Wetwired an Austin Texas Blog

We’ve got 3 candidates with varying ideas and ideals but all equally the same. They are all career politicians.   The Democrats all have great plans for us. Let’s give you more socialized programs and of course increase your taxes to pay for it, and forget about continuing the Bush tax cuts.  They will also yank the troops out of Iraq so quickly they’ll plunge Iraq into a civil war, causing oil to stop flowing, thus driving the up the cost of gasoline even more.  The Republicans are fully prepared to keep us in Iraq for 100 years to ensure the flow of oil, but at what cost? 9 billion a month? Not only that, while we’ve heard about tax cuts from them, continuing the bush tax cuts, we’ve not heard about any IRS revamping, or any new effective plan to fund the country or revitalize the economy.  The Republicans have only one real agenda at this point, and that is to continue to fund the Military Industrial Complex. We’ve been warned about this previously but we did not take heed.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. 

Traditionally a wartime economy is good for a country because money is put right back into it and jobs are created, but this is only when the war lasts a few years -you cannot sustain a war-time economy.  This is why we had a low unemployment rate through 2003-2006 or even mid 2007 and jobs were steadily on the rise, but we’ve hit the peak.  Companies are laying off people and trimming the fat to make their quarterly numbers. But fear not, 3 candidates continue to talk about how they plan to take office and create more jobs.   Magically poof, from day one (another sound byte thrown about) jobs will suddenly appear.

Everyone wants to take credit for creating more jobs, but what jobs are we going to do ?  Make cars? Wait no, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and China have that tied up.  Clothes? No, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia have that tied up. How about electronics and computers? Be serious, Dell computers outsourced all of its manufacturing 6 or more years ago, the only thing that is done here is putting the parts in a box.  Wait, I know, we could all be customer service reps.  No? You mean India, Panama are now the countries with the largest call centers in the world? Oh, it can’t be all bad.  I’m sure we can find some sort of good paying job here in the States. I know, we can all go work at McDonalds, Burger King, Applebees, and various other restaurants.  With competitive wages, benefit packages, and great health insurance where could we go wrong? I don’t know maybe the fact that  we’ll be eating 15000 calorie burgers and be dropping like flys from massive heart attacks?  But call my cynical.

Who do we blame for all of our jobs being outsourced to other countries, our manufacturing going over seas or offshore and our growing waistbands?  Look in the mirror.. 

oooh sexy, ok now stop…

You (we) voted the people in office who provided the incentives for companies to find cheaper labor and increase profit by breaking the backs of underdeveloped mal-nourished people who have yet to unionize.  But come on, it’s a free-market economy and these big companies are just trying to compete on the global market, can’t we give them a break? 

By break I mean  break the bank, as in our financial institutions that have loaned out massive amounts of money to people who knew they couldn’t afford to make the realistic payment on a house.  They want us, the tax payers, to pay for a) the greedy banks who knew better, and b) the optimistic moron who threw caution to the wind.  Lets blame everyone else but ourselves.  Its time that both of these two entities learn to own up to their own responsibilities. What is the meaning of the price of Freedom?  One meaning is simple: the price of Freedom is taking responsibility for your actions. Are we a country of people who are not responsible for ourselves? A country whose people allow their government to tell us what to do, where to work and where to live because they know what’s good for us?

Now before you right me off as a stereotyper of these loans lets address the legitimacy.  Begin run-on sentence:  I understand that yes, you could have worked at Ford, just gotten a 30 year mortgage ( 20% ARM and 80% fixed at 6%) and suddenly the ARM that you had so planned on refinancing just shot up to 22% interest rate and you’ve got to find some way of doing something about it before they foreclose on it but right before you started thinking about it you got laid off because you just couldn’t afford to buy one more car on the X-Plan and Ford didn’t make its quarterly numbers yet again on the massive 15 mile per gallon vehicles they continue to push out on the market, or maybe you just took out a 2nd mortgage on your home because you needed to send your kid to college and you were just trying to keep them from having to take on student loans that they would have to pay back soon as they had graduated and moved back in with you again because they couldn’t get a job with a degree they received, now they  planned on working with you at the Ford plant so they could get their feet on the ground with their English degree and a minor in Russian Literature, but now both of you are out of a job and your stuck between a rock and a hard place.  

