bill!
No more of this. We need ideas that people can get their heads around the first time you explain it to them. If you want to set the electorate on fire despite the fact that the press will lie about you and what you are planning, try simplicity and clarity. Make your message as elemental as gold.
The Budget
It is the clarity that will be the tougher sell. It is here that you make understanding your plans simple. But it is also here, that you make clear to the voter that what they think are goodies from Papa Government, are not goodies at all and are going away.
We’ll start with the budget. The best plan proposed in the last two decades is what is called the Mack Penny Plan. It goes something like this:
You choose a recent year’s spending level in which no one died due to the fact that the US Government budget was too small, say 2014. Whatever was the total spending for that year will be the total budget for the coming year. Next year you cut that by one percent across the board; one penny on the dollar. No exceptions. Then you do the same thing again the following year. This is repeated for 7 years. Each year, the one percent is, in actuality, a smaller number than the year before because it is one percent of a smaller total amount. The result, you have balanced the budget.
Liberals and our not-too-bright conservatives are already squirming in their chair with the first objection.
But MJ, that can’t work, it’s too simple! Nothing is that simple!
The Next Teachable Moment
Here the wise candidate gets a chance to outline his economic program by teaching the public some basic truths they probably already know to be true but have been convinced to think otherwise.
Why are liberals and RINOs so impressed with needless complexity? I can understand the governing class on this point because they believe in gathering power unto themselves and need byzantine barrels of regulation as mentioned above to hide their desires. But in conversation with people about this very point, a lot of otherwise smart people complain of the simplicity. Why would the regular Joe complain of simplicity when the optional complexity is a millstone around his neck? See it for what it is – a lifting of a great burden from your life.
Things are only as simple or complex as we insist on making them. Controlling spending and balancing budgets is not like sending a man to Mars. People and corporations do it every damn day! Expect the same from those in whom you have entrusted your hard-earned treasure. If you don’t see the truth in this, put this book down now. You are too stupid to absorb the rest of it.
The trouble with any bureaucracy is that too many people, instead of doing their jobs, spend all their time building little empires and call that management. It is invariably a distraction from the primary mission. They HATE simplicity, especially when it comes to budget cuts. Broach the subject and the thousands of little empire builders in the federal labyrinth will be saying, Oh no. That’s fine for some other department, but my little corner of the world is far too valuable to absorb what will be approximately a six percent cut over seven years. Take more from this and that program, but give me my regular increase. - OR - Our workers are the finest workers in the entire universe (even the ones who look at porn all day) and we can’t afford to layoff a single one of them. The federal worker is the very bedrock of Western Civilization.
I’ll take those two examples of self-preservation, at the needless expense of the taxpayer, in order.
To defend little government empires - and we heard this with the sequestration arguments - the little emperors will cry, by golly how can I plan next year’s work if I have to cut everything by 1 percent? We have new programs going online. They must be paid for. If you are going to just willy-nilly cut one percent of my budget, we may as well shut down the whole department!
Don’t tempt us.
This was, at the time of “sequestration”[3] and still is, a riotously specious argument. The operative word here is planning. So, in 2016, as an example, Congress acts responsibly and passes the budget for 2017. The budget provides all departments a pre-sequestration budget of X dollars minus one percent. Now, planning begins on how to incorporate the cut. As professional employees, the little emperors should be expected to meet this requirement. If they can’t absorb a one percent cut, they should be fired and replaced by competent managers.
Also, if they were told they were getting an increase of any kind next year, as the federal government has gotten EVERY year for the last 40 years, they would have no trouble planning for that, and spending every last dime.
As for the layoffs of government employees…
This is where the shit really gets deep. You would think every government employee was a snowflake with a degree from MIT. You’d think they all had 3.2 perfect children, had the work ethic of an Amish farmer and sang God Bless America every morning before starting work.
I’m here to tell you, after 23 years in the navy and 14 as a contract employee for the Department of Defense, the previous paragraph is beyond fantasy. There are some truly great people working for the government. I’ve had the honor to work with some of the best. But as an organization, I can tell you, being good stewards of public funds is not at the top of anyone’s priority list. And there are thousands, many thousands of highly unproductive members of the federal workforce.
I can see the news stories now. Media hacks will search frantically for a story that will show an excruciating tragedy caused by a 1% cut in funding. We’ll see the 22 year old that had just settled into his new job at the Department of the Interior, now the only layoff in the whole department, cast out into the cold. So unfair.
Or, among the proles, we’ll see the face of a crying, single mother with five kids, from three different men, who can’t make rent this month because her landlord demanded the extra $8.00 the government didn’t pay in housing assistance. Kids will be forced to walk around in New Balance instead of Nike, shattering their delicate self-esteem. Schools will be forced to serve food the kids will actually eat instead of the arugula Michelle Obama commanded them to eat. And don’t get me started on the 1000 fewer welfare cell phones that won’t go out this year.
Give me a minute. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
That said, with one percent cuts per year, it isn’t necessary to get rid of even this dead weight; at least not early on, and never in great numbers. If you cut payroll by one percent, EVERYONE’S new spending authorization by one percent and required that any new project be within budget and/or offset by curtailing other projects, the need for layoffs becomes very remote. That is, if we are only relying on the Mack Penny Plan.
But there would be layoffs. As you get further through the budget reduction plan there would have to be some reorganization. That’s what the planning is for. Get rid of the dead weight first.
And speaking of dead weight, there is much more we can do in conjunction with The Mack Penny Plan to reduce spending and take the first steps to shrinking the size and reach of the government. Remember, I said, “in conjunction with. ” Even the smallest government operation could use the discipline of spending less. If they have to do less (1% less) that is likely a very good thing.
We’ll talk about taking away the “goodies” and really shrinking government in a chapter that will give the weaker candidates a heart attack. One can only hope.
7 SWIMMING WITH SHARKS…WRIT LARGE
Back home we got a taxidermy man. He gonna have a heart attack when he see what I brung him!
- Quint, Jaws, 1975
Along with small cuts needed to balance the budget, there is an opportunity with this election to slash the executive branch, make the President’s job easier and less smarmy, and save multiple hundreds of billions of additional taxpayer dollars. We also want to reign in the federal monster. In this book, I am suggesting that the next chief executive preside over the greatest surrender of power since George Washington turned his sword over to Congress.[iv] The executive branch needs to be heavily reduced and responsibility for making law must be put back on the shoulders of Congress; preferably one not presided over by the Four Morons of the American Political Apocalypse[v]. If you are reading this as a Congressional aspirant, you will want to assist this new President in returning power and relevance to the legislature. Remember, legislators; other than foreign affairs and the veto power, this man’s job is to execute YOUR will! Hold him to account!
Voters, pay attention and insist this happens. Pound your Congressional delegation, no matter what their party, with phone calls and emails demanding that they put on the man pants and take back the power that is by law, theirs.
Everybody thinks that his rep is a great statesman. Every two years polls indicate that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to throw all the bums out. And every year more than 90% get reelected. Clearly, legislators go home with the same message year after year: I’m the good guy. It’s all the other guys who are ass hats. Don’t buy that. Check his voting record. Where does he make the most appearances?
Do you know what a legislator’s most common complaint is? No letters, no phone calls from constituents. They often don’t know how their people feel on many issues. SO LET THEM FRIGGIN KNOW! MAKE THEM EARN THEIR PAY! Don’t worry so much about the rest of Congress; that’s the concern of people in all the other states. Ask what the hell your delegation has done for you, or at least not to you, recently. Then challenge his or her sense of adult responsibility…often!
Politicians be warned: If you are not a candidate in control of yourself or the facts, you would be better off quitting the race forthwith than to venture into these waters. If you are not a Fiorina or Jindal or Walker, you may suddenly find yourself being dismembered by the sharks in the media, the Beltway and by the citizenry that you failed to convince. Lindsay Graham; I like you. I always have. But you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being this guy. It’s the same with Jeb Bush. If anyone shows the audacity required to push any proposal in this book, Jeb will be knocked to the middle of the pack. If Bush tried this right now, the sharks would tear him to pieces. Not because he couldn’t do all these things, he can. But so far his campaign is too risk averse and business-as-usual to stand up to the onslaught that a less than ethical media would bring to bear.
