Back in the saddle

Yah - I have not posted for a long long time.

As Mark McGwire said, I am not here to talk about the past.

Where are we? In a a mess. Well, the US is in a mess, I am living in Europe at the moment, and they are in a really big mess.

How did we get here? Ignoring the Constitutional limits on the Federal Government, plain and simple. The ass=hats in Washington have, for too long, tried to be all things to all people. And we have allowed it - actually encouraged it.

They created the Dept of Education, which educates no one. The Dept of Energy - creates no energy. The Dept of Transportation... you get the idea.

The basic problem is that the Federal govt got too big for their collective britches. Re-read (or, read for the first time if you went to public school) Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution. It outlines the things the Fed is empowered to do.

Now, admittedly, we are decades into the over-reach of the Fed. This does not make it right, it just makes it so.

We are operating under the falsehood of the 'Federal Grant'. A grant for education, for hiring more police, for building a bunch of state and county roads. This is bull shite folks!

What is a Federal 'grant'?

Step one - you take money, in the form of taxes, away from the citizens of a state, say Ohio.

Step two - you give it back to Ohio (in this case) for, say, education. But first, you keep part of it DC, then you attach a bunch of string to it. So... the state gets (part of) their own damned money back ( or maybe some from, say, Michigan, or borrowed from the Chinese) and we are expected to be all joyful? Bullshit. The round-trip to DC just reduced the amount, added strings, and not much else.

How about this - You don't take our money, you don't attach strings, and you let us just do our own thing on education? That is the essence of States Rights (and no, it is NOT racist). States do their own thing - unless it is too big for any one state (Like the national defense).

This is it in a nutshell folks. We have a debt problem because we have a spending problem (not a lack of taxes).. We have a spending problem because we have a run-away Federal government... Which we have because we have abdicated States Rights... Period.. Full stop.

We will never solve this problem with the level of debate now going on in Foggy Bottom... States need to stand up and re-assert their rightful place. DC is the problem, not part of the solution.

And the Tea Party has it exactly half right... spending it a PROBLEM. Allowing the Federal government to be bloated, over-reaching, utopian, and soul-sucking is the other half of the problem.

This is not the time for 1/2 measures.