Well…didn’t go out to the coffee shop this morning but have been reading the news online and a few things fell into place that have been marinating in my head for a while. I know you’ve heard over the past few months how the repubs have been holding up any spending bills to help the unemployed and states that are in financial peril since they have an impact on the federal deficit. But what they aren’t telling you and I is that red states (those that are controlled by and vote for these same repubs) are the ones that most egregiously feed at the federal trough; taking back well more in federal taxes than they send to Washington. One of the worst of these states is the one who gave us the small government idiot Sarah Palin and gets $1.84 for every dollar in taxes they send but on top of that, Alaska got almost 3 times more in stimulus money than the average state; almost $3,200 for each and every resident. Now, I have a great idea for the repubs, make a pledge that, to help eliminate the deficit in the next year, your state will not take more in federal funding than you put in and I challenge the tea partiers to do the same..oh, but I get it, it’s okay to take from the feds when it benefits you but not if it benefits the country as a whole. More hypocrisy to pile on the heaps they have already shoveled…geez…
Tag Archives: taxes
When did everything become pork?
Well….saw a headline in Car and Driver this morning that triggered a flash in this old brain. The title was ‘when did roads become pork?” And, in my fevered brain, that immediately became “when did everything become pork” in our society? There was a time that I can still remember where we were proud of new roads, schools, and other parts of our shared, communal infrastructure and people understood the value to our society of these kinds of projects. Now it seems that any necessary project to keep us even with the rest of the world is met by the excess tax crowd with loud cries of pork, pork, pork, and the projects are deferred by scared politicians who only think as far ahead as their next election. When did we lose our guts to take on the hard projects? And, when did the idea that we are all in this together go away?
Have we become so simplistic in our capacity for thought that slogans are the new thinking? This country became great by big politicians and big citizens who could see past that next election, that could see past the day that their kids grew up and were no longer in school, that could see that the ideal of America IS that we are all in this together and could put their selfishness aside and see that there are limited resources but didn’t mind paying their fair share of the tax burden when it is necessary for the country to go forward. Progress for the whole of the country cannot be left to the private sector whose very existence is based on the “I’ve got mine” premise….as a country we need to stop wasting time and energy on bitching and start doing again….geez….