But it is audacity that paves the way for massive victory, so I would hope that some of the conservatives take on at least a goodly portion of this chapter.
This Will Give Carl Rove a Stroke. Any Takers?
Over the last two decades, we have seen spending, the budget and the national debt skyrocket. Even sequestration continued the growth. Hundreds of billions were added to our spending, again and again. When cuts would be touted, and there have been few, they weren’t real cuts, just smaller increases.
Well, it’s time. The people are prepared – make that starving - to hear that someone is about to take a broad axe to the federal monster. Here are just a few humble suggestions from your loyal servant.
Whiteboards ready? Summarize this section and start scribbling.
ELIMINATE THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION!
Of all the departments I will take on, this one is the most useless by far. The Department of Education (ED)[vi] takes the blue ribbon in wasting taxpayers time and money. No Child Left Behind! Common Core! INDEED! The ED has never educated, nor has it contributed to the successful education of a single citizen of the Union. This is the most useless collection of bureaucrats ever assembled. Like some of their local and state counterparts, the ED exists to keep these people employed. They do nothing but add to the cost of educating our children by syphoning our tax dollars and making pronouncements that do not contribute to student success.
There is a legitimate explanation, of course. They know nothing. No desk warmer in DC knows the first thing about what your child needs to be successful. They claim to. Some actually think they are omniscient and can discern the perfect solution for every state, county and municipality in the country. Most of these delusional creatures are liberal doctrinaires and really, REALLY believe that Big Brother knows everything. Like their betters in the White House, these people read Animal Farm and 1984 and instead of being repulsed, sat back and thought: This could work! I could be an important person in this world!
The most important thing a candidate needs to know is that starting your cuts here will be like shooting fish in a barrel. Democrats will be apoplectic. The press will actually froth at the mouth. Government spokesmen will run to the nearest podium to tell us that every last employee at ED, and all the other departments we are going to eviscerate in this book, are the most indispensable people in the history of man.[vii] Weak Republicans will try to crawl under refrigerators to avoid talking about it. We will hear that dumping the Education Department will sound the death knell for western civilization.
Don’t worry. Joe Sixpack and Lilly Minivan will hear you are closing down this monstrosity and do a Tiger Woods fist pump. And you, brave candidate, can rest easy. There are more Joes and Lillies in this country, black, white, Asian, Latino, gay, left-handed, even on the federal payroll than any other voting cohort. Go for it!
As for the invaluable qualities the typical federal employee might possess, let them put those qualities to the test by going forth and offering their services to the states and cities. If it is true that they are the best things since perforated toilet paper, they won’t be unemployed for more than a week. I am being facetious, of course. But they shouldn’t worry anyway. The economy we are going to spawn from this and other federal dismemberments will create so many jobs the average citizen will need to hide under his bed to avoid employment.
Reduce the IRS to a Bookkeeping Operation
There are many reasons to take the teeth out of the IRS. The most recent to come to light is that the organization has become little more than an attack dog for the governing class. Lois Lerner and that smirking, smug Koskinen are convinced that the American citizen is so thoroughly cowed that the IRS can do whatever it wishes to whomever they dislike. They share Obama and Hil-liar-y’s view of a socialist utopia. They feel utterly at ease abusing you and your money and your personal liberties in order to tamp down political descent. This is the fault of the gutless wonders inside the Beltway right now, especially the four morons. Trey Gowdey seems to be doing something, but he is moving terribly slow. He ought to quit messing with his hair and get on with it.
No matter. As we saw in the chapter entitled “Other People’s Money” the tax code can be made infinitely simpler than it is today. A point-of-sale tax will render the IRS obsolete. The only function of the new IRS will be to monitor the receipts of retail businesses. Those businesses will have little, if any, motivation to skirt the law for people they don’t know. They will produce the revenues needed to run what will be left of the government, once it has been leashed and cut down to a manageable size. For those businesses stupid enough to lie about their monthly sales or companies that don’t do their bookkeeping correctly, an IRS 1/100th its present size will be sufficient to roll those businesses up and close them down.
I can hear the non-thinkers nagging me again:
But MJ, what about all those poor out-of-work IRS agents?
