Randy Inman
Jingo's Ruminations
Kim K.
Mom! The government is stealing my cookies and putting them in the pork barrel!
June 26th 2008 18:34
I remember sitting at lunch in kindergarten one day with a pack of cookies. My little friend next to me was eying them up and asked if she could have one while she already had her hand on it. She didn't even wait for a response before eating it. I got upset at first, but I still had some left, so I let it go. The next day, she took two of my cookies. The next she took three. I told my mom about it and she told me to "stand up for my rights." Not understanding the nuances of that saying, I took her advice quite literally the next day and stood on my chair to tell my little friend not to take my cookies. She looked up and said, "Can I please have a cookie?" I thought for a second and handed her one. Its not that I didn't want to share, I just didn't want her to take them without my consent.
This philosophy has maintained its integrity in my adult life. I'm not entirely heartless, I just want the power to control who exactly my money goes to help. People have often called me crazy for wanting to get rid of income tax. Income tax only acounts for about 40% of our national income, basically enough to pay the interest on our national debt. Meanwhile, the debt continues to accumulate as the government continues to make costly program after program that does nothing to help the country grow. Lets just set aside the larger issues like social security, healthcare, welfare, etc...for a moment. Beside all the grand scale projects, I could go on for days about all the little places our government spends money where it shouldn't (and I will in the long term on this blog.) Add all of them up and then tell me we still need income tax.
Today I wanted to briefly touch on earmarks. We've all heard this term in recent history, but what are they? Earmarks are little lines written into bills that appropriate money to particular causes. Citizens Against Government Waste identified 2,568 earmarks for 2008 as pork barrel projects. For those that are unfamiliar, those are projects that go directly to fund pet projects of campaign contributors or supporters. These projects accounted for $13.2 billion in the 2008 fiscal year. It is just redistribution of money from one place to another. From someone's pocket to a campaign, so a politician can use his clout to put that money back to the cause the pocket would have supported in the first place.
This philosophy has maintained its integrity in my adult life. I'm not entirely heartless, I just want the power to control who exactly my money goes to help. People have often called me crazy for wanting to get rid of income tax. Income tax only acounts for about 40% of our national income, basically enough to pay the interest on our national debt. Meanwhile, the debt continues to accumulate as the government continues to make costly program after program that does nothing to help the country grow. Lets just set aside the larger issues like social security, healthcare, welfare, etc...for a moment. Beside all the grand scale projects, I could go on for days about all the little places our government spends money where it shouldn't (and I will in the long term on this blog.) Add all of them up and then tell me we still need income tax.
Today I wanted to briefly touch on earmarks. We've all heard this term in recent history, but what are they? Earmarks are little lines written into bills that appropriate money to particular causes. Citizens Against Government Waste identified 2,568 earmarks for 2008 as pork barrel projects. For those that are unfamiliar, those are projects that go directly to fund pet projects of campaign contributors or supporters. These projects accounted for $13.2 billion in the 2008 fiscal year. It is just redistribution of money from one place to another. From someone's pocket to a campaign, so a politician can use his clout to put that money back to the cause the pocket would have supported in the first place.
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Comment by Anonymous
I generally take a more moderate middle of the road approach towards gov't since as Madison rightfully point out, men ain't angels. My wife would certainly attest to that in a nano-second, New Y ork nano-second no less!
But if you really want to see how awful cheapskate eggheads treat their lowest and hardest working employees while they blow money hand over fist, just look at what happens whenever they take over any school committee in any prominent college town.
If they don't get the tax hikes they want, they go out inpublic and blame the voters for being so cheap (????) for their having to gut the poorest employees that they can't wait to outsource to an even cheaper employer. The employees in question are school cafeteria workers, aka "Lunch Ladies."
All this has "gotten on the fightin' side of me," as Merle Haggard would put it. Bullying the smallest to achieve political success is so typical for such a cheap line of work: academia. Well, they're cheap with everyone else's welfare, not their own.
Those are some cookies you might want to dig into.
Keep up your bloggin.
S.