Apr 20 2010
Americans Don’t Trust Government, And Naturally Democrats Are The Party Of Government
Our government is out of control. It is sucking the life blood out of this nation and making a mess of things domestically (or admiration for the defenders of this nation is not in question, unless you are from the liberal left and afraid of the military). It has become nag-in-chief, poking its big ugly nose into every aspect of our lives. It tells us how to act, what to eat, what to say and how many gazillion ways we cannot afford to succeed personally. It even claims that the life giving gas CO2 is some kind of poison to the goddess of Earth, and therefore we must give up our cars and large screen TVs and freedoms to save the goddess. Government is insane and hurting every one of us.
If you want to distill down the Tea Party movement it is this – government has run amok and needs to be stopped. Moreover, this new ‘movement’ – which is actually more of an awakening – is growing out from and consuming that part of the American public which is center-left to conservative-moderate. They are the voters who decide which of the aging national party candidates will win any election. They have marginal allegiance to the national parties if any at all, they very independent of the left and right group-think.
Financially this group is also the most successful of the middle class. The Teat Party supporters (there is no political party) Â is not the uber-rich trying to rationalize their gross-consumption existence, nor the Hollywood crowd trying have an actual life of value verses being paid obscene amounts to pretend to have one on stage. The Tea Party is the vanguard of the reasonably well off and happy – which is the engine of this economy and the families from which the next generation of leaders will emerge.
And they don’t like who is running our government, or what it does. They want to kick the current rulers out of DC and start dismantling the federal bureaucracy beast, since it has clearly failed to spend our money wisely. This is clear in the polling of Americans and their view of government, such as this poll from Pew:
By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.
Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation’s top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation’s problems – including more government control over the economy – than there was when Barack Obama first took office.
People have lost faith and patience with the US Federal Government. And any party or candidate that promises to bring the government back under control of the people, to remove even partially questionable functions and activities, will win. Even a hint of government solution right now is going to see a backlash (reference: Crist in Florida).
I plan to highlight how to restructure the government in a series of posts in the coming months, but each agency and department can be massively trimmed and reworked. For example, the education department should have NO mandate over public education. Instead it should be holding some emergency funds pooled by the states to deal with areas needing infusions of money. The money would be directed by consensus of the states combined with the US representatives. Other than that the department would sponsor events to communicate which techniques succeed or fail, which lesson plans have the best results, etc. Beyond that it is useless.
The FAA could be shrunk massively. That piece that was created to promote air travel should be shuttered (air travel is here to stay). That piece which is regulatory and monitoring planes can be slimmed down by one simple approach – massively increase the fines for making mistakes. Make mistakes so painful no sane company would let one happen. If human life is involved in the mistake, multiply the penalty by 100 or 1000. We’ve been at this long enough to know what is required to fly safely. Multiply the fines by 10000 if the company is caught trying to cover up the incident instead of reporting it, and have the people go to jail for a very long time.
By applying the right incentive, there is less need for inspectors. In this case the paper work will grow, but safety requires and audit trail. But I digress.
This article highlights some key data from the poll:
Nearly one out of three Americans view the US government as a “major threat” to their freedoms, and four out of five say they don’t trust Washington to solve their problems, according to a new poll out Monday.
What else needs to be said? Its so bad democrat pollsters are ringing the alarm bells madly.
Democrats have over reached and the usually tolerant center of the nation has had enough. This is going to be worse for the party in power than the election years 2006, 2008 or 1994. It is going to be worse because the arrogance out of DC is worse this time around, the lack of respect for the peoples’ opinion is much worse this time, and the economy sucks like never before. This crop of Democrats will go down into history as the ones who screwed up so badly the people had no choice but to roll back government and make sure no more fools could do that kind of damage again.
regarding the parties, it’s not just money – it’s control. Your system would strip control of the system away from the parties and hand it back to the voters. The parties would lose the ability to say who was and who was not allowed to run for office – the Horror! No control means no fat revenue stream to milk and might even mean no more “fundraisers” in Vegas and condos in the Caymans for the nomenklatura.
Which causes me to reflect that more and more, on all levels, Government today has simply become nothing but the game of keeping the gravy train running while everyone attached tries to suck it dry as fast as they can.
WWS:
I wonder if it would be better if Senators were still picked by state legislatures as well.
Where to start cutting goverment?
1. Congressional pay scales. (Not a significant amount as a percentage of the whole but a good gesture) This should include congressional perks like health clubs, dinning halls, retirement and pensions.
2. Eliminate the Department of No Education.
3. Eliminate the Department of No Energy
4. Eliminate the Department of No Health and Human Services
5. Eliminate any other cabinet level agencies that are not constitutionally mandated such as NPR/PBS/NEA/TVA
6. Fold Homeland Security, the FBI and the CIA into a single, integrated intelligence unit.
7. Abolish the Post Office (Would take a Constitutional Admendment)
8. A 75% net wealth (not Income) tax, with no deductions on registered Democrats since they claim to believe in more taxes let them put their money where their mouth is and watch the nuber of people in the democratic party fall. There is some sarcasim in this one.
