Tag Archives: Federal Government

Crumbling

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End of a BridgeSince I had all the Twitter traffic from @MichiganDOT and @MDOT_Southwest automatically sent to my phone via SMS I’ve been able to catch various things that they post on their Twitter stream. One of those things is a political advertisement from Michigan farmers and their campaign “Just Fix The Roads”.

I stand behind the farmers for improved maintenance of our roads and I certainly support Michigan DOT in their efforts to raise awareness of our crumbling infrastructure problem. Every day I have to dodge potholes, wide cracks, poor drainage, and bridges that I really don’t trust completely. Every day I cross many bridges, across train tracks, across the Kalamazoo River, those sorts, and I have faith, weak as it is, that my trips across the bridges and over these roads won’t put me in danger. It’s faith, have to have it that way because our infrastructure has been ignored for so very long that what once was new and strong is now weak and crumbling.

After watching that video on YouTube, I can’t help but think back to around 2003 when we, as a nation, decided that declaring war on Iraq and Afghanistan was a really great idea. Back then it was before the housing bubble broke and before the criminal banks were unmasked for being as corrupt as we eventually discovered – and we thought two unfunded wars would be just neat as hell. Well, now that we have made our bed, it is time to sleep in it. I sympathize with the Michigan farmers, and I certainly support infrastructure repair, but what money do any of us plan to assign to such an expensive endeavor? It’s going to take a whole lot of cash to do correctly what must be done. Where will that money come from? The Federal Government can’t help – they just beat out the sequester, the federal budget is a rotten mess, congress is idle, filled with backbiting idle celebrities behaving poorly. So it’s up to the state to fix it’s roads, again, where is the money?

So this is what two unfunded wars get us. Awesome cosmic military powers come at a cost and surprise! This is what many of us on the left were trying to say while the right was busy getting it’s patriotic on. There is a lot of blame to go around, most certainly, but in the end it does the rest of us no good. Not only do the farmers struggle with our crumbling roads, but also the rest of us who have no choice but to dare the paths that Michigan calls roads and to dare our rusted out bridges. It was going to be expensive before the unfunded wars, now it might actually kill us. Either the roads will kill us (slowly, by a billion paper cuts) or financial apocalypse will because we’ve saddled our government with prosecuting wars when we should have been directing them to work on internal matters, like roads.

So, feel good about our proud military. They’ll have the funds and resources to do their job. Their incredibly important, more-important-than-everything-else job in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feel good, wrap yourself up in the flag, and be the proudest chief patriot when the bridge your car was on failed, the roadway crumbled and you ended up with the front-end of your very expensive SUV stuck in the mire of the filthy Kalamazoo River.

photo by: Kecko

Federal Budgets

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Watching bloggers go bonkers reporting that Social Security may be cut to balance the government’s budget has me laughing all the way to Apocalypse. What is it that people thought? Social Security is a time-shifting Ponzi Scheme that isn’t illegal because the government runs it. It gratifies the liberal in me and makes absolutely no sense economically especially when we have an upside-down-triangle shaped population as ranked by age (thanks WW2 baby boom!).

When people catch wind that an entitlement as big as Social Security or one as fundamental as Medicare is threatened everyone instantly closes their eyes and power-stuffs their head into the sand – wham wham thhhwap plork!

I tweeted a while back that it would be an interesting time when the government was faced with Social Programs vs. Military Spending. This particular versus is an insidious one, because if either side wins it’s an economic apocalypse. It’s a Catch-22 as well, since you can’t keep this kind of spending going forever, eventually China will go apeshit and demand that we take the borrowing we’re fleecing them for seriously. In many regards, USA(SSI vs. DoD) Vs. China. If we cut Social Security we’ll have outrage, panic, and most likely a spike in heart attacks. If we cut Medicare we’ll have a lot of dead elderly as medical care will become catastrophically unaffordable. If we touch military spending then we’ll harm the military-industrial complex and the massive flow of cash out of the DoD and back into the general economy will squelch and then we’ll have another economic collapse. So, if we all play a very good game of pretend, we can ignore that problem as long as none of us do any kind of simple mathematics. That is until China can’t stand the Catch-22 they are in with us and stop lending us money. They know that it’s disaster if they stop, but eventually they’ll have to, and then we’ll stop buying all that cheap chinese plastic crap and their economy will tumble as well.

This is epic level drama whore material. “May you live in interesting times!” Indeed a blessing and a curse! Afghanistan nearly broke the Soviets, and it’s going to break us. What’s the practical upshot? Massive hyperinflation as the US Treasury prints billions of worthless dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the mighty US economy from total collapse. Those of us who are filthy debtors are going to be the only ones dancing in the streets as our debt, which is not keyed to inflation quickly pay off the numbers, and then we’ll follow the rest of you down the whirling economic toilet hole that is our collective future.

All it takes is time. In the meantime it will be interesting to see how the Federal Government responds to these ever-mounting pressures. Which will buckle first? Entitlements or Defense? Anyone care to toss the dice?

Letter to Levin

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Dear Senator Levin,

I just read on the Wall Street Journal that you and Senator McCain have made moves to strip the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the defense spending bill. I would be enraged, I would declare that the democrats have effectively turned their campaign promises to us inside-out and displayed the lies that they are. I would claim these things if I were really an American.

I can’t serve in the military, I can’t donate blood despite the need, and I cannot marry. I am not equal under the law and by evidence because I am robbed of my 14th Amendment rights I am easily written off, easily ignored, and issues that matter the most to people like me matter not one jot to those in the Federal Government.

On November 2nd I voted. I went to the polls and I cast my party ticket for the Democrats. The idea that people like me have to find someone to be our champion, to secure our basic rights before the law, and then to have them trample us, to use us via glittering campaign promises which are barefaced lies hurts the most. We have no party to turn to except the Democrats, despite our apparent leprosy.

The problem isn’t just with your decision to strip DADT from the military spending bill, but rather with all the democrats including our President whom I pleaded with when he was just a senator from Illinois to please run for the presidency. I would have never thought it possible that a man and party I idolized would betray us.

In the end I’m just another ignorable voice, one of millions who just fade into the woodwork and don’t really matter. When I go to vote next, I don’t know what I am going to do. Vote for someone who can’t possibly win or for someone who doesn’t really care about people like me. It’s a horrible thing. The only thing that comforts me is that nobody lives forever and with new representation perhaps someday we’ll have someone who thinks that equality is something more than just something to put on a bumper sticker.

You’ve more friends with Senator McCain than with your gay constituents.

Thanks.