Grumpa Joe's Place

Air Force One is Up for Sale

All I hear about is a balanced approach when it comes to deciding how to deal with America’s budget, deficit, and spending. What I have seen happen is different. The balance goes this way:

The President proposes tax increases, and Congress rubber stamps it; see it is balanced!

My proposal is this:

I will willingly pay more taxes if I get a law that holds the entire 535 members of our government, President included, responsible for the fiscal responsibility of the country. What that means is that we fire all 535 without pensions if they fail to balance the budget and run without a deficit each year they are in office. I also propose that past legislators who are no longer in office who had anything even remotely to do with a budget failure lose their pensions immediately.

I also propose the President be limited in the amount of travel he may take. With modern technology being what it is there is absolutely no reason for him to leave the oval office to do business of any kind. In other words let him work like most private sector workers. Remember the traveling salesman? He doesn’t travel too much anymore. He does business via the internet, and a smart phone.

The President should speak to foreign leaders via Skype, or face to face via his desk top computer. All meetings are done via “Go to Meeting.” Since the Divided States of America is the world’s richest and strongest nation it should use its technology to become the world’s most efficient government as well. Efficiency must become the by-word. The 535 must work diligently to cut costs by reducing the workforce not by increasing it. We must amend the Constitution to add Government Productivity as a requirement. Congressional leaders will receive million dollar bonuses for cost reducing a bureaucracy by a billion dollars or more. Now that is balance folks, cut costs get a bonus. The old carrot on a stick concept at its finest.

Instead of using these tried-and-true principles, the 535 will try to outsmart one another with new weasel-words intended to confuse and bewilder the rest of us.

My good friend Al spent considerable time last week researching what our real debt is. He came up with ninety-trillion dollars. It took a lot of red wine  before he came up with a balanced solution. Here is the easy math: Divide 90,000,000,000,000 by 300,000,000. What is your answer? Mine is three hundred thousand. The solution is for each person living in the DSA to pay $300,000 to the Treasury toward all the unfunded pensions and commitments of the 535.  That is the fairest way to solve the problem and to start with the new ideas proposed above. For a family of five that is a mere one and a half million dollars. You can do it, I know you can.

US annual federal deficits 1901 to 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related articles

• Q for Those in Favor of “Balanced Approach” of Spending Cuts and Tax Hikes: How Many Times Has Real Spending Declined Since 1980? (reason.com)
• Speaker Boehner: It’s Not a “Balanced” Approach Without Spending Cuts (speaker.gov)
• The Hope of Damocles (tokendissonance.wordpress.com)
• Another GOP break from Norquist (politico.com)
• Obama takes fiscal plan to Philadelphia (bigpondnews.com)
• The “Balanced Approach” is Bunk: All Tax Hikes, No Spending Cuts (reason.com)
• Morning Bell: 6 Fixes to America’s Fiscal Crisis (heritage.org)

Filed under: Cartoons, Conservative, economy, family, Government, Satire | Tagged: Balanced Budget, Barack Obama, Congress, constitution, Face time, Go to meeting, productivity, Republicans, Skype, The 535, United States, United States Congress, White House | 4 Comments »