By Mickey Walker-January 31, 2010
Hmm. In America we each have the freedom and right to
our own opinions. Comes now the tea baggers, bless their little
hearts. They tell us we are being
taxed too much already and want it to stop. But you got to ask, why now? How could they sleep through over 16 years of Neocon
sponsored borrowing and spending that got us into this fine kettle of
fish? Lordy, why did they wait so
long to bitch at Obama about it all? They say Obama is leading us down the path to economic suicide. Fat chance. Obama inherited the wind from the biggest spender in the
history of the world, George W. Bush. And he borrowed every penny. Ain’t that just like a fiscal conservative? Not.
America committed suicide when we borrowed 3 trillion
dollars more than we took in on taxes to bring the Evil Empire, Russia, to her
knees under Reagan. Such spending madness for programs like Star Wars
that were never completed, put a hole in America’s fiscal bucket a mile
wide. Reagan had backup
though. Arthur Laffer had given us
his famous “Laffer Curve” a term to describe “Supply Side Economics.” Don’t you just love these little pearls
they use to define irresponsible behavior with taxpayer money? Laffer told us
(and Reagan agreed) that high taxes stifled production, you know, the natural
flow and supply of goods. If taxes were too high, it would cost too much to
produce goods, plants would shut down, and we all would lose, they said. It all had a neat ring to it. These economic giants also said that if
we left business alone and to their own devices, our factories would crank out
more goods, and the profits they made would trickle down in terms of higher
wages for the working man. Lift
the free market restraints so that Wall Street could flood the world with
“Derivatives.” Make it so these
new financial instruments do not need to be regulated by the SEC. We never knew what hit us. Do you love it?
All you needed was capital. You needed the money to set the wheels in motion, and Reagan
came up with the brilliant idea that we could borrow the money. You know, like in Master Card? We could charge it, he told us, because
we could not afford to let Russia, “The Evil Empire” as he called them, get a
leg up on us in the arms race. It
would be okay Reagan convinced us to borrow the money we as a nation did not
have at the time, to bring Russia to their knees.
That’s right. He told us it was okay to borrow money that we did not have as a
country, and to pay the interest on it by borrowing more. All us
befuddled Democrats at the time thought this here conservative Ronald Reagan,
the great communicator, had gone cuckoo bananas. Lord, he was acting every bit like a big-spending Democrat,
you know the liberals, and the socialists he said were the destruction of
democracy and so on? Dick Cheney
said cryptically in a cabinet meeting a few years back, “Reagan taught us that
deficits don’t matter.” Wonder
what he meant by that? Did borrowed
money that we had to pay interest on have a divine sort of glow like holy water
or something, in that such money was put to use fighting the Evil Empire, a
nation of atheists maybe? I mean,
was I the only one who thought the GOP and the nation had gone bonkers and off
their financial rockers? I got to
tell you, it was like they all fell and hit their head.
Well, there was one Republican, George Walker Herbert Bush
who scowled at Reagan’s attempt to borrow and spend Russia to her knees. “Voodoo Economics.” Old Poppy called it. It was one of his finest
one-liners. His conservative blue
blood coursing his veins told him that something was amiss in borrowing like a
bunch of Democrats to fund fear. But that’s all you ever heard of it because he hooked up with Reagan as
his VP, and the term voodoo economics was never heard again. Wonder what shut Poppy up tighter than
a drum?
Today, you got to ask, did we get our money's worth?
Well, today Russia is not on its knees and its treasury has a 2 Trillion dollar
surplus while we have a 12 Trillion dollar debt. All this time, though,
the war corporation cronies of the GOP got to sell us taxpayers $600 dollar
toilet seats in our attempt to build up our armed forces to defeat the Evil
Empire. Halliburton or Lockheed
got Uncle Sam’s business all right, and they rushed to charge us taxpayers
dearly while their super-inflated prices could be rammed up our taxpaying
asses. Nobody would even notice. Is that why you saw Reagan winking all
the time as if he knew something?
