And the spending just keeps on coming...

With three kids ages 6 (almost 7), 4, and 2 (almost 3), we have quite a task every time we go to any store, as I'm sure many of you can relate to. My wife does the actual shopping, and I usually do the other work of stopping my kids from grabbing everything in sight and trying to explain that we can't buy something if we don't have the money. My son's answer to that is usually, "Then why don't we just go to the bank and take some out?" He knows about the bank, etc. since we went there a year or so ago to have him start an account to save for his mission. Then we start the round robin discussion about how if there's no money in the bank we can't take anything out, and that we have to have money to put in unless we have money in the first place, and so on and so forth. I'm sure you get the idea.

Well, this kind of thing is quite difficult to explain when they have such a wonderful example in our national government (thank goodness they don't see the news yet!). I can't even imagine what parents were telling their children 13 years ago when we all saw our president lying under oath about his relationship with the intern! Parents nowadays have a hard enough time teaching their children what is right without having our government and society mixing things up. This all leads me to our current situation.

I've been fuming about this recent bailout for some time now, and I haven't yet recovered from the last one. I have never believed that handing out money we don't have to people who don't really need it is a mistake. This makes particular nonsense when giving this money to failing companies in efforts to help them succeed, especially if we want to promote economic growth. I've been hearing a lot about what is actually contained in the current bailout, and as it would be, the president and Congress have included much that has nothing to do with improving our current economy. A new favorite website of mine of The Heritage Foundation, which gives no nonsense facts, has a new website, www.askheritage.org, that gives lots of facts about this bailout plan. Here are some of the highlights:

• $200 million for repairs to the National Mall in DC including $21 million on new sod
  
• $600 million on cars for government bureaucrats
• $650 million for digital television converters
• $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts
• $87 billion Medicaid bailout and increased SCHIP to help move the country to providing health insurance for every American -- code words for socialized health care!
• increased spending on family planning and birth control for children, immigrants and the wealthy -- this was subsequently removed by Pelosi when there was a widespread outcry against it
  

While some of this may be needed (and as well as some that are not necessary), a stimulus bill should do just that: stimulate the economy! Now I'm no economist, but I don't believe how any of the above can even remotely stimulate the economy into growth. I'm thankful for many of the members of Congress voting against the bill until it is improved and pared down to spending on improving the economy alone.

I'm just not sure what we tell our children and grandchildren when they are having to continue paying for this horrid mess years from now. Well, I'll get off my soapbox now and return you now to your regularly scheduled programming...