My late father had a few standard sayings that really evoked thought. “Save your money,” “Be frugal,” and “That costs too much,” were but a few. Those with added value, however, often contained prognostications only Nostradamus could muster.
Upon returning from the service/gas station, supermarket, or lumber yard, Dad would spend the next hour, or so, grousing about the cost of everything he just saw, touched, or bought. My favorite was his foretelling the world’s road to perdition.
His thoughts on life were to trade honest work for an honest paycheck; he did so with great pride. And what he brought home in pay was what he expected to be as just compensation. The thing is, other people got in the grift without recourse, and that was not fair.
“Just wait,” he’d begin. “Someday – SOMEDAY – they’ll figure out how to charge us for air!” remains his best loved guess at the future, largely because it came true. Oddly enough, most of his episodes with ESP also have been realized, much to my surprise.
Paying good money to park your car, turning on a faucet for water, driving your own car on roads for which you were already taxed, and giving more money to the guvment for the benefit of receiving your Social Security (SS) fund money, were but a smattering of his favorite topics.
Looking both back on history, and forward to tomorrow, his complaints were nothing more than tearing a page off the calendar, only to be re-dated without altering any other notations.
When city dwellers turn on the water faucet in their homes they pay for both water and sewer; water being charged by the gallon, plus added sewer charges for the municipality to recoup treatment of the dirty water, ensures it will be resold to city dwellers again. That’s paying for water.
Finding yourself on the road with a low-on-air tire, you make your way to the nearest gas station. There, you will discover a self-service pump which requires money to refill your tire. Costing upwards of one-dollar for several minutes, this amounts to paying for air.
Let’s not forget the SS benefit checks we get from the fund in which we dutifully and “voluntarily” paid for at least 40-quarters. FYI, it was no more voluntary than succumbing to gravity. Legalized theft is a pretty good description for the another guvment-generated Ponzi Scheme.
In the Great Depression Era, Willie Sutton, a prolific career bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks. Sutton simply replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”
Sutton’s philosophy wasn’t much more profound than my Dad’s. Basic answers to basic dilemmas.
Don’t think that those lizard-like politicians we’ve all come to know and love haven’t been paying attention to your savings.
Enter the anointed, self-centered, sleazy, smarter-than-thou, narcissistic, politicians who are at the helm of our nation’s economic ship. And it’s sinking.
In 1913, the federal income tax system was born. At that time, our nation taxed only 1% of the top 1% of Americans to help fund our rapidly growing country. By 1919, the top tax rate was 77%. Not bad work if you’re a professional thief disguised as a Congressman or Senator.
Admittedly in the throes of World War I, and with a rapid decline of available blue collar workers, the tenor of America was quickly changing into a monster that would only grow, and never shrink. If you need an excellent example, please read on.
Something of which you may never have heard is likely the National Helium Reserve (NHR), also known as the Federal Helium Reserve. It is a federal guvment agency created around World War I to ensure the United States guvment always had enough strategic helium for the war effort.
It seems as though brilliant guvment minds felt it necessary to maintain a healthy stockpile of helium in case we needed to fight a war with helium balloons. Yes, indeed.
A facility near Amarillo, Texas, once held 1,000,000,000 cubic meters of helium, just in case. Then something shocking happened: it was decided the NHR would be shut down in 2021.
What???
For the record, it is 2024, and the haggling over who will auction what off to whom, and when, remains in limbo, with a decision likely soon. Maybe.
See what I mean when I use the words “a monster that would only grow, and never shrink?”
Our nation has been spending money we don’t have. For years, our bloated budget deficit has been inflating faster than Nancy Pelosi’s ego. Currently $34,000,000,000,000 in arrears, our professional politicians have finally connected all the dots and arrived at a solution to their money woes.
Indeed, it is to force hard-working people to pay even more of their earned dollars to the guvment because you’re too stupid to handle your money wisely. After all, you proved your lack of intelligence by electing, re-electing, re-re-electing, and re-re-re-electing these same politicians to office. Right?
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| A knockoff of The Three Stooges |
Enter Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Elizabeth Warren. These three deep thinkers genuinely believe they have a right to your money, like it or not. Riding President Biden’s coattails to bringing America closer to Communism, these mooks merely ignore your pleas for financial relief.
Their simple-minded solution to this astronomical deficit is to tax their way out of it. Using a tried and true method – not unlike obese dieters eating their way to weight-loss – this Gang of Three (GOT) feel that spending to feed the beast will only result in prosperity.
Imagining they have rights to your precious overtime, vacation compensation, savings, stock market investments, real estate holdings, coin collections, classic car collections, even unpaid life insurance policies, the GOT wants your money, and pronto.
How do I know? Because they said so.
During a CNN interview between Jake Tapper and AOC, on September 18, 2018, Tapper asked her a question worth $40,000,000,000,000. That’s 40 trillion dollars – in the event your eyes glazed over.
Attempting to explain her compassionate take on giving free healthcare to everyone through a single-payer system that will only cost $40T, AOC insisted a simple tax increase on the wealthiest Americans would do the trick.
Unfortunately, her calculator batteries passed away before she could muster a comprehensive budget idea. She mentioned that this brilliant idea of hers would be so well fashioned that “We need to realize when we look at something like Medicare for all, Medicare for all would save the American people a very large amount of money.” Of course it would, just as the Affordable Care Act, aka: Obamacare, collapsed under its own weight.
By the way, her business acumen was acquired at Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, where she received a degree in economics.
Yes, you read that correctly: economics. Boston University must be very, very proud. But I digress.
Tapper proceeded to query her as to from whence this giant savings was going to come; she stuttered while searching for an appropriate fabrication and arrived at: tax increases would supply $2T, over ten years. A relentless Tapper continued by asking about the remaining $38T void.
AOC cleared her throat and mumbled something about changing the name of her astronomical tax increases to “investments.” Yeah, that should do it; problem solved!
Another bird of a feather, Senator Bernie Sanders, agrees with AOC when it comes to taking other people’s money. A multi-millionaire himself, Sanders considers himself self-made because he’s been sucking on various local, state, and federal guvment teats since 1981. Not the arduous dirt-under-your-fingernails work you’d expect from an 82-year old gasbag with his hand on your wallet.
AOC and Sanders, alike, are two aspiring Communists who feel they are smarter than you, and they are. You see, they have both been elected and re-elected by their constituents who clearly enjoy the games these two are playing.
Not to be outdone, Senator Elizabeth Warren, professional kook from Massachusetts, has been proudly announcing her ardent attempt to secure federal funding – probably because there’s such an enormous surplus – to grab more of your cash to pay for electric school buses, “Symbols of how we are fighting climate change.”
Again, using money from everyone except her, Warren couldn’t be happier ‘sticking it to the Man,’ otherwise known as corporate titans. Always working for the little man, Warren has a proven track record of promoting the confiscation of money, higher minimum wages, Israeli animosity, plus killing innocent babies, may now be up for the Women’s Movement canonization award.
Between the GOT, they’re tied, running neck-and-neck to outdo every other politician claiming to do more for you, while they remain deaf to your actual needs and wants. Lower prices, less social hostility, more law and order, and speaking the truth, may help ingratiate themselves with hardworking Americans. Oh, and free air.
On the other hand, they’re still anointed, self-centered, sleazy, smarter-than-thou, narcissistic, lizard-like politicians.