9. Restructure the military so that equipment, purchasing and logistics are handled by a single agency to reduce duplication, control cost and prevent problems with interbranch compatibility.
10. Form a special law enforcement agency similar to the Hong Kong ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) that has the sole purpose of ferreting out governmental corruption and putting politicians in jail. (It is one of the few things the HK government does right)
The govt has no money of its own. Only that which it confiscates from the working citizens who produce and earn it. Unless it just prints a bunch which is another form of taxation through inflation.
It is not the job of government to bailout any private enterprise.
There are a lot of reasons for the collapse had there been one including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and low interest rates (thus encouraging spending and stifling saving) for a long period.
Also, there was manipulation by whom we do not yet know, large drawdowns of cash reserves.
There is nothing that says this manipulation will not occur again (at election time?) if it is rewarded by confiscation of taxpayer funds to prop up businesses and elect a certain party or person.
TARP was paid back but where did it go have the taxpayers seen it back? What if the banks collapsed and it hadn’t been paid back, still a good idea?
Its the principle , government should not be deciding winners and losers with taxpayer funds and TARP led to stimulus, auto takeovers and the screwing of secured creditors in favor of unsecured (Unions)!
Free enterprise has solutions to financial insolvency its called bankruptcy and reorganization.
The Democrat Party is very effectively killing free enterprise and capitalism (with the help of a few RINO’s ) and paving the way to socialism through the propping up of unions and outright takeovers of business.
Just wait until, those union pension funds come up way short of obligations …. too big fail? TARP two for unions pension funds?
1. Eliminate Congressional pensions
2. Eliminate defined benefit pensions for ALL government employees at all levels (federal, state, and local). Nobody in the public sector gets defined benefit pension plans, give them all a 401K like the rest of us and if the government wants to kick in a contribution, fine. But we need to end these unfunded liabilities.
dhunter:
Taxpayers made money off the Savings and Loan bailout…the difference was the money went back where it was supposed to go and the government did not go onto spend more and more on all sorts of things. If they had not stepped in with TARP, the entire economy might have collapsed, the blame would have been on Bush.
My point is that those private companies were in trouble in large part because of government and there was no way the market could magically fix what it did not create. I fail to understand why it has to be all or nothing. That is just ridiculous.
And no, I did not say anything about TARP two. That is my point. People today act as if there was no emergency back in September 2008, as if the markets world wide did not collapse into disarray. I said that TARP, the initial $600 billion {only half of which Bush used} was necessary to stabilize the markets because of a government created lending catastrophe. That does not mean that there has to be or should be a TARP for every financial problem.
http://biggovernment.com/amellon/2010/04/22/indymac-attack-did-schumer-paulson-soros-and-the-crl-kill-the-bank-and-profit-from-its-collapse/
It was an engineered crisis and the engineers benefited through the govt rippoff of the taxpayers and it continues today with the “new regulatory reforms” that Obama is pushing.
These new reforms will allow govt control or takeover of any firm they deem nesecary not specifying the reasons.
It started above with Indymac and continues today.
dhunter:
The other day I heard Krauthammer talking about this and he said that the truth is that the economy very nearly did collapse and the actions taken at the time did save it…however, people like Obama have taken advantage of the situation for their own political purposes.
I am not going to get into some conspiracy stuff with you. At the very least it was fortuitous for Obama…the point you are ignoring is that if Bush had not moved to deal with the problem in the first days and weeks, it would have been far worse and the Democrats would have garnered even greater benefit from it. After all, if the economy is collapsing and Bush says too bad and goes and plays golf while the country slides into financial chaos that is not exactly going to help conservatives and hurt liberals.
I think the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lending practices lead to a situation in which it was only a matter of time before the housing bubble collapsed and took a lot of people with it. If Bush had another year, or if McCain had won it could just as easily be argued that the money would have gone back to Treasury like it was supposed to, the additional spending would not have taken place and the crisis would have passed without trillion dollar deficits.
I am sorry, I think the idea that since some people think the crisis was engineered that somehow that made not dealing with it okay is crazy. Imagine the national security implications alone of just standing back and doing nothing.
I agree that is far better for the private sector to work this stuff out alone when it can, but this problem was a lot more complicated than that…no president is going to hear the words “economic collapse” and do nothing. Unless that president is someone like Obama and he thinks he can take advantage of the crisis somehow.
I read AJ’s original post as suggesting that the very existence of a Tea Party “movement” shows how far off-center our gov has got. WWS, on 4-21, really makes my point well. Without the two parties monopolizing the election process, and using the system based on Internet voting that I suggest, we could have a political system centered on the Golden Middle.
That’s really what democracy promises to do. I thought it would take a lot of reading of my essays, but WWS seems to have got it just from my comments above. Nice!
Also, the 17th Amd (people directly elect senators) shows a faith in democracy that I still hold. So I say lets not change that!