I have despised the policies (and often the total lack of them) of this president since he first took office. But rarely, if ever, have his tactics proved as despicable as the ones he is now using in order to increase taxes and continue to bloat the federal government behemoth.
The sequestration that is going to occur on Friday is the result of the president and congress continually refusing to take the debt/deficit bull by the horns. The cuts in proposed ‘automatic increases’ in government-funded programs are admittedly a negative when they affect necessary expenditures such as national defense. But they will provide welcome (by the knowledgeable taxpayer, who should, incidentally, be found on the endangered species list) belt-tightening for the majority of government programs.
Cutting automatic increases should have few other results than a more prudent expenditure of dollars.
Not so, according to the president. If the American public listens to, and believes, his current rhetoric, our children are going to starve and have no opportunity for quality education, our streets will be rife with crime, firefighters will be unable to respond to calls, planes will be colliding with each other in mid-air, and healthcare will be virtually inaccessible. Are we to assume that the billions that are spent on hundreds of government programs that have been set up to monitor the rate of growth of turkey beaks, or to teach chimps how to knit, or to determine whether Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior, will remain unscathed?
I am no expert on government spending, but I suspect that, for every reasonable and necessary government program, there are probably two frivolous ones.
And yet the president, rather than sitting down with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and hammering out genuine budget reform, is gallivanting around the country predicting the end of life as we know it if budget increases are slashed, and counting on the fact that the average American will swallow his swill. And why shouldn’t he? That same ‘average American’ was responsible for returning him to office four months ago.
The campaign never ends. And the community organizer mindset of our fearless leader is calling all the shots: pitting segments of society against each other, and relying on the fear factor (with that fear resulting from bogus bogeyman issues) to create legislation. The other two branches of government have become officially impotent, and having a pathological liar tyrant in the White House has become the accepted status quo. |
