Words Fail Me

Like Obama! He won't tell us who the next leader will be in Egypt! He won't cut spending as much as we will! He probably wants the Muslim Brotherhood in charge because he's secretly a Muslim! He wants to spend our country to ruin because he's also secretly a terrorist!

I think that's my quota for exclamation points for this month. Please read the two stories I linked because they deserve their own time. If Mrs. Palin actually read all of the magazines she said she does, she would know very well that nobody knows who the next leader will be. Nobody even really knows what kind of leader it will be yet. I'm really glad that her speech will be aired on the same show whose host said that America deserved 9/11 on 9/12.

Mr. Hensarling is also an idiot. At the bottom of the article he says quote, "There is no limit to the amount of spending that we’re going to be willing to cut." Well actually there is a limit. Another Republican congressman returns his salary to the Treasury minus the cost of his living arrangements, travel, and other necessary costs. How much money would we save in ten years if the other 534 members of Congress did that? Somebody work on that.

What about cutting the Defense so that it matches the next highest defense budget in the world?

According to a guy who knows more about this than I do, China is second on the list of military spending with $125 billion. We could save $875 billion dollars every year right there. That's not even really asking us to fall behind the curve, that's asking to get back in line. Russia only spends $69 billion a year. So matching China's budget would still be almost double Russia's and neither of those countries wants to go to war with us.

Social Security is next on the list of top three expenditures. I'm sure Republican Michele Bachmann of Minnesota wouldn't mind ending the program. At least in theory. If she, or anyone else, actually proposed to end Social Security there would be no re-election. For all the vitriol, congressmen are still at the whim of their constituents. The elderly are the most likely to vote regularly and also benefit the most from Social Security, so good luck cutting that and surviving November when your number is up. However, sometimes leaders have to sacrifice themselves for the good of all. Even if the good of cutting spending means not providing for the poor and elderly. I guess you have to then go into a discussion about which is the greater good (I'm not going to).

What about Medicare? Score two for the elderly. If Congress were to approve a budget without any appropriations for Social Security or Medicare and an 87.5% reduction in defense spending, not only would spending be down, but the national debt would probably be paid off in a couple of years (just a guess, if anyone wants to do some number crunching I would love to hear about it). Then we could cut taxes to a bare minimum. That's assuming that by the time we've made those kinds of cuts, other things like the Department of Education has been shut down, grant funding and other silly things like that have been disapproved. We could probably do away with income taxes, lower property taxes, and do with just a sales tax. Wouldn't that be great?

Of course, without any of that spending we wouldn't be able to afford to have an intelligence network that spanned the globe. Without that intelligence network we wouldn't be able to know who the next leader in Egypt would be. Then again, even with their $80 billion per year budget they didn't see the uprising in Tunisia going how it did. Talk about a bad return on investment.

I suppose what I'm saying is that before you go out into the world and say something stupid, run it by someone who knows what they're talking about first. Otherwise you turn into the one thing nobody in Washington wants to be: