Thank you to the Ron Paul supporter....

A few days ago I was voicing my displeasure on Ron Paul's Facebook page regarding his apparent disregard for his constituents. Mr. Paul has been everywhere but here in the Texas 14th District. No town hall meetings, no meet and greets..nothing. Of course I was hammered with all sorts of Libertarian nonsense, how I was being selfish. Selfish? He is my Congressman, how are my complaints about him not doing the job he was elected to do being selfish I asked myself.

Mr. Paul is running for President, while not actually running for President. He is on a book tour too. I was wondering how he can afford to fly all over the country to the early voting states when we have seen some Congressmen sleeping in their offices because they cannot afford to get their own places in DC. After some checking, I found that Mr. Paul has a $1.8M slush fund from his previous run for President.

To be honest, Mr. Paul is considered and joke in the Republican party. His bills are laughed out of committee. I ask this question, how can a laughing stock actually, responsibly represent me and my fellow Texans? The answer was simple and one I had not considered, yet it there it was.

One of the rabid Ron Paul supporters made a statement, which opened to door to why. The supporter pointed out, accurately I think, that Mr. Paul is considered a safe bet. In other words, his seat is safe. He does not actually have to run for Congress as he will always be elected. According to the supporter, this 'proves' that he is doing a great job representing his constituents, if not how could he be re-elected. This mindset should be of concern to all of us.

It is true there are many seats in Congress which are considered 'safe'. When considering this fact, then we really have no one to blame but ourselves for a dysfunctional government. Now the simple answer would be term limits. Do we really think that Congress would actually vote to limit their terms? I think not. Term limits can come only if we the electorate actually vote the bums out. The system is corrupted by career politicians who will protect their power base at all costs.

I think the time has come when we take a long, hard look at the people we elect. 'Safe' seats such as Ron Paul's should be up for grabs every two years. In his case, he has shirked his responsibility to those who elected him and he is taking advantage of his 'safe' seat.

Why is it that a state will always vote a certain way, a district always votes a certain way? What does that say about us as individuals, of our ability to make up our own minds?

Change will NEVER come until we sit down and say to ourselves, the status quo must go. Change is in the hands of the electorate, not big business or PAC's or lobbyists as they DON'T VOTE, we DO! We can blame big money, but the reality is that WE are the ones who actually have the power. We can no longer be timid, we have to take back control of our government. If it takes one Congressman at a time, then so be it.

The Budget and deficit..arghhh.

That last weeks have demonstrated how dysfunctional our system of government really is. On one side, we have politicians who believe that to relieve the crisis we must reduce spending and increase revenues and reduce the deficit by $4T in 12 years. On the other side, there is a group who believe that we should reduce spending only, this will give us a balanced budget in..er...76 years. According to the GOP talking points, the time for compromise has ended. Today when asked, the GOP Whip said that a 'clean' bill to increase debt ceiling is a non-starter and will never pass the House. What the GOP wants to do is attach riders to the bill which add more spending cuts, which in my opinion is something best left to the FY2012 budgetary process. To hold the increase of the debt ceiling hostage, without any hope for compromise is a recipe for financial disaster, not only for this country, but the world financial communities as well.

I find it ironic that the GOP has pointed out that the President is not following to the letter the recommendations of the Debt Reduction Commission. This commission was created by executive order by the President after the vote in the Senate failed because the 7 GOP Senators who CO-SPONSORED the bill voted against their own bill when the President came out in support of it.

Admittedly I am no economist, nor am I very smart, but it does not take a rocket scientist to reflect on actual history and facts to disprove the GOP assertion that tax cuts alone will resolve our jobs situation and reduce the deficit and debt. When Bush2 took office, he had a $273B budget SURPLUS from the previous administration. It took Mr. Clinton with a Republican Congress 6 years to balance the budget. Enter Bush2. What did he do? First was to slash the tax rates for the wealthy, why? Who knows. Everything was chugging along just fine. Job creation slowed by 60% after we had been told that if we reduce taxes on millionaires and billionaires, more jobs would be created. The fact that 22 million jobs had been created the previous 8 years seems to have been ignored. To be fair to Bush2, we did have 9/11 which lead to the war in Afghanistan. Of course, if he had had that $273B in the kitty, the financial hit would not have been so bad. In fact, the unfunded Part D Medicare would have been covered as well. In reality, had the tax cuts not been in place, Bush2 could have funded Afghanistan, Part D, Katrina, Iraq and all the extra Federal shopping which took place under his administration. The budget surplus over his 8 years was projected to be...$4T if he had left well enough alone. The the recession hit and we had nothing left in the kitty to fund TARP and the programs Mr. Obama was able to push through Congress, against the party of NO. So we increased the debt and deficit again. Now we face a $14T deficit, equaling our GDP. Unfortunately it was necessary for the government to step in to stop the recession in it's tracks. The result is an uneven recovery. Wall Street has recovered to pre-recession levels. Corporations have $2T in the bank. While unemployment has dropped significantly, it is still not enough to make up for the lost revenue through payroll taxes. People who don't work, don't pay taxes.

To put things in perspective...if we shut down the government, I mean..everything..it would take 9 years to pay off the debt with the current receipts. Does anyone know what $14T is? It's 14,000 billion dollars! So when the GOP 'negotiated' the the $70+B deal with the White House, it points out how insignificant those cuts really are.

Many Tea Party talking heads want to do just that. Shut the whole thing down. Maybe we should let them, for say a week. Let the American people see exactly what it would be like to have no government, no government services at all. Then they can see exactly how extreme the right wing is.

The GOP say's they want to revamp the tax code to get rid of the loopholes. Well, unless they toss the entire code and come up with a minimum tax for all corporations, say 20% which is only 3% more than the average effective rate, they will be wasting their time. You cannot say that they will go through every loophole and pull it without lobbyist interference is practical nor desirable. The good thing about the flat tax on business is that small business will get a tax break, big business will finally be paying something.

Bring back the standard taxes for the wealthy, its only a 2-3% increase...tiny by comparison.

But what do I know?