Posted by
Bob Wood aka TrekTek on Sunday, November 02, 2008 7:12:27 PM
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Cicero - 55 BC
Balance the budget. That should be easy. Figure out what your income is, then prioritize your expenditures, subtract the expenditures from the income until you get to zero, and eliminate
EVERYTHING that falls below zero. We all learned how to do this in high school. And if we didn't learn it there, we certainly learned it soon after setting up housekeeping on our own. This is
Dave Ramsey 101.
Public debt should be reduced. That should be one of the priorities in balancing the budget. I don't know about you, but my parents taught me that if you don't have the cash to pay for it, you don't need it! That is true for governments as well. We can not in good conscience continue to pile debt onto the backs of our children.
The Treasury should be refilled. You and I have savings accounts, CD's, and long-term investments. We call it "Saving for a rainy day." Well, recent history shows that the federal government has rainy days too. And when it has a rainy day, it's a doozy! In fact, almost everything into which governemnt inserts itself results in the unintended consequence of a rainy day!
The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. Our public officials have forgotten that they are elected by us - ordinary citizens - to serve us. In their first official act, taking the oath of office, they pledge to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of The United States of America." But judging from the legislation and court decisions they thrust upon us, it becomes painfully obvious that most of these folks have never read, much less understood, The Constitution. Instead, they look forward to the next election as if they are entitled to hold the office instead of using the office to serve the people who put them there.
The assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome (the United States) become bankrupt. We spend billions of dollars in foreign aid every year, sending it to countries that don't even like us very much. In many cases, those American dollars never reach the people of those lands for their benefit, and instead those funds end up being embezzled by the corrupt leaders of those lands. Our government has no mechanism for correcting this misspent "charity." And now we have a presidential candidate who wants us to "give" 1% of our Gross Domestic Product to third-world countries and have it administered by the United Nations! That is dumber than dumb! Charity begins at home, and that means your home and my home, not the government.
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. Every year at Thanksgiving,
Rush Limbaugh tells the story of The Mayflower Compact. Most of us have forgotten that socialism was tried in this country before it WAS a country, and it failed miserably. The people who lived under that Compact dumped it for a better way. The New Deal and The Great Society have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars into government programs that have done nothing more than create another generation of the "dependent class" - those who would rather sit on their butts doing nothing until the government hands them a check (and I am not referring to those who paid Social Security and Medicare premiums for years.) See this article "
Cory the Well Driller’s Letter to Obama the Socialist" at
The Texas Rainmaker. We need more "Cory, The Well-Drillers," "Joe, The Plumbers," and anyone else who dares to start and operate the small businesses that provide the vast majority of the jobs in this country. And we need the workers who will show up and work a full day for a day's pay. And government needs to get out of the way and watch as the miracle of the Free Enterprise System that made this country great does its magic.
Cicero was right more than 2000 years ago.
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.