Federal bureaucracy is kind of like a wild animal. Both can kill you, but bureaucracy has the law on its side.

Europe is buckling under the weight of immense debt and bureaucracy. It’s an amazing turn of events. American liberals look fondly to Europe. This comes from Euro tourist trips to Paris, Rome, and London. They see all the beautiful places, they ride on the rail, and they believe everything is perfect in Europe. They don’t notice the highly segregated cities, the high unemployment, and the fact no one actually rides the rail.

Europe is failing despite the fact the United States subsidized their economic model for a half century. It’s infuriating. Now Europe is looking to the United States for a bailout. We’ve saved the continent in two world wars and given them free health care for over 50 years and now we’re supposed to bail them out?

If there was only one great example I could cite that encapsulates Europe’s bureaucracy run amok… Wait, there is! European Union officials spend time and resources dedicated to proving water doesn’t hydrate. Huh? No, I’m really telling the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-yVjQzq7W0

The silence on the left when it comes to the debt is unbelievable. Their only plan is more taxes and less defense, even though that won’t solve the problem. The real problem is the American people. Americans love their subsidies, pensions, entitlements, and tax breaks. We’re a nation drunk on selfishness and guilt. We’re too selfish to take responsibility. This creates guilt that we outsource to the federal government. “Let someone else do it” is the rallying cry. This cancer exists on both sides and I’m not sure the nation can escape the future.

Where are you in the federal government's pyramid? And, where are our children and grandchildren? Perhaps in the impossibly unsustainable level? Awesome!

What sent Ken Lay and his Enron minions to prison pales in comparison to the fraud regularly being perpetrated on the American people by our public servants. Yet instead of languishing in prison, the politicians and the preferred political interests who defraud the taxpayer in the name of “green jobs,” “affordable housing,” “social justice” and whatnot are handsomely rewarded.

President Obama likes to talk about crumbling bridges and a deteriorating infrastructure to justify more drunken, crack-smoking sailor spending. These days, the problem is that when the federal government gets involved with building bridges and other infrastructure, every project is forced through the intestines of a vast regulatory, money-skimming bureaucracy that puts the completion date somewhere in the far-distant future at a price tag umpteen times higher than if the locals got together and made it themselves.

Never mind Social Security, big government as a whole has become a vast Ponzi scheme. It has been set up to reward itself on the backs of the average citizen. It is sold to us as an “investment in the future,” but whose future, exactly? Certainly not mine nor my kids’ future, nor any future generations that will follow me. As Mark Steyn puts it, we’re looting the future to bribe the present.

And that’s essentially what these various so-called jobs, stimulus, health care, financial reform and other bills are all about: bribing specific constituencies to build political power. These constituencies are given preference over others, violating one of the bedrock ideas of America’s founding philosophy, equality before the law. Those who are being treated unequally – the average hard-working American who wants nor expects anything from the federal government – sees much of what they pay in taxes go into the black hole of political favoritism.

Black holes are formed from stars that collapse from their own weight, and that is the future of America as so vividly illustrated by solar-collapsing Solyandra. We said goodbye to half a billion of our taxpayer dollars and yet in today’s surreal, hyper-inflated atmosphere it seems a mere drop in the bucket when your average “stimulus” bill is reckoned in the trillions.

Just as we’ve become used to buying gas for more than $3 a gallon, the political class has desensitized us to the concept of trillions of dollars as a reasonable amount for the government to regularly outlay to those whom it favors. And you better believe that politicians and bureaucrats tend to favor themselves over any others, followed closely by those who help them ensure they stay in office so they can continue to favor themselves.

James Madison wrote that “power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” Unfortunately, we have strayed quite far from that philosophy, and have allowed a remote central government to operate almost completely unrestrained. One need only read the Constitution to see how far astray we’ve really gone.

What do Americans really want? Is it a nation of do-nothing slackers who expect that all of their problems will be solved by Sugar Daddy Uncle Sam? Or, is it a nation of independent innovators who welcome risk and the consequences of failure?

I’m afraid the answer is increasingly the former, and as Americans purposely shackle themselves to this dependent model they will find they have fewer real liberties as their political betters grow in wealth and power. The pyramid in the world’s largest pyramid scheme ever is being assembled as we speak, write and read. Where are you in the pyramid?

“Of course, there’s been a real debate about where to invest and where to cut, and I’m committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt,” Obama said in his weekly radio address. “But we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity,” he added.

Huh? Well, spending isn’t working either. Raising taxes isn’t going to work. The Democrats are philosophically opposed to cutting anything. It’s not in their DNA.

The U.S. has spent trillions on the War on Poverty since 1964 and poverty still remains.

