I’m willing to buy my freedom
The WaPo doesn’t seem to recall a Republican leader with a pair:
THREE TIMES in the past quarter-century, conservative leaders have promised to restrain wasteful government spending. President Ronald Reagan tried it and showed he was at least half-serious by vetoing the pork-laden 1987 transportation bill. House Speaker Newt Gingrich tried it and risked his party’s electoral standing by battling to restrain the growth in programs such as Medicare. And President Bush has tried it, declaring on numerous occasions that he expected spending restraint from Congress. None of these efforts proved politically sustainable. As The Post’s Jonathan Weisman and Jim VandeHei reported Thursday, Mr. Bush’s attempt at spending discipline has been especially limp.
No party is the party of small government and only the Democrats tried to balance the budget (yeah, it was fedmath but at least they tried it). It’s true.
So, with that in mind, here’s the deal: I am willing to buy my freedom. It’s true, I’ll cave. I yammer on and on about taxes being too high and that I pay too much and that my money pays for a bunch of useless crap. And that’s all true too. But I would gladly pay that price; deal with the 1,395,000 words and 693 sections of the IRS Code; and 20,000 pages of regulations containing over 8 million words from the Treasury department; etc. if I knew that my freedoms weren’t under attack.
But that’s kind of the problem, really. The more they tax, the more resources they have to bureaucratize my freedoms away. And that’s what they do (seriously, 26,911 words dealing with the sale of cabbage?).
I’m willing to let the .gov use my money to pay for all the roads, space programs, indoor rainforests, golf course repair work, etc. that it wants to, if it leaves me alone, stops taking people’s land, stops trying to pass nanny laws, etc. Think that will work?
August 16th, 2005 at 9:52 am
Nope.
August 16th, 2005 at 11:35 am
No, I do not think it would work.
Because they view their jobs as really important, not as the public servants we view them as.
August 16th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Here’s the thing: WaPo is being a bit dishonest here (yeah, I’ll wait while you get over the shock). The transportation bill was big. Yup. And full of pork. Yup. But guess what, the bill is smaller than either the House or the Senate wanted it because the White House put a number out there and said, “no bill if it spends more than this.” The Senate bill was fifteen or so percent higher than the White House’s number and the House was somewhere in between. In the end, everybody compromised a little bit, but you would have seen a bill at least $20 billion larger if the President hadn’t held the line in a way that forced Congress to behave just a little bit better.
PS – I agree with you about the freedom thing. I’d happily pay double what I currently pay in taxes, and never breathe so much as a word of complaint about waste, if I could get some kind of reliable guarantee that I’d be left alone for the rest of my life. If only.
August 17th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
[…] You can read that post from Say Uncle here. Comments » […]
December 20th, 2005 at 10:09 am
[…] If the Democrats actually get their collective shit together over this whole gun issue (which they appear to be trying to do), I’ll vote for them because the parties are the same except for that and taxes. And I’d pay more in taxes for gun rights guarantees. Or, as I said before, I’m willing to buy my freedom. […]