I am thankful for the sequester

Well, the day is here. The apocalypse has come. the devastation is starting to be wreaked.

And I am pretty excited about it. To say the least.

I think it is awesome that the MAD* suggested and agreed to by the president and the Congress has come upon us unchecked.

It has been hysterically funny to me watching the pres and the Congress argue about how much they do not want this event to happen even though they are the people who proposed and put into law the mechanization of this plan.

Lets go back to their reasoning for a moment. Spending is out of control. Record yearly deficits are growing. Or, to put it another way, we are spending extra money we don't have and every year we are spending even more extra money we don't have.

Yet these devastating cuts are basically equal to the money our government is printing to buy bonds to stabilize the economy. That is so staggeringly stupid I am not really sure I understand it. We are going to QE3 s much or more money just because we want to as we are going to cut.

Furthermore, these "cuts" are spending MORE than we did last year, not this. That is some brilliant new math; more is less?

So to sum up where we are so far; we put a process into place to slow, not stop, deficit spending while spending even more that is somehow unaccounted for by this and are accusing others of being responsible for the "devastation" unleashed by our own plan.

Just remember folks...we voted for these people.

Of course, in his desperate, media-aided (and too often successful) attempt to lay the blame for this at the feet of the opponents, the White House put out state by state lists of what will be affected.

Now, before I get to that list, let me ask a simple question; lets say we had enough revenue to fuel all these bits of Federal largesse in the first place. Where did it come from?

 Not, as one had-to-be-a-plant caller once asserted, from "Mr. Obama gives me money". When asked where he got it, she said, "I don't know..." and continued to assert that he gives her money.

Note this is distinct from the incorrectly-labeled "Obamaphone" nonsense which anyone who spends 30 seconds researching quickly realizes was from a program set up by...wait for it...Reagan. The only similarity is that woman thought the source of phones was Obama which was quite incorrect and the inference people often draw from it is just as wrong.

My point is far more simple; in order to GIVE money to states, the government has to TAKE money from states.

Yep, your income is significantly lowered so the federal government can take billions of dollars from your state, spend some of it on salaries for the people taking the money, running the programs, etc., for some states send part of it to other states, and then send back some of what they took to your state as a Federal program.

For any non-math majors out there, let me take $100 from you...spend 40 of it paying salaries for the guy who wrote the code saying to take money from you, the guy who takes it from you, the guy who keeps track of how much was taken, the guy who decides where it goes, and the guy who sends it back to you. Then we are going to send 10 of it to California because they are in desperate need. Then we are going to send 50 of it back to you to use on programs you may or may not want. See how awesome we are? You only had to give up 100 dollars to get 50 dollars in aid...that you might not need had you kept the full 100, but that is beside the point.

Federal taxation is not a zero-sum game. It is much worse. There is a lot of leakage. They do not take out x amount of dollars from a state and send x amount back. They take out x-y and send part of the resulting sum back.

So less Federal revenue from taxation means more money available in any given state that is on the wrong side of that equation. I suspect there are some states who do get back more in Fed aid than is taken out. I do not, however, suspect that is how it should be.

So knowing our beloved, beneficent Federal government is not going to be able to spend 250% of their revenue this year because of "sequestration", I took a look at the things it will cost us here in Oregon.

I am not afraid to admit I had problems with several of the things we are not going to spend as much on this year. At the risk of sounding like a heartless person hateful of all...almost without exception, my problem was that we are still spending money on many of these programs at all at a Federal level.

Furthermore, many of the programs are things the Federal government has no business being involved with. I am all for meals for the elderly...administered by the state or local charities such as the awesome Meals on Wheels program.

If we stop the pork spending, the bloated military spending, the ineffective extraneous school programs, and many other demonstrably "sound good, achieve nothing" programs that people are emotionally attached too even though they are intellectually worthless, we would be able to live within our means instead of the constant deficit spending.

Stop increasing salaries for public service. Stop adding layers of regulation to law-abiding citizens that do little to nothing to stop actual criminals. NSA I am looking at you...

We have layer upon layer of inefficient bureaucracy, programs based on political coinage rather than helping people, a military flung all over the globe, and hundreds of other boondoggles costing us trillions. And I am supposed to be worried about billions?

Thanks for the laugh.








* Mutually Assured Destruction