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federal reserve
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Banning Earmarks? Much Ado About Nothing
29 Nov 2010 by Jessica Hughes / 4 Comments
The internet is abuzz with demands that the Congress ban earmarks as a portion of cutting our deficit. Honestly I am hardly paying attention to who has and has not signed on to support such a measure. This is John McCain’s claim to fame, that he has never earmarked any money. But what exactly is an earmark and what will it mean to ban them?An earmark is an allocation of federal money to a specified project. So rather than $18 billion being sent to the state, $18 billion is sent to the state with strings attached. So what will happen if earmarks are banned? Will you receive a refund check from the federal government for the portion of taxes they collected that would have gone to save the naked mole rat if only earmarks for that sort of thing hadn’t been banned? Exactly.
So what will happen to that money that isn’t being earmarked? It will still get paid out, the only difference is the corruption, horse-trading, and pocket greasing will be closer to home as your state and county officials fight over whether to name a bridge after themselves or a Civic Center. Our deficit will not be one dollar less and you will not be one penny richer. The only difference is a bunch of Congressmen will ride the “I voted to ban earmarks” gravy train to re-election for about a hundred more terms. How about some real reform fellows?
How about abolishing the IRS and replacing it with… nothing!? The percentage of our labor stolen from us at the point of government’s gun is but a fraction of the total amount of money Congress spends or promises, anyway. They print or borrow the rest no matter how much it amounts to. Abolish the immoral, confiscatory, violence against private property that is the income tax and then let Congress fight about where they need to cut spending. How about some real relief for the people of the nation first and then Congress can figure out how to make it work, just like when you lose your job you have to figure out how to survive.
No, what we’re supposed to accept is if we work really, really hard and call and write, we may win some token ‘victory’ which is supposed to somehow trickle down to us in the form of lower government spending. Sure, I believe that will happen. Does the Senator from Arizona have any oceanfront property he would like to sell me while we’re at it?
If we expect any real change in the way Washington does business we need to strip them of two immoral powers: the power to counterfeit money and the power to directly tax the people. Our Founders knew a paper currency was devastating to the wealth of the people and was useful for only one purpose: the unfettered expansion of government power. This is why they specifically named gold or silver coinage as the only Constitutionally acceptable currency to be produced by the government. They also recognized that a direct tax was enslavement and this is why imposts and tariffs were the acceptable methods of revenue enhancement prior to the 16th Amendment.
Abolish the IRS, shut down the Federal Reserve and sell off their gold (back to the citizens from whom it was stolen), repeal the 16th Amendment, and return the duty of collecting revenue into the hands of state and local officials who are at least closer and somewhat more accountable to the people. Task a state-level council with determining what of the federally proposed budget is actually Constitutional and pay proportionately.
This is the time for real movement, genuine change. Demand it. If they ban earmarks, great, but don’t be fooled into settling for some shiny bauble meant to distract you from the objective.
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Our Week Versus the Ruling Class
24 Nov 2010 by Jessica Hughes / 3 Comments
Today is the busiest travel day of the year and thousands plan to arrive at the airport and opt out of the full body scanners. My thoughts and prayers will be with these Patriot Protesters because I know it is hard to make decisions that cause inconvenience in pursuit of a principle. My prayers will also be with those who choose to drive instead of flying, a statistically more dangerous venture to which many have been driven by an out of control police state. As tensions rise and tempers flare here amid the unwashed masses, nothing is so clear as that the self-anointed American Aristocracy has turned a deaf ear and a blind eye and is merrily showing us the ‘tall finger.’First, a recap of some of this week’s highlights:
Video was released of a screaming, traumatized three-year-old girl being accosted by a TSA agent
A man who refused to have his genitals touched was detained, then ordered to leave the airport, then ordered to stay, then threatened with a civil suit because he left without letting someone ‘touch his junk.’
A child was semi-strip searched.
A breast-cancer survivor was forced to remove her prosthetic breast.
A bladder cancer survivor was left covered in his own urine after an agent’s rough handling burst his urostomy bag.
But of course that was going on among us proles. Among the ruling class things were a little different:
Hilary Clinton laughed that of course she would avoid the pat downs.
Janet Napolitano took care to comfort the beleaguered TSA agents, who have been demoralized by the public’s persistent objection to being fondled.
John Boehner blithely skirted the discomfiting security procedures.
President Obama lumped himself in with us saying the procedures were a necessary inconvenience to us all, as if he would ever get his junk touched by some rent-a-cop.
And all of this is justified with the fear-mongering specter of last year’s Christmas Day Bomber; a failed attack foiled not by a vigilant government but by a combination of terrorist ineptitude and passenger initiative.