First, lets acknowledge that these virtuous and invaluable public servants allowed, and in many cases, participated in the harassment of citizens who didn’t agree with the sitting emperor. Few, if any, ever raised an eyebrow. So my heart isn’t breaking at their dismissal. But once again, our own austerity will come to the rescue of even the undeserving.
Bust Medical Scammers…
One of the areas needing to be addressed is the obscene amount of fraud and waste occurring in government and by citizens raping the federal dole for entitlements to which they are not, well,… entitled. The rate of fraud in Medicare alone is in the tens of billions per year;[viii] $50 billion each year according to the government’s own estimates. Some say it is closer to $80 billion.
To start addressing this, we transfer an army of those agents the IRS will free up to the Department Of Health and Human Services with the same police powers they have right now. These agents will carry Department of Justice badges. They won’t work for the agencies they monitor. Turn them lose on the fraudulent scum who are directly stealing our money. But with this caveat: in order to bust individuals, they must also take down any skanky, quack doctors that may have made their fraud doable. And such scum should do serious jail time!
Continuing on the medical fraud theme: Since the ugly, grey dawn of Obamacare, millions of people have illegally, if not understandably, left the workforce, applied for and gotten disability checks from the Social Security Administration. After being forced from the workforce and living in an economy with zero real growth for several years they gave up and took the bait being offered by Valerie Jarrett’s lapdog. Obama is why people like Jarrett keep community organizers around. The easiest thing to do in this country is breath. The second easiest is to get on Social Security Disability. Hell, around the time Obamacare was being rolled out, the White House had people recruiting citizens to sign up.
More of these IRS agents, after years of serving the emperor, often willingly, can be sent to DHHS to warn off and, if necessary, bust those on disability who go to the gym more than my gainfully employed readers have time to. Agents can also go after those who collect a government check and work under the table.
But I’ll say it again; the economy we are going to grow will pull people off the government dole. And since we will be heavily means testing this bloated program and drastically cut the rates for those who don’t really deserve it, many of these people will leave their disability behind and get real jobs. For those who do not, they get one LOUD warning: if you are not sick, get off the dole. Leave it for those who need it.
… and then Cut Those Departments Accordingly.
There is an endless, sickening litany of people ripping off the government/us, both private citizens and government employees. You should be able to pull 90% of the IRS and transfer them to other areas to clean up the mess. Make these agents answerable to people outside the target organization they police, and transfer them often.
Fear alone will curtail billions and billions of dollars worth of waste and fraud.
Once you have reduced the fraud by tens of billions, cut that amount from DHHS. There is much more to be done to bring this department to heel, but you get the idea. I gave you a good start.
Eviscerate the EPA
Did you know the EPA packs heat? Oh, yeah. Nice stuff, too. SIG Sauer; stainless steel, no less. I own five weapons. I can’t afford a stainless steel SIG.[ix]
WTF?!?!
The EPA is a policy arm of the government. What jackass gave them police authority? How can it possibly be justified?
Let’s suppose the EPA decided the drainage ditch in your backyard was a protected navigable waterway. I’m not half kidding on this one; they do this kind of monkey shit all the time. Once established, they can cite you for any one of dozens of things you might do to or near this waterway. Let’s suppose further that you build a 10’ x 12’ storage shed you bought at Lowe’s and plop it near this critical body of H2O. Should Big Brother find out about this, and find regulation against it, the fun would begin.
You would be cited, of course, and told to get the offending shed away from the life-affirming drainage ditch. If you refuse, then the fines and arrests come into play. There was a time when the EPA would have to notify the Justice Department and/or local police to assist in assaulting your property, tearing down your shed and dragging you into court. Now it seems they have the guns and police powers to do it themselves. Brilliant. What a time saver!
Along with police powers, these people now have the power to make laws. They say they are just expounding on proper law, debated and legislated. But as we have seen, through new “regulations” supported nowhere in existing law, they are dictating NEW law. We also know they have the blessing of an authoritarian regime to do it. “I can’t wait for Congress…” and all that jazz.
One of my favorites is that CO2 is now, by totalitarian fiat, a pollutant; a toxin; fucking poison! Who knew?
I was shocked to hear this. I immediately wrote my Congressman (He’s the good one. It’s all the others that are ass hats.) and demanded that a warrant be sworn out on every single American. I have it on good faith that several times a minute every single one of these damnable Americans is spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And they do it all day long, even at night when they sleep. They have absolutely no regard for their planet. Bastards!
It should be easy to catch them. The NSA has all their phone and computer records. They can pull every phone conversation these criminals are having, find out their movements, who they are talking to, and arrest them.
Taking it an important step further, do you have any idea how many tons of CO2 are being expelled by 9 billion people everyday? Oh yeah! The whole world is doing it. The trees have absorbed so much of the poison they’re turning green!
We can’t arrest the whole world. So Valerie Jarrett should order Barry to bomb every last one of them into dust. And he can start with those Lithuanians. Thick as thieves, those Lithuanians.
The one thing more stupid than the last four paragraphs is the CO2 declaration I am making fun of.
But I’ll tell you something even more stupid and truly frightening. The person now at the head of an organization with fiat power and guns is a liberal, environmentalist doctrinaire. She is a propagandist and GW/CC alarmist of the first order. She is totally beneath our trust.[x] I speak of Gina McCarthy, EPA Administrator.
Reduce the EPA to a monitoring group and give them four initials.[xi] All the states have their own version of the EPA. Many simply lift environmental law directly from the federal government and make it their own. Call the new federal activity something like Environmental Policy Monitoring Group (EPMG), responsible to the states for assisting them in maintaining a safe, clean environment and settling environmental disputes among the states.
But for Christ’s sake, take away their police power, rescind all of their fiat pronouncements of the last 7 years and take away their GUNS! Nobody wants some sunken-chested Occupy Wall Street type carrying a gun. He’ll probably just shoot himself in the foot – or someone else’s foot.
Subsidies Schmubsidies!
There are literally millions of ways to cut the thousands of programs that must be cut for the federal government to function in a way even remotely sane. For example, welfare should be one, means-tested program providing the recipient with two cards. One would work in grocery stores and one in other retail stores. Purchases with these cards should be linked to specific UPCs that would not be attached to junk food, booze, cigarettes, etc. And they certainly shouldn’t work in ATMs.
College loans…
…and grants should be jealously awarded. It wouldn’t hurt the future of this country if they were limited to science, math, language and history. I know, I know; someone will then insist that Militant Lithuanian Athletic Studies is a science. And the federal government should get out of the school loan business altogether. Has Uncle Skidmark ever gotten involved in a business that he didn’t totally cock up?
Crony Corn Squeaz’ins
Subsidies for ethanol should have never been created. The industry still won’t discuss the impact of production on the environment, claiming that the slightest explanations would compromise proprietary secrets. Why the hell do they get a pass? They won’t say how many gallons of fresh water it takes to make a gallon of their crap. Why the hell do they get a pass on that?
Their crap retains water. This is bad for your engine. It is why smart people put boat fuel in their lawn mowers. No ethanol. Ethanol would ruin them. Ethanol scorches cylinder walls.
The big reason to dump the crap is because it doesn’t produce the performance per gallon that gasoline does. So having ethanol in your tank may cause a little less pollution out of your tail pipe per gallon, but it takes more gallons per commute, for example, thus producing more pollution per hour the car is run. So at best it is probably near a wash to go with it or without it, minus the consideration for engine damage.
There are independent experts who, if given access to the “proprietary information” the industry hides, would likely prove all of this. But on its face, it makes perfect sense anyway. Ethanol is a waste of time and a standing insult to the American taxpayer. Flush the shit.
Note to the Republicans who fight every year to save the ethanol subsidy: You are whores who have abandoned the principles you claim with your party label. You must feel skanky when you fight this dishonorable battle every year. But hey, a lot of that taxpayer money comes rolling back your way every election year, doesn’t it?
To farmers on the government corn dole: Just a few years ago, many of you were broccoli, wheat, peanut or whatever different kinds of farmers there are. By jumping on the government subsidy wagon and switching to corn, then selling it to the ethanol machine, you participated in an artificial rise in food and feed prices. I refer most directly to the big super farms operations. It is a free country and you were offered the whore money from the government. It is certainly legal to take it. But you can kiss all of our asses anyway.