Socialized health care has been a progressive dream for over 70 years in the United States after FDR progressives spent decades trying to pass it, but the American people rejected it. However, liberals came up with a different plan. In the 1960′s the American left gave us Medicare, a ponzi scheme that makes Social Security look like the picture of solvency.

Liberals believed (and they’ve been proven correct) that if they incrementally introduced socialized health care it would eventually take hold. Medicare has never been solvent. It never will be solvent. No nation in the world has come up with a socialized heath care system that works in the long run. Every system spends too much, wastes too much, and delivers too little care. Health care eventually has to be rationed and the quality of the health decreases.

Those aren’t spurious claims or wild predictions. They’re the indisputable facts. The citizens in the United States who are collecting Medicare benefits today are collecting way more than they put in 30 years ago. The world pushes towards bankruptcy. Europe is already ahead of the United States. That continent’s lust for entitlements coupled with slow economic growth is a recipe for the return of the dark ages.

The United States follows slowly behind. In the United States no one even considers the thought that Medicare should be abolished. Politically, it’s worse to be labeled anti-Medicare than to act like there’s not a problem. Plenty of Democrats insist there’s nothing to worry about. Heck, plenty of Democrats believe we should be spending more and that ObamaCare doesn’t go far enough. One could chuckle if this kind of willful ignorance was a vocal minority, but indeed the great majority of the left lives in fiscal denial. It’s a safe haven of fiscal dissidence.

The most extreme budget presented by Republicans is Paul Ryan’s own version of Utopia called the Path to Prosperity. The Daily Plunge hopes Ryan runs for president, not because he has the answers, but because his answers are the least moronic. Ryan is naive that Medicare can be saved. Oh, it can be saved for tomorrow, or next week, next year, or the next 50 years, but eventually it ends. Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review has more on the subject.

Reformers such as Representative Ryan always ignore this inevitable trajectory of entitlement politics. They rationalize that they can make a government-sanctioned bribery system run better, or at least preempt Democrats from making it run worse. Hoping to stave off Medicare, congressional moderates in 1960 passed a bill to provide means-tested medical assistance to the elderly. It only greased the wheels for not only Medicare but Medicaid. In Massachusetts, Romneycare was another well-meaning attempt to install a compulsory statewide health-insurance system that would be less autocratic and costly than the one the Left would have imposed. It is, predictably, a disaster that tends toward ever-more-suffocating government control.

The mountain of evidence against entitlements is staggering. No reasonably educated person who looks at this objectively can come any other conclusion. If well-intentioned programs to help a few people ultimately end up harming everyone why insist that it’s a good intention any longer?

The challenge of our society isn’t to create the perfect government program to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves. The challenge of our society is to take responsibility for the disadvantaged ourselves. It is the individual who should be responsible for their loved ones, their neighbors, and the poor. A cynical person may insist that that isn’t enough. They would be correct; however, the government isn’t the solution either and it’s pushing us toward economic calamity. Both solutions are imperfect. We live in an imperfect world. Faced with two choices the answer is clear.

Sadly, too many people already feel entitled. They are our friends and family. They are Republicans and Democrats of all ages. We have educated generations of people who are unable to see the forest for the trees. Entitlements are the closest thing eternal life on Earth. I can only hope that I don’t live long enough to witness where this economic road to ruin ends.

Why are we paying for this?

Entitlement reform isn’t the only area of the federal budget that needs to be addressed. It’s obviously the most important because of it’s size, but there are some common sense things Congress could do right now. Ending farm subsidies should be a priority.

The only reason we continue to subsidize farmers is this nostalgic idea that farmers are the backbone of the nation. Just read this tripe:

Family farmers are being forced out of business at an alarming rate. According to Farm Aid, every week 330 farmers leave their land. As a result, there are now nearly five million fewer farms in the U.S. than there were in the 1930′s. Of the two million remaining farms, only 565,000 are family operations^. As established family farms are shut down, they are not being replaced by new farms and young farmers.  Very few young people become farmers today, and half of all U.S. farmers are between the ages of 45 and 65, while only 6% of all farmers are under the age of 35.

I’m not concerned. My ancestors used to be farmers. Most people’s ancestors used to be farmers. Thank God that’s not my profession today. This is progress and it’s nothing to be alarmed about. Groups like Farm Aid have propagated the myth that we need to be concerned about a dying part of our economy.

The United States pays out $20 billion in agriculture subsidies. Plus the United States controls the price of milk and sugar. There’s no justification for this to continue. The Daily Plunge has written extensively about Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. His number one priority is to secure as much farm assistance is possible. He’s a big reason we have the ethanol subsidies. Even Al Gore believes that subsidizing ethanol is a bad idea.