That’s one hell of a wake up call, but here’s rub: its your responsibility, not mine, to keep up with your own finances.  If you can’t take on more debt, don’t.  If you were meaning to refinance that ARM but just didn’t get to it why not? Were you taken advantage of by the lending institution? Maybe.  But look, if you didn’t do your due diligence and research types of loans or you were the type of person that did not quality for an A loan because you had previously not been fiscally responsible enough to have good credit, why should I have remorse or sorrow for you? Because you had to have your house now and not wait until you could save up I am to suffer?  As Eisenhower said,

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. 

I do believe in a better tomorrow but we’re looking at a very insolvent today.  I want  you to find a new job and be able to take responsibility for your own actions.  Because of that, here is my path to righting the United States.

1. We do not bail out the financial institutions that are flopping.

2. We stop allowing financial institutions to have overseas countries (China) underwrite our loans.

3. We do force financial institutions to refi the customers that they knowingly misled to a reasonable loan instead of allowing them to foreclose.

4. We infuse our education system and job re-training programs in this country.  Those who have lost jobs need to be able to find these magical “poof” jobs.  The only way to do that is to re-train them to do something else. This I’m willing to pay for, because having another working citizen paying taxes only increases my chances of actually being able to retire at 65 and being able to take my social security that I’ve been paying on since I was 16. 

4b. By retraining our countrymen we allow them to stand tall and take responsibility and own up to their debt. 

5.  NATO: Guess what, no longer will the US be the primary financial backer, its time for everyone to step up. 

6.  Foreign Aid to countries who only subside on it: No more.  The money is needed here in the United States to pay down our National Debt and buy back our Country from China.

7. Iraq? This is a multifaceted problem. Money, Terrorists, Oil, Freedom.    

7a. Money: War Bonds. We’ve done it before, lets do it again, war bonds allow the country to borrow   money from its own citizens and not other countries.   

 7b. Terrorists:  Time and time again we’ve learned that logic does not work with brainwashed fanatics, you can’t talk it out of them.  No tolerance policy, no more human rights issues, they are not going to provide it to you when they blow up your plane.  Unfortunately to some people the only way to talk is with aggressive action.    

7c. Oil: We have to get out of the middle east.  In the 1960’s our President put forth a mission to put a man on the moon in 10 years.   Its time to have another mission, freedom from Foreign Oil Dependency.   

 7d. Freedom to Iraq. We have to pull out once the government is stable. Pulling out before then will cause a civil war and the same freedoms that they had enjoyed will be gone. 

8. Balanced Budget: seriously we have a bunch of morons who earmark everything throw money left and right because it’s the US government.  Its time we run the gauntlet on the budget and start killing stupid programs.  We need to help ourselves to be able to help the rest of the world.

9. Reinvest in public transportation nationwide.  This goes hand in hand with item 7c.  We are too dependent on cars to get from point A to point B. Go anywhere in Europe and you will find that this is not the case, hell they don’t even have fat people in the Netherlands they have great public transportation and they ride bikes. 

10. Healthcare: Universal healthcare is not the answer it causes higher taxes and less interest in research and development because of the lack of incentives.  We fix the run-away frivolous law suits, we stop the drug companies from spending millions on marketing their new drug to doctors thus driving the cost of the drug higher.  I’m serious about this, on a typical day a drug rep will go to 5-10 offices bringing trays of food, free samples, pens, pencils, tickets to expensive events all to sway the specific doctor into pushing their drug they are representing. 

Pharmaceutical marketing is an obvious place to start. Drug companies invest $7 billion yearly in marketing to physicians.

How does that grab you for waste? Why not stop marketing drugs like this and start charging less for drugs.

Is this plan the end all be all of resolving our problems? No.  Is it a bit drastic in some cases? Yes.  But think about this, what is the cost of doing nothing? What is the cost of continuing to run a rapidly increasing well-fare state?  Its time that we as a country start thinking smart financially so that we may once again prosper and the dollar can regain its value.  Obviously none of these 3 candidates we have are going to act fiscally responsible and we’ll once again be voting for the one that can do the least amount of damage.  As long as people continue to question and not immediately accept we may be ok, but when we turn complacent and do nothing, we’ll continue to see our freedoms erode away.  (And when I say erode away, I mean Jim Carey “errroooding”)

(5 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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