The bottom line on ethanol is that without artificial subsidy from the government and the police state requirement that we put the crap in our gas tanks, there would be no one willing to buy it. That’s because it is of no valuable use. If it provided great gas mileage or extended the life of your engine, everyone would buy it. But it doesn’t. It’s crap.
The list goes on. For the sake of simplicity, I will paint with a wider brush. But the light is starting to come on in your head. Whether you are a voter or a politician, you are starting to see the genesis of an earth-shattering message here. It will set you apart and make you the distraction from the rest of the news. There is no need for you to take all this and carbon copy it onto your campaign. Take the ideas and plug in things you know will work, but think big. Small ball is for losers.
And now you REALLY have to open your mind to Madisonian thinking[xii];
An old idea brought new again. Hold on t’yer ass, Fred.
The federal government should do away with all non-welfare subsidies. All. That’s right. I have never met a subsidy that I thought was worthwhile. In the eyes of those who cannot open their minds right now, that makes me a hater. People will say just look at all the programs that the government supports out of sheer kindness. The government is acting as it should in subsidizing them.
Uh, sorry, Dudley Do-right. No, the government is not. In providing subsidies, especially popular ones, the politicians are whoring themselves to gain votes. With others they are doing it nakedly for the money. They are outside their mandate, causing people to live their lives more and more for the interests of others and not their own.
Well, why not?, you might snidely sniff. It would do people some good to take care of others and learn the value of charity. Or a person must recognize that helping oil companies find oil is good for everyone. Or if XYZ business fails, people will be laid off. They need the government money. Blah, blah, blah.
First, I implore you to read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. This PDF file can be downloaded free from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It explains the basic, timeless economic realities the world works under and goes into great detail about the stupidity of subsidies, especially subsidies for businesses. Any business that needs to depend on subsidies should be out of business. The fact is most of the companies taking subsidies don’t need them. But they’d be crazy to pass them up so long as they are available.
Also, when the government takes from one and gives to another it does so under the color of authority and the threat of a gun. That is not charity. That is coercion.
And if you do the long division, as Henry Hazlitt has, subsidies benefit only the recipient of the subsidy. They hurt everyone else. What you don’t pay for in full by yourself, at the time of sale, you end up paying full boat, along with the cost of someone else’s portion, plus the government’s cut for brokering the subsidy scam. It makes your life more expensive!
That’s why, before the government was run by total retards, they didn’t subsidize the buggy whip industry with the dawn of the automobile age. The people in that industry had to find other work. And they did, thanks to the newly disrupted and exploding economy. The buggy whip lost its usefulness…unless you like to dress in leather skivvies and say, “Yes mistress!” a lot. Erm…uh…ahem. Moving on…
But here is the real rub. If they do away with all subsidies, that means they’ll take yours. Bad right? No. If you are a productive, taxpaying citizen it is a wash at worst. We may not get our mortgage write-off, but we will no longer be financing thousands of other things, born of crony capitalism, that we presently do not benefit from.
For example, the government has pissed away $154 billion of your money on “green” energy swindles[xiii]. The companies involved were usually tinker toy operations with no hope of generating energy on a large, dependable scale. Or they were phony scams intended to fail, while the top brass left with your money still in their pockets. That’s more than $4000 wasted for every man, woman and child in this country. If the government decided to give that back to you in cash as opposed to the “green” scammers, how would that compare the few hundred dollars the average mortgage write-off would be. And that’s just one program. They empty the coffers every year on stupid ideas and then borrow as much as we produce annually, as a nation, on top of that. EVERY YEAR!
(2023 P4B note: My figure about what was spent by 2014 on GW/CC scams is now laughable.)
How are all your write offs put together looking now, compared to that? We have been, year in and year out, strapped with greater and greater taxation and government debt while being convinced that the pittance we are left with in the form of a write-off is a really good deal. I have news for you. The house always wins. They take more than they leave and you don’t get the benefits; at least not one equal to what has been taken, and certainly not if you are a productive citizen.
And as a bonus kick in the giblets, the government competes aggressively against its own citizens for every dime of credit available so it can waste our future money on what it can’t pay for this year.
