As I am sure you are aware, the United States has been downgraded to the AA+ Credit Rating by Standard and Poor. This of course, will force world markets to sell off for a while, but I do not think it is going to doom us all as the world media likes to portray it. But things are going to change. Everything is going to start costing a little bit more as every company who operates under its own credit umbrella (every company you have ever heard of), passes the buck onto the consumers in order to compensate for their higher interest rates. Fine, whatever, what else is new? I don’t think anyone ever expected to ever go to a grocery store and pay what they did in 1986 again.
But eventually, this has to stop. These children in Washington are going to have to find a way to play nice together and stop playing political games with the potential of ruining people’s lives. Luckily for my side of the equation, the vast majority of this country does not blame the president for this debacle. The voting majority realizes that he was blocked in every attempt to get anything done by the Tea Baggers. If anyone is going to be hurt politically by this, it is them and their lackey Johnny Boehner (Thanks for producing this gem Southern Ohio). And let’s face facts, the people who like the Tea Party, have very little to lose, because they don’t fall under the demographic of people who have much money vested in the stock markets.
All blame aside, you can’t keep trying to operate the government with people who have such conflicting ideas of how the world works. The idea of checks and balances is all well and good if you have two parties with some semblance of mutual respect for one another. After all, when this works it prevents any one party from doing whatever they want no matter how horrible the ideas are. But we don’t have these sorts of people in DC anymore. These people absolutely hate each other. You couldn’t run a lemonade stand for very long, at the end of your driveway, if the two people running it had a deep seeded hatred for one another.
The idea is to be able to invoke a healthy, productive debate between two sides of each equation. Not to have a bunch of clowns who hate each other so much that they won’t even use the same bathrooms, yelling at each other and doing everything they can to screw the other side over in order to gain a bargaining chip for a future election. As far as the public is concerned, this has become taxation with the illusion of representation. These people do not have our best interest at heart.
If you talk to anyone in government who stands to gain anything from blocking progress, they generally hide behind the thought that it is a “good idea” to have these sorts of ongoing debates because they prevent some sort of disaster that they made up in their heads from happening. Again, I agree, to a point but there has to be limitations to this debate. After all, with your logic, why not just have two parties running the country, one with all Southern Christians, and the other with all Muslims, and see how productive that “debate” turns out to be. People would get stabbed on live television before they determine whether or not it was a good idea to wear pants outside of their homes. We are about two little steps below this sort of comical ineptness in Washington, right now.
If anything, for how long these kids have been slap fighting with each other in DC, this credit downgrade was a slap on the wrist. Any other organization, who managed to operate at such a low level of progress and results would have been forced into bankruptcy, forget a lowered credit rating, grab a box, put your shit in it and get on Monster.com.
So did the United States deserve its lowered credit rating, you bet your ass it did? It probably should have happened a lot sooner. If you compare this country to a person, it would be like Equifax, feeling so bad for them that it never lowered their credit rating, for decades, even though they were unemployed, addicted to meth, constantly taking out new lines of credit for shit they don’t need, and paying back the bare minimum, if anything, every month, in a currency that is backed by a bunch of metal that doesn’t really exist anymore. How we managed to stay at AAA for as long as we did is beyond me.
So now, the big “to do” is to figure out how we climb back to a AAA credit rating as a country, why? Shouldn’t we fix the broken system that caused us to be downgraded in the first place? After all, if someone is bleeding, you first have to stop them from bleeding before you give them more blood.
My question is this, why do we need all these jackaloons in Washington anymore to begin with? Between the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, we have 535 “representatives”. Each one of these people earns about 155,000 dollars a year. They also, don’t pay for much of anything during their terms. This includes, airfare, most of their food, gym memberships, housing etc. Also, each one has their own support staff, accounting teams, call center staff etc, on their payroll. Currently, there are about 24,000 people in Washington doing nothing but supporting Congressman and Senators. Let’s take a really low estimate and say that each of these 24,000 folks all makes 50,000 per year. If you total all of this up, just paying these idiots, costs the taxpayers about 2 billion dollars a year. Mind you, this is a very low estimate, that doesn’t take into account building maintenance, their housing, their travel, their food, their horrendous decision making, their family’s tagging along, their employees vacation time, employee benefits etc. A grand total would be at least another billion per year on top of the two billion they are already getting paid.
So, as hard as that previous paragraph is to swallow, ask yourself, what are you getting out of these people? There are essential services, that we need some of these people there for, namely defense, anti-terrorism, infrastructure, food safety etc. But I have a hard time believing that the American populous needs 25,000 skin bags in Washington DC representing them. This is 2011. Long gone are the days where communities and regions of America were so cut off from technology and the countries capital that it was necessary to elect someone and send them to Washington to represent you.
So get rid of them. Bring the vote back to the people who they are supposedly voting for anyway. After all, if they are really representing their constituents, as they say they are, nothing would change right? Develop an ultra-secure method of allowing the US population to vote for anything that requires the Senate and Congress to vote for now. Just have all the votes on Thursday nights, once a week and give the people their voice again. This technology is nothing new; you can easily dump online polling data into a massive database and get results in near real time. We were already doing this in 1996. If anything it would be a lot quicker than whatever the hell you call this current system. Nobody would have to ever turn on their televisions and see a bunch of 40 – 50 – 60 -70, something, overpaid, white, racist, dickheads yelling at each other about how much they hate providing armor for troops who are being shot at, ever again. The amount of money, sending these men back to wherever they came from, would save, is nearly impossible to calculate until you try. You force lobbyists out of the equation completely unless they want to try to bribe everyone in the United States instead of just our current collection of corrupt geriatrics in DC.
And above all, it fixes what is broken. You can’t pay off the whole country but you can easily pay off a few hundred representatives of that country. How else do you think Wall Street got its Tarp money? How else do you think real Healthcare reform was filibustered? How else did it take so long to agree upon a debt ceiling deal that second graders understood was completely necessary to saving the countries credit rating? It is because, these men and women who represent us, are paid to vote on things the way that benefits them and nobody else. They then go on camera and SPIN their justifications for these decisions to their constituents however they are told to do so. This is how you have such systemic breakdowns in progress like we just witnessed with the debt ceiling debate. When you know full well, that voting a certain way, or wasting time in other ways, will inevitably damage the lives of everyone in your country, and you do it anyway, your system is irreversibly broken. These sorts of situations should not even be possible. If there is even a method of filibustering elementary decisions like “Hey should we make everything more expensive for everyone in our already poor ass country?”, then you have to reform the system, it can’t work, ever again, period.
Our current ability to do this sort of shit is why our credit was downgraded, and I am glad. I am not interested in watching these sorts of stalemates on CNN anymore. I find it embarrassing and shameful to be lumped in with people like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, in the eyes of my international friends whose countries still enjoy AAA Prime credit ratings and governments that can make trivial decisions for their countries. You have to reform the system to a point where people can no longer do things that ruin their people’s lives. It is that simple. If WE all voted for things, not Congressman and Senators, I really don’t think we would have half as hard of a time making these kinds of decisions. After all, we are free of outside influences like, Big Oil, Wall Street and “Interest” Groups. So we would vote for things because we thought they were right or wrong not because some focus group wanted to pay for a trip to the Sahara for my family if I voted “No” on something.
I am a firm believer that people have to be governed. But I am also a firm believer that people have to do their jobs. And when people don’t do their jobs, they shouldn’t keep them. When people in government stop doing their jobs, we end up where we are, right now. Fire the people who aren’t doing their jobs and let’s take some of the power back from the inept.
Or let’s just keep doing this. I can’t wait to pay 8 bucks for a box of cereal.
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