As we scream for our freedom and demand that these offensive, obtrusive and invasive assaults end, the Ruling Class is shopping for 500 more naked scanners for airports and planning to install even more at train and bus stations and marinas. Because we have the money to blow. Or the Federal Reserve will give it to us anyway. At this point it might be cheaper to just assign a Storm Trooper to follow every citizen from the bed to the shower to the toilet then to work and home again to make sure every one of us is obedient to our Masters.
And really, when they’re grabbing your sixteen year old daughter’s breasts so she can fly to visit Grandma can such drastic measures really be so far away?
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Destroying Sacred Cows
23 Nov 2010 by Jessica Hughes / 5 Comments
The great quandary of government used to be “guns or butter.” Would the resources of the state be put to feeding or fighting? The issuance of fiat paper money has supposedly rendered that question moot. Now we are told we can have both, and furthermore, that we must or else the world will fall apart without our global governance.
Within the Tea Party there are a wide range of beliefs on this subject from the Ron Paul non-interventionists, to the George Bush pre-emptive warriors. A good deal of debate on this issue has been set aside because arguing over it will distract from the domestic agenda. But with said domestic agenda including such goals as cutting spending, lowering taxes, and ending the inflationary printing of fiat cash on Congress’ demand, the military budget has come into question.
John McCain, RINO-extraordinaire, has lashed out at the incoming Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) for his ‘isolationism’ because Paul has said that even the military budget should be examined for cuts. Speaking at DC think-tank Foreign Policy Initiative, McCain told the conference, “I think there are going to be some tensions within our party. I worry a lot about the rise of protectionism and isolationism in the Republican Party.” McCain would have us believe that the military budget cannot be cut without endangering our national security. This assertion is ludicrous.
First, the U.S. has around 1,000 military bases in over 100 countries worldwide. Is it ‘isolationist’ to imagine these may not all be necessary? It is interesting to note that in 2004 Donald Rumsfeld suggested closing several hundred overseas bases allowing 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members to come home to the United States. Rumsfeld estimated then that closing 200-300 bases would save $12 Billion per year and in 2004 ‘billion’ was still a big number. That does not take into consideration the return of the 170,000 people to communities where they would be gainfully employed and spending their income in their own towns rather than overseas.
Second, while there is no denying that our troops in most cases are brave and honorable young men and women who risk life and limb on our behalf, this treatment of the military per se as a sacred cow in conservative circles is dangerous. It plays right into the hands of those who would commit malfeasance unchallenged. The military, like every other collection of human beings on the planet, is going to have good people and bad people. The Department of Defense, like every other government-run agency, is a monopoly in its market with no competitors to force efficiency. It is guaranteed to be rife with corruption, embezzlement, waste, and cronyism just like every other government office and if we allow people like John McCain to convince us that questioning military spending is unpatriotic or an insult to our troops than we will be played for suckers.
If we expect to see drastic reductions in spending we need to be looking at every aspect of that spending. We need to be willing to be wise in our plans and we need to be willing to live in reality even when that reality is uncomfortable. In short, we need to be willing to choose once again between guns and butter. As an example, the debate over a domestic missile shield is being framed in terms of whether or not we will add this expense to our budget. Why is the debate not being framed in the context of replacement? If this missile shield is effective than shouldn’t we be able to drastically downgrade our overseas presence? Might we not be able to exercise the wisdom of Jefferson who advised “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none?”
With the specter of increased intervention in Iran and North Korea we need to ask ourselves whether we are able to carry on as the playground monitor. Surely there are good arguments for a wide range of opinions on whether, or how much, we should be participating in overseas feuds, but with over $100 trillion in unfunded domestic liabilities, military spending accounting for another trillion per year and the additional trillion-plus spent so far in Iraq/Afghanistan; the question is no longer even what we should do but what we can do. When big government RINOs like McCain start fear-mongering what dangers await if we just cut spending on the military, we should remind ourselves that we will have no military at all to defend us if the printing presses finally give out and the dollar collapses for their reckless refusal to live within our means.
Conservatives have no problem admitting that this is a fallen world when we talk about the problems associated with poverty and the fact that government cannot give us a perfect world with a social safety net. We need to acknowledge that government also cannot provide a world of perfect security, no matter how many bases, shields, troops, treaties, or embargoes. Our security is paramount, yes, and defense is one of the few functions government should provide, but we mustn’t allow propaganda from the likes of McCain to trick us into leaving the defense budget entirely unquestioned. No government expenditure should be considered so sacred as to be untouchable because wherever the sacred cow is, that’s where their corruption will best be hidden from we taxpayers who bear the true cost.