Another act of suicide by country was to let Bush II attack
Iraq based upon his scare tactics that Iraq played a part in 911. They
did not, but we lied about Saddam Hussein pointing missiles of mass destruction
at us so we attacked and still occupy Iraq. Down went another 4
Trillion dollars! We owe a debt of
thanks not to the big-spending Democrats but to the fiscally-conservative
Republicans who when we took our eye off the ball, borrowed and spent us into
the fiscal toilet of no return.
Today our dollar and the American economy are in the
tank. Jobs are dropping like flies. Tea baggers finally get worked up at
the Democrats and Obama who had little to do with borrowing and spending our
country into oblivion for 16 of the past 28 years. Under Clinton's 8 years in office we showed a fiscal
surplus, not a deficit, but who cares, all that's importance is that he lied
about a bj in the Oval Office. The tea baggers finally woke up and
realized that hey, we spent a lot of dough. Glen Beck forgot to tell us that these war contractors
Eisenhower warned us about got rich selling us $500 hammers. When you
follow the money, it ain’t that hard to see that Cheney’s old company he was
CEO of, Halliburton cut a fat hog.
So do any of the so-called conservatives get it? Is
the arithmetic that hard? Do the figures lie? Did Obama and his
scardy cat Democrat Congress really cause all that damage during the last puny
year that many says America committed suicide? I think not. America
did not commit suicide. It died a long death by cancer from within. Those we trusted to represent us sold
us down the river and busted the Treasury forever. It happened over many
years of complacency. We allowed our leaders to mislead, lie, and borrow
and spend us into the cesspool enjoyed by third-world countries everywhere.
We allowed George W. Bush to hire Darth Vader mercenaries
like Blackwater and to pay them 5 times the salary of our own uniformed
soldiers. And we continue to allow it, yes, under Obama, who has not made
good many of his promises to withdraw troops, close down Guantanamo, and to
stop using the unconstitutional Patriot Act to spy on honest Americans without
court authority for wiretapping and other invasions of our own privacies.
America committed suicide when we let Bush shred our rights to habeas corpus,
the right to know our crimes and to defend ourselves from those who accuse
us. As some say America did not commit suicide in 2008 when Obama was
elected president. We embraced the cancer of our own indifference by our
preoccupation with television football games, American Idol, prayer in school,
and gay marriage. Something cleverly got us off the track and our eye off
the ball when we should have been paying attention to who really benefits the
most from illegals crossing our borders and why the cheap labor is more
valuable than stopping illegal immigration. At least to somebody, guess
who? And you can bet that the
working man America is not the big winner here, but guess who? Or let’s take the easy path and try to
blame Obama for how the dollar is crashing in the one year he has
been president and show our ignorance.
No, America did not commit suicide in 2008. It was
embalmed and buried with the remains of the Constitution that we should have
embraced and defended many years ago before Bush called it "just a
goddamned piece of paper." It died when America began to torture and
allow George W. Bush to affix signing statements to bills, nullifying the
powers of Congress to make laws as one of the three branches of government as
established by our founding fathers. America died when we tried to
politicize our churches and God himself by preachers putting out hit lists on
candidates for office when they know better. Deep down all preachers know that
their work is the work of God, not the government's. What did Jesus
say? "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s?" Yes, we
trashed America because we wanted to mix government with religion and made
both of them less.
But this is America. Blame whoever you want. The guilty party is us. We just did
not remember to care about our country and what it really is to us and the
world. Now as the largest debtor
nation in the history of the world it is time to pay the piper. Until they cut us off for lack of
funds, we continue to borrow from the Chinese to buy Arab oil. The big
winners? The war corporation cronies who got to sell $600 toilet seats to
Uncle Sam when we could have bought the $19.95 toilet seats at Sears or Home
Depot. Who got all the money? It's your guess. Take your
time. We are about to reap what we sowed. So get all the scapegoats
lined up, like Obama, Muslims, illegal aliens, Liberals, Hollywood and
university professors, and movie stars, and maybe we will all feel better.
But be careful not to look in the mirror. You just might see one of the
apathetic creatures who really did help kill America.