Well, another long day at work and I’m home now, eating noodles and vegetables and reading blogs. Those of you that follow this blog know that I enjoy politics but one thing that I enjoy more is amusing myself with America’s stupidity. I’m a pretty rational person. I think things through, I ask questions, I read, I learn and I don’t take things for granted. True, that may not have been the case in a few ways for those of you that knew me as a dumb-ass 20 year old but things change, people do tend to grow up….eventually.
I came across this little tidbit on the web tonight and wanted to share it. Americans LOVE their entitlements! Good lord where would we be without Medicare and Social Security, and soon Healthcare. We love things that are handed to us on a silver platter but god forbid we be fucking rational about it. Let’s talk about taxes and how exactly the Federal Government (the provider of Entitlements) gets money. The primary revenue stream comes from us. We are tax payers, we dump a certain amount of our income into the Federal Pot so to speak throughout our working lives. This is supposed to pay (among other things) for the entitlement programs that exist and that people just can’t live without! We all know that today, our Federal Government is in a tight spot. The budget needs to be balanced so what happens? We cut things that are “unnecessary” out of the budget so funds can be allocated appropriately. Trouble is, NOBODY (or at least only a very few people) is willing to cut things out of the budget. Take a look at the graphic below.
Take a look at those numbers. These are all things the Government spends money on, yet hardly anyone feels they should receive lower federal funding than they are already currently getting! In the areas above, the biggest percentages only account for 3% of the Federal Budget according to the survey! So you could cut them out entirely, and gain nearly nothing! So, we want our cake and we want to eat it too! Sounds like America.
So, how do we balance the budget? As much as I hate to tell you this, the ONLY way to balance the budget is to increase revenue and that means YOU HAVE TO RAISE TAXES. Yes, I know, shoot me now, I get raped every week by the government taking large chunks of money from what I willingly earned by busting my ass at work for 12 hours a day. But guess what, I am one of the few that would be willing to increase my tax contributions in order to live in a country that is actually solvent and actually spends appropriate dollars on appropriate programs for it’s citizens. Trouble is, there aren’t very many people like me. Only 5% of the people polled in this survey said that taxes needed to be raised. The Chairman of the Fed knows what is necessary, even President Obama knows that taxes have to be raised but NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR THAT. I can only hope that someday, the people of my generation will come to understand reality a little better than the boomers have over the past 30 years while we grew up. We must either reduce the size and scope of the federal government OR we must raise taxes to pay for the things that we so badly want. It is right there in black and white. What are you willing to do?