P. T. Barnum said there is a sucker born every minute. I can tell you where 310 million of them live. That’s what I mean by Swimming with Sharks Writ Large. So many of our citizens actually believe the federal government is interested in their welfare. They will be spitting mad that we intend to take their “benefits” from them. We need to convince a plurality of Americans that their future relies on doing for themselves, not taking a miserly whore’s tribute from a corrupt central government. Which of our band of merry conservatives has the sack (or sacklette) to take on this fight? If that candidate emerges, will you vote for him or her?
[1] More on this when we discuss ending party fratricide.
[2] If W were brighter than a 40-watt bulb, he’d have understood that true conservatism is already the most compassionate (or put more correctly – benevolent) system of governing. We didn’t need yet another bullshit education program. We needed to get the federal government out of the education business completely. It has never educated a single child. And the more money we throw at the problem, the worse it has gotten. If Bush, 41 and 43, had done nothing more than spend their time fighting to slash the size of the federal code, we’d have been far better off than we are today. This, despite the 2008 bank scam and eight years of Wall Street’s favorite son, Barry Obama.
[3] This is an irresponsible process with which I disagree. Further, sequestration was not a cut in spending on anything. It was a reduction on the anticipated increase. This is automatic and a product of another irresponsible process called baseline budgeting. That’s been around for decades. No person calling himself a conservative should EVER vote for anything that starts with automatic spending increases across the board before budget deliberations even begin.
Ch. 7
[iv] The point being that he could have simply kept the army and taken over as dictator. You can be sure there were more then a few who worried over such a possibility. U.S. Grant would repeat the gesture after the Civil War. He marched into DC at the head of a two-day parade. He could have seized power without breaking a sweat.
[v] Again, that would be Boehner, McConnell, Pelosi and Reid (Note from 2023: That is now McConnell, McCarthy, Schumer and Jeffries. The name may have changed, but the quality continues to fall!)
[vi] This abbreviation is common and serves to distinguish it from the Department of Energy (DOE). The similarity to a dysfunction afflicting half of middle-aged men is just a funny coincidence.
[vii] According to Shutdown lowdown: Sizing up the federal furloughs by Yuval Rosenberg, The Fiscal Times 7 Oct 2013, As many as 800,000 workers were initially affected by the last government shutdown. The Pentagon called some of them back to work early. Did you miss any of them? An event known as Snowmageddon 2010 shut down the federal government for a week. It was that week, the governing class noticed a PR mistake when referreing to workers we really don’t need. During that week, “non-essential” workers were told to stay home. That accounted for about 90% of the federal workforce. Did you miss them?
By the time the shutdown rolled around, the Office Personnel Management cobbled together a new term for the people we really don’t need to be working full-time for the federal government; “non-excepted”. The term requires an explanation where non-essential doesn’t. People were getting their noses out of joint about the old term. The perpetually offended said it was injurious to their self-esteem to be told they were unimportant. But most were worried the term demonstrated their true worth and that it might have a deleterious effect on their status among the New Aristocracy (federal employees).
[viii] Progress Made, but More Action Needed to Address Medicare Fraud, Waste, and Abuse GAO-14-560T: Published: Apr 30, 2014. Publicly Released: Apr 30, 2014.
[ix] 10--U. S. EPA Firearms Purchase - SIG Sauer P229 22 Aug 2011
[x] EPA Chief: ‘Climate Deniers’ Aren’t Normal Human Beings -Michael Bastasch – Daily Caller, 23 June 15
[xi] People outside the beltway probably won’t know this, but federal agencies are always trying to find ways to justify three-letter acronyms for their little empires. The NATIONAL IMAGERY AND MAPPING AGENCY (NIMA) got a boost in prestige when it became the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). I remembering thinking that very thing when driving by their headquarters shortly after the change; “Well, they’re moving up in the world. ”
[xii] LPMaryland.org, Madison quoted, 27 August 2014
[xiii] FAIL: US HAS WASTED $154 BILLION ON 'RENEWABLE ENERGY', Breitbart. com, 5 December 2013. Pay particular attention to the kickbacks and sleazy politics involved.
Street Politics: It Ain't Your Daddy's GOP Anymore! Continued