District 6 Race, Truth, Politics

Watching the NC District 6 Republican primary race has been enlightening.  With nearly a dozen hats in the ring, the Republican race was virtually destined for a runoff.  And with the runoff, the candidates are showing their true colors.

As I observe the race, to be decided on Tuesday, here's how it looks to me.  Mark Walker comes to the race as a novice politician, an outsider who simply wants to help lead the country in a better direction.  Phil Berger Jr. comes to the race as an experienced politician, from a political family.  He knows politics, down and dirty.  He knows what will work, and that all's fair in campaigning.  Berger brings his heavy artillery to the race, accusing Walker of being dishonest and desperate. 

It is chilling that one can no longer be a good politician and a good person.  Good people finish last.  As a result, we have a ruling class that plays to special interests, writes laws that don't even apply to them, while claiming the moral high road.  Politicians love to accuse their opponents of the very things they are guilty of.  Obama refuses to bend on proposed legislation, then blames the Republicans for being too hard to work with. 

In this race, it seems to me, that Berger becomes desperate, produces lies about Walker, then accuses Walker of lying.  Berger does this because in the world of politics, it works.  Walker is so naive that he doesn't know what has hit him.  Could GOP politics really be that dirty?  Welcome to the rotten world of politics, Mr. Walker.

May truth triumph.  May we boot out the ruling class, with their deceit, arrogance, and contempt for truth.  May the American people wake up and realize that both major parties are more hungry for power than truth.  May we stop believing the lies and stop voting for the same old rulers.  We need statesmen, not politicians.  We need people who tell the truth, even if it costs them political points.

It is time for good people to win.  It's time for voters to stop tolerating dishonesty in politics.  We need good people to lead us.

Ruling Class Rising

It seems like the NSA spying news opened the door for people to consider how intrusive our government is.  Today I see the news that the FCC may put observers in newsrooms across the nation.  That sounds like the first step to government control of the media.  The freedoms articulated in the First Amendment include freedom of the press.  The government has no business studying or regulating the press.

Government wants to control our children through the schools.  They want to tell us what kind of light bulb to use.  They want to keep us in debt to the government through the student loan program.  They want to manage the entire health care system, and force us to buy insurance.

Government can only do what we let them get away with.  The Ruling Class is rising.

Keep the Sequester Cuts

We may need to clean house in Washington.  The politicians, on both sides of the aisle, appear to be ready  to restore the spending eliminated in the sequester.  How can they seriously deal with our budget and think of increasing spending?

We are already on a financial time bomb.  There is no way to diffuse it.  It is only a matter of time before our financial system collapses.  The politicians only hope that it will not happen on their watch.  Thus the perpetual kicking of the can down the road.  Addressing the real issue will be messy and politically unpopular.

Our other problem is the growing government.  Weekly we hear about more government intrusion in our lives.  Government interference may seem benign now, but the power of government can easily be turned for evil.  We have to stop government growth now.  It only grows because we let it.

A whole new slate of legislators might be the answer.

History in the Making

The lawmakers in the U.S. House now have the attention of the nation and the world, as they have scaled back the government.  We call it the "shut down."  Now the government spending is bumping up on the debt ceiling, and something has to be done.

This is a Hobson's choice.  If they raise the debt ceiling, we go further into debt.  We continue to add to the future troubles.  If they don't raise the ceiling, then they set in motion the financial catastrophe that has been building since the Reagan years.  There is no good way out of this.  They tell us that this is complicated.  In the details, it is.  In principle, it is as simple as a piggy bank.

Government is a monster that needs to be fed money.  It consumes money faster than we can earn it and mail it in.  It grows every year by design.  Some have grown tired of feeding the monster, wishing that it would be satisfied.

The next step may make history.

A Long Time to Pay Off the Debt

We are fooling ourselves if we think that we are ever going to pay off the U.S. national debt.  

What is the national debt, anyway?  Think of it this way.  Imagine that you get an allowance of $10 per week.  But you end up spending $11 per week.  You have a spending deficit of $1.  That extra money has to come from somewhere, so you borrow it from your sister.  After the first week, you owe her $1.  But you keep up that spending pattern, and every week you borrow another dollar from her.  After 12 weeks, you owe her $12.  That is your total debt, not including the interest you owe her.  You add up the deficits to determine your debt.

Our national deficits have recently been over $300 billion, and according to the National Debt Clock  our national debt is over $16.7 trillion dollars.  The numbers are so big that we can’t really understand them.  

Let’s put those numbers in perspective thinking of these numbers in terms of time.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. 

A million seconds is about 11.6 days.

A billion seconds is about 31.7 years.

A trillion seconds is 31,710 years.

The earliest records of human history date back about 5000 years.  So one trillion seconds is more than 6 times as long as human history.  History itself has not experienced a trillion seconds.

So, if the U.S. never borrowed another penny and began paying off the debt at a rate of a dollar per second, we would pay off the debt in about 529,557 years.  If we paid off the debt at a rate of $1000 per second, it would still take us over 529 years.

Another War?

The US looks determined to take on another war, this time in Syria.  It was terrible for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons on its population.  But we cannot be the world's police.

We are involved in numerous conflicts all around the globe, and have been for generations.  Unfortunately, many times politicians lead our country into war for political reasons.  Presidents grow in popularity when they start wars.  Thus, it takes very little rationalizing for presidents to lead us into war.

We interpret US national interests so broadly that virtually any excuse works to take us into war.

The American public allows this war mongering, not considering the problems with world-policing.  The more we intervene, the less moral authority we have.  The flimsier our excuses for war, the less moral authority we have.

Here we go again...

Healthcare Revealed

Universal healthcare was supposed to fix so many problems. Every day we now learn more reasons why it was too good to be true.

Today Delta Airlines announced that compliance with the law will cost them $100 million.  Government interference in the marketplace always has unintended consequences.

It amazes me that anyone is surprised at the debacle.  The legislation was rushed through with contrived urgency.  No one had a chance to read the bill thoroughly, much less debate or refine it.

No one could predict the effects of such far-reaching changes in the healthcare market.  But sending the industry into chaos has one clear benefit for power-hungry politicians:  government will be called in to straighten out the mess.

So government creates the mess, then charges in to fix the mess.  Seems like we have seen this pattern before.