The ethanol subsidy should be eliminated immediately. John Stossel agrees:

The time to end the government powered ethanol subsidy has come… and gone… multiple times. It’s an expensive waste of money, and a GAO report confirms that if it is left unchanged, the

… annual cost to the Treasury in forgone revenues could grow from $5.4 billion in 2010 to $6.75 billion in 2015.

The government has tried to promote the growth of ethanol since the Energy Tax Act of 1978. Additional waste comes from the renewable fuel standard which:

requires overall transportation fuels in the United States to contain certain volumes of biofuels…

So not only has Congress passed legislation that forces consumers to give their gas money to ethanol companies, but also they provide a tax credit to these same companies, allowing them to “double dip” in your pocket.

Before being elected in 2008 then Senator Obama voted for the current Farm Bill. There’s no hope he’ll rise to the challenge of eliminating this vast waste of taxpayer money. It’s truly staggering how many people are receiving some kind of government welfare.

The AARP sponsors Jeff Gordan’s NASCAR ride. It costs millions to sponsor a NASCAR team. What is the AARP advertising? The drive to end senior hunger. According to the socialist AARP six million seniors face the threat of hunger – meaning they are forced to skip meals or buy poor quality food. How can we help? I’m sure the AARP has a simple solution: don’t change entitlements.

The AARP is an enemy of the state. The sole purpose of the AARP is to maintain the status quo. What’s the status quo? I pay nearly 14% of my income for Social Security and apparently that’s not enough to keep the elderly from being hungry. How the hell is the possible? I’m not sure it is possible. Let’s abolish Social Security and levy a 5 percent tax on income to keep the elderly from being hungry. That sounds like a worthy cause.

The American path to bankruptcy is real and it’s inevitable. American’s say they want to cut spending, but a majority want to maintain or increase spending on education, veteran’s benefits, college grants, social security, and health care. The list goes on and on… the only thing Americans agree to cut spending on is foreign aid to needy nations.

This isn’t a left vs. right issue. It’s a spoiled population vs. those of us living in reality. Many Democrats live in a fantasy reality where the only thing we need to do is decrease spending on the military and increase taxes and our problems will be solved. That’s not going to work. Americans need to wake up. It’s time to take a chainsaw to entitlements and the Federal budget as a whole.

Christie’s rhetoric sounds great but we’ll see if he means business. So far he’s saying and doing all the right things. The fiscal decisions we’re facing aren’t going to be popular. The reason government spending is so high is because politicians are adept at creating programs that are popular. The first politician that’s serious about reducing our spending will be labeled anti-elderly, anti-education and anti-military. It’s going to take a special kind of person to lead us out of this mess.

Save us Obi Wan Constitution. You're our only hope.

The economy is always the main issue in elections and I’ve thought for months Americans aren’t really angry with the White House; they’re angry about the economy. The Republicans should quit banking on the economy staying in the tank forever and come up with a plan to save the Republic. Obama and the Democrats are a short-term business cycle rebound from bankrupting the nation forever. At this stage it’s time for a Reaganesque “starve the beast” strategy. If Americans want to be sold a populist bill of goods then so be it.

I wrote last month about the Balanced Budget Amendment. This is a very populist bill that despite its economic theory problems is a best solution available to solve the nightmare fiscal situation we’re facing. Let’s be frank. Despite the fact the President has insisted that his health care bill is deficit neutral, it’s not. He’s living in fantasy land. The claim is laughable and reflects what Obama thinks about the intelligence of the American people. Even The Economist, which endorsed Obama’s bill, thinks that it’s going to add to the debt. The GOP should move fast and make the Balanced Budget Amendment the keystone issue in the 2010 election.

Faced with a Constitutional amendment mandate, Congress will be forced to either raise taxes or cut entitlements. The nation needs to make this choice sooner, rather than later. If we had honest leadership we would be addressing these problems now instead of passing it off on some other generation. The only question is can enough people push for this amendment before it’s too late?

If the RNC is any indication there’s not a lot of hope for the GOP. The RNC supposedly doesn’t like big government but they don’t mind it as long as they’re in power. There needs to be a revolution inside the GOP if there’s any hope of tackling America’s fiscal problems.

Worrying about debt is like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing. America’s indebtedness would be sustainable and even healthy if the underlying economy were vibrant, innovative and strong and if federal and state governments could channel those moneys productively and quickly. The problem isn’t how much debt we’re carrying today; it’s whether the economy of tomorrow will be able to justify it.

Karabell goes even further suggestion that we should be “investing” more or in other words spending more money. While I agree with some of what Karabell has to say it would have been more applicable four years ago. Simply hoping the dollar remains strong and that interest rates stay low is not a recipe for maintaining a lot of debt.