Here is Ryan Craig's column from this week's newspaper:
LET'S THROW THE BUMS OUT
Let me be straight about this, I am so mad with the elected officials in Washington D.C. that I’m going to refrain from saying what I really want to say (mainly because this is a family newspaper) and I’m going to turn over my anger to a favorite 1930s saying by those who were hit by the both the economic tidal wave of fiscal mismanagement and politicians who couldn’t handle them:
LET’S THROW THE BUMS OUT!!!
Ray Stevens also has a really good song with the same title and as we all know Ray Stevens is rarely wrong.
Also let me be clear, I don’t care if you are a Democrat, a Democrat who votes like a Republican, a Republican who votes like a Tea Party member, a Tea Party member who votes like they have some sort of special way of reading the Constitution or one of the Independent so influential (in effect, they elected President Obama) in the previous two national elections; you all shoulder the blame.
All of us.
I sat and watched in horror of the brinkmanship, partisan rhetoric and murky dealings that really gave us nothing except a terrible set of options and a debt limit that was raised as part of the most pitiful amount of governing in several generations.
Then a few days later, Standard & Poor’s —- a credit agency —- said what we all were thinking: Let’s throw the bums out! Or at least, let’s make an effort to lower debt, raise revenue and give some stability to a world-wide market that is shakier than turtle trying to walk on a washing machine on spin cycle.
The agency took the United States’ credit rating from AAA (which is perfect) to AA+ (which is still super good, but just bad enough to make Wall Street and every other market in the world go absolutely nuts).
Sure, the same politicians who caused the problem because they think compromise is a akin to weakness despite 240 years of our history that contradicts otherwise, started finger pointing.
The Republicans called the credit lowering “Obama’s reduction;” the White House called the same thing “The Tea Party reduction.”
Basically, there is no way this isn’t the fault of everyone in Congress, the White House and those in the so-called “media” who make a living throwing what former GOP strongman Alan Simpson called “sharp elbows” — “instead of having a caucus where you sit down and say ‘What are you going to do for your county?’ you sit figuring out how to screw the other side.”
Simpson, who was about as fiscally responsible and conservative as it gets when he was in office, told Time magazine that America was “the healthiest horse in the glue factory” and needs to get serious about cutting our deficit.
“The absolute rigidity of the parties,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before. Somebody said they’re as rigid as a fireplace poker but without the occasional warmth.”
A couple facts: The U.S. deficit is $14 trillion. You could not count that high in your lifetime. The average share of that deficit is a little over $120,000 per household. For the first time since the Great Depression you have a generation that thinks their lives will not be as good as their parents’ or grandparents’.
Let’s throw the bums out!
Another problem for you and I —- you know, regular people who work for a living —- will be that the credit downgrade for the U.S. and places like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have a majority of the home loans in the nation, will make it much harder to go to a bank and get a loan.
Basically those who have money will gobble up cheap stocks and those who took a huge hit in 2008 will take another ding.
This year over 1,000 millionaires paid no taxes at all. The rich will remain so while all the rest of us become poorer.
While I’m not a fan of socialism, I’m also not a fan of Darwinian capitalism either. The system is rigged for the rich and your American Dream is vanishing by the day as the money is transferred slowly but surely.
Let’s throw the bums out!
There is no reason to think that the current group of jackals we have will change for the better.
So, I say let’s take responsibility for our own lives by not borrowing more than we can cover. Let’s take responsibility for those who make or have made our lives worse.
Let’s throw the bums out!
Let’s celebrate in five years when Rand Paul, and hopefully his ideas that could cripple the lives of our children and grandchildren, is defeated and the last of the bums in Washington D.C. are gone.
This column is not about politics, it is about life, and no one can convince me that a slow, thoughtful effort to rid ourselves of the cancer that has set in in Washington D.C. has to be about politics. They all deserve nothing less than to join the unemployment line.
It is time that we demand more than a bunch of sound bites from those who sign no tax pledges before going into office and then take an oath to serve the people. It is time to stop voting for people who won’t sit in a room with people who have differing opinions on things like abortion, tax codes or what is the best way to run a school.
They are all supposed to serve the people who put them in the office, but instead they seem to serve everyone else first. The biggest problem in D.C. is that everyone seems to serve two (or more) masters and we all learned in Sunday School that way of thinking only brings destruction and anarchy.
So, please, make every effort, send this column to everyone you know. Let’s start taking our task seriously.
Let’s throw the bums out!
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