Happy Tax Day!

So it's Tax Day all across our great nation, and people are flooding the streets in celebration of our patriotic duty to give money to the federal government to support those wonderful programs that make our nation function as a whole, like reseeding the grass on the National Mall in Washington, DC, or building a lobster museum in Maine, or even keeping failing companies in existence that continue to bring our economy downwards. I'm so thankful that we have the government to choose to put money into those areas that no rational American citizen would even think of doing.

If you don't like your taxes now, just wait for the next few years. We thought that Pres. Bush spent money like crazy, well Pres. Obama is putting him to shame with the amount of money coming off the presses now, doubling Pres. Bush's average spending deficit from $300 to $600 per year. This means that while Barry publicly committed to reducing the nation debt, with current spending and budget changes will increase to $15 by the time all this money is spent. Over the next 10 years the burden put on Americans will increase from its current $24,000 per U.S. household to $32,000 for the average taxpaying family. Each of us is going to have to figure out how to make much more money over the next 10 years just to pay for the increase in taxes, just to live at the same level we are now, and that's not considering other changes in economy or increases in spending throughout those years.

I'm not just trying to push unhappiness on this wonderful day of taxation, but it is an actual concern within our family considering the amount of money our country is spending. I plan on trying to make money over the next many years in order to provide a happy life for my family, but it is hard enough to survive without having to also pay for non-taxpaying families. I'm even more worried for my children who are going to inherit a larger national debt and even larger yearly deficits due to huge government programs that will require more and more spending over time.

We have someone who promised "change", but change is not always good, and it seems that we're getting more of the same spending that we got from Bush's last year in office, though maybe the "change" is that instead of just paying for failing companies through bailouts, we taxpayers are now paying for anything and everything that can be stuck into a bailout, a stimulus package, or any other spending bill that is "required" for the preservation of America's future. Many years ago Cuba demanded change in their country, and now look where they are. I'm not equating Obama to Castro by any means, but turning a country from a republic into a socialist state doesn't happen in one step, although our government may be trying to prove that wrong with recent spending and government control over various private sectors.

I'm thankful that there are many people around the country that feel the same way I do, with the attendance of hundreds of Tea Parties by thousands of Americans protesting things from excessive taxation to overabundant government spending. It's time that We the People stopped meaning We the People of Washington politics, but returned to We the People of all American citizens. We need to return to a "representative" government that does what we ask them to do, and not be told what will happen because it's where the nation should head whether we agree or not.

My parents came to this country legally many years ago because of the opportunity that existed here, but something changed from then to now. I hope that "change" comes to us soon, not Obama's kind of "change," but a real change, a return to what made our country great, before my children are grown and realize that the dream that brought their grandparents here doesn't exist any more.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Does anyone but me see where this is going?

I've neglected to write anything political for some time, but after listening to some of the things that have been happening recently, I decided I had to write...for posterity's sake. To start, I was driving around this morning to drop Joram off at school and then to Kiran's eye appointment, and I listened as of the Congressional Black Caucus spoke of their recent visit with former Cuban president and Communist dictator Fidel Castro, and I almost had to pull over the car because I was so dumbfounded. They "heaped praise" on the dictator, calling him "warm and receptive" during their visit.

“'It was almost like listening to an old friend,' said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Il.), adding that he found Castro’s home to be modest and Castro’s wife to be particularly hospitable. 'In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor,' Rush said." Really? An old friend? I can picture it now...

...Good Ol' Fiddy hanging on the back porch at the Rushes home, sipping on ice tea when the phone rings. Fiddy excuses himself for a few minutes, and when he returns he tells his buddy Bobby that he just had to execute some dissenters, confiscate some property, and confirm the building plans of his 6th mansion. He and Bobby sit back and share a hearty chuckle. "All in a day's work," Fiddy says.

It's not enough that we've been doing everything to wreck our economy, and possibly our nation, but now we need to pump our dwindling American dollar into Communist Cuba so that the Castros can build a few more mansions. This may even end up working out better than the UN "Oil-for-Food" that blessed the Iraqi people SO much!

This follows our illustrious leaders "muscling" private institutions and determining their fates, screaming about bonuses for AIG when other failed institutions also paid out bonuses (some of them much larger bonuses!) during and after receiving bailout funds, yet all we hear is the uproar over AIG. I thought that "Turbo Tax" Timmy was a Treasury Secretary, not a mob boss. I'm not saying whether or not the bonuses should be paid, but that's something for the Board of Directors or the shareholders to decide, not the President or Congress. Even a failing company, however, will have good executives, and in order to get back on track the companies will need the good ones to help rebuild, but if they're not getting paid they'll likely go elsewhere. Did I fail to mention that the AIG CEO reduced his salary to $1 last year for 2008 and 2009 in conjunction with the bailouts?

It's embarrassing that Congress wrote the bonuses into the bill, yet when public opinion sways to anger against the bonuses members of Congress and the President himself jump on the bandwagon to help whip up the frenzy instead of maintaining heads. It wasn't until much later that we found that Congress already knew about the bonuses, and this after Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn) first denied writing it into the bill. Does anyone in Washington have any moral stability left?

The way to improve things is to let failing institutions fail, not give them government money that doesn't exist and help them hold on a little longer, only to see them drag the rest of the American economy down with them. These bailouts may work, though they've never been proven to work in the situation we're in now, but we'll have to wait and see. We also can't expect success with the government in charge of private institutions, hiring and firing who they will, determining salaries and bonuses, and messing things up in the way only the government knows how. They continue to slip their fingers into every industry they can in order to exert a tiny bit more control, all on a quiet path to fascism. At least with socialism, there isn't any hiding what the government is trying to do. Now we have a government that claims to be leaving things in the private sector, but all the while they take control inch by inch. It's no wonder that a Communist dictator is anxious to "help" the current administration. Soon we'll be hand-in-hand with Cuba. Hopefully the American people will shake off the haze of a good public speaker with a nice smile and wake up before it's too late. That's the kind of hope and change I'm looking forward to.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

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...