by

John Wright

Tonight I watched a segment of the TV show "60 Minutes©," in which the comptroller general of the United States, the head of the General Accounting Office (GAO), one David Walker, our federal "watchdog," described a pending financial disaster for the USA. The disaster was presented as a financial result of promises of entitlements to people of the "post war baby boom" segment of our population. Perhaps that statement is too specific. Walker said that our projected outflows of money for entitlement programs will far exceed our ability to provide funding, with disaster around the year 2040. Medicare and Medicaid were described as four fifths of the problem, with Social Security being the remaining fifth.

In all fairness it was also noted that the inflation rate for medical care runs at twice the rate for all other areas of our economy. This means the combination of a large increase in the number of recipients, a growing decrease (oxymoron?) in the relative number of people paying taxes into the system to cover the medical costs of the recipients, and finally the ballooning cost of medical treatment itself combine to destroy us financially, and that is to be taken literally. There will be no money to do anything but pay the interest on our loans. Whee!

His solution? Raise taxes and reduce benefits. Go *&%^ yourself, David. You are too intelligent to be so stupid as to recommend pouring more gasoline onto a fire. That means you really don’t get it at all, or you represent interests that want to sustain the raping of the USA citizen by pouring even more money into medical and pharmaceutical company and "for profit" hospital coffers.

Let me be blunt. You don’t raise taxes. You kill benefits. That cuts medical costs down to what is reasonable, which is what people can afford to pay without entitlement programs. That is how it must work. Entitlements were bullshit from their inception, e.g. Social Security, and they are what must go. Medical insurance? No! Oh, and you don’t try to underpin the continuation of a pyramid scheme by importing illegal aliens to provide a citizen base to pay into the sick system. Look at how the French, the Italians and the Germans have fared with their importing of aliens. Nice, huh? And our coming generations of Mexicans in the USA will do what to help us?

Now, in the spirit of actually helping the American people, let’s outlaw McDonalds® and all similar sources of crap food and all forms of tobacco, and for that matter why not include alcohol? Let’s not allow any "food" manufacturer to sell any product with less than fully nutritious contents balanced to achieve and maintain good health, when used in conjunction with plenty of good physical exercise. That, by the way, must be mandated as a daily school requirement, such that overweight couch potatoes cannot exist, else the school administrators go to jail and the parents get fined heavily. Ditto in the work environment for the employers.

Voila! All of a sudden I see a great lessening of the need for pills of any sort. I see far fewer surgeries. I see far, indeed far fewer bastard capitalists ruining the lives of common USA citizens. Now, to be candid, I am a capitalist. I am not a socialist. But my greed is limited by my conscience. Do you have a conscience?

How do you like that, Mr. Comptroller? How about we eliminate Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid by 10% per year for the next ten years and let the "free market" determine the value of medical services and all other services for retired/elderly folks? Oh, and by the way, how about a really serious tax reduction? You see, we won’t need any money for further war, will we, once we can Bush and his criminal contingent? And the excess revenues that won’t be spent on entitlement programs will cover the costs of our recent infernal and repeated stupidities in attempted colonialism, to the tune of $700 billion. In short, we will pay for the criminal activities of our federal government by cutting entitlement programs. Isn’t that what you want? Won’t that "balance the books?" Or, do you want even more of the citizen’s income?

Come on now, you don’t feed an addict more drugs to fix an addiction, do you? So why should we feed the Congress and the President more tax money to direct to the capitalist bastards who are robbing us blind now? If you love the American citizens, then preach about actions that must be taken to destroy the businesses that are destroying the citizens, through the government and the fast food outlets … and the hospitals, etc.

You don’t want to preach that doctrine, do you? Do you mind telling us why? Well, frankly I don’t care what you say or what you believe. Your "numbers" may be accurate in a relative sense, but relative to what? Are we to continue our present course? Will more taxes help we individuals cover increased costs? Oh, darn, I shouldn’t have said that, right? I never was very good at being politically correct.

I sit here and wonder why you haven’t been detained by our Executive branch, or in some other way eliminated. Superficially, you appear to be our champion. On the other hand, with just a bit of thought the answer becomes too obvious.

Ah, well, I think I need a drink! Whoops! I’d better get one quick before my obviously brilliant ideas become law! And right now a smoke would feel pretty good too, except I quit that habit. That leaves me something to, uh, chew on. Maybe.

Later!