Stop Pulling the Wagon

The government says it wants to “fix” the problem of unequal pay and income.  They say too few are paid too much (the evil rich) while too many are not paid enough (victims of the rich).  The goal of the government is to equalize pay for all citizens.

Based on the governments track record of “fixing” things like the War on Poverty, our Public Education System, the Postal Service, Amtrak, and the growing National Debt, I am not sure we want them to try to “fix” income equality.  Or anything else.

I have a vision of what a likely government “fix” will look like.

First they will establish what is a reasonable amount for everyone to be paid. For sake of  this discussion lets say they decide on $60,000 a year.  That would be $5,000 a month.

Here is a plan that I am sure would appeal to every bureaucrats heart.  All residents of the United States of working age (18?) would receive a “salary” of $5,000 per month from the government who would function as the payroll department for all employers.  A “single payer” system under complete control of the government and IRS.   We could all become cogs in the wheel of the Proletariat masses.

Don’t worry, if you like your current job, you can keep it.  That’s a promise.

Your education does not matter.  Your age does not matter.  Race, religion, political party, type of work, skill level, work ethic, level of responsibility, or experience. None of these matter.  Unions could be eliminated, you wouldn’t need them.  No merit or performance pay, everybody gets paid the same.  Movie stars, Presidents, Barbers, Plumbers, Soldiers, Dog Catchers, Burger Flippers, Brain Surgeons, etc.

Visualize a Baseball Team under this system.  The owners, the managers, star players, beginning players,  bat boys, groundskeepers, peanut vendors, everybody gets exactly the same pay.

As desirable as this sounds in providing equal pay for all of us it would have the added benefit that the IRS could withhold their “fair share” before we see our paycheck with no need for us to ever file an annual return.  Who could possibly object to such a fair and equitable solution?   Consider this,  we would all get paid the same no matter how lousy a job we do.  Just like members of Congress.

If every citizen received the same amount of pay every month, do you think we would all have the same bank account at the end of the year?  Or would some have a fat bank account, another a new car and still another a giant hangover?

Perhaps governments next task is to require equal outcomes for all of us?  It should be easy.  A plan to devolve all of us to the lowest common denominator.  Call it government approved cookie cutter equality.

An American melting pot filled with glassy eyed, average room temperature IQ automatons.

Bob Bandy

I have not written anything for a while.  When I write here I like to do so in a kind of upbeat way.  Even if I am frustrated by happenings in the world I try to temper my frustration with humor.  However, I must confess to being in a kind of “funk” for several months.

It’s a trust issue and we seem to be in a drought.

I don’t know anyone who does not fear, at some level, the Internal Revenue Service.  You do not have to have done anything wrong for them to make your life absolutely miserable.  Not even the Internal Revenue Service fully understands its own rules,  or the myriad of the often confusing, conflicting and convoluted interpretation of  those rules.

Still, I always felt comforted by the fact that all of us could expect the same unfeeling, mean spirited and heartless treatment from the IRS.  In other words I believed we would all be treated equally badly.  Not any more.

It is now clear the Internal Revenue Service, along with the Judicial System, Environmental Protection Agency, Labor Department and virtually every other Government agency and department have become politicized and hopelessly corrupted by those in political power.

We can no longer expect fair and equal treatment from government at any level.  We must change our political registration and affiliation to that of the current ruling party in the seat of government and hope for favored rulings due to our political party “loyalty”.

I no longer have any expectation that our political leaders will tell me the truth.  Not to say there are not rare individuals who tell the truth, but they are lost in the crowd of  the habitual purveyors of lies, half truths and “spin” that serve only at the twin altars of  re-election and power.

What is the old saying?  Lie to me once, shame on you.  Lie to me twice, shame on me.  To which I would add: “You have lied to me a thousand times, so do you really expect me to trust anything you say?  Sorry, trust is a fragile thing.  Trust must be earned and cannot be instilled by government fiat or Presidential executive order.”

Our political leaders remind me of a line from “The Sounds of Silence” written by Paul Simon:  “And the people bowed and prayed to the neon gods they made”.

Not much in the way of humor to find in this.  Only a kind of sorrow that we have corrupted a political system that once brought hope to so many.

Bob Bandy

It has been my philosophy to never give up trying.

There have been tough times in my life where my faith and the belief that God doesn’t so much want me to be willing to die for him as he wants me to live out his plan for me that has given me the grit to keep on trying, no matter the odds.

Like the frog with his hands around the throat of the stork.  I am feeling like that.

I love this country and feel blessed to have been born here and to have grown up in the years and times that I did.

Lately, I have become discouraged at the path that we, as a nation, are headed down.  I see a time coming all too soon that most everything I believe in will be gone.  Washed away in a Tsunami of national debt and dependency.  A form of institutionalized slavery for the great mass of sheeple.

We are going to need to build a fence around our borders, not to keep enemies out, but to keep productive citizens from escaping.  Looking for freedom and opportunity in another part of the world.

It isn’t that there are not hardworking, sincere and honest leaders and politicians trying their best to make things better.  There are.  The problem is the other 97%.

One of the most admired people in my life is both an attorney and a politician – and that is a sentence I never thought I would be able to write.  He is also a man of faith and, in my opinion, a kind of Don Quixote.  Armed with but a single lance in a forest of windmills.

Leaders like this man are vastly outnumbered.  One of a small percentage of dedicated men and women.  They face an overwhelming army of what I have characterized as clowns, lunatics and criminals, interested only in their own re-election and feeding their own egos.

Too few Don Quixote’s and too many windmills filled with the aristocracy from the dark side.

How do we fix anything with those kind of odds?

Is it time to just give up and start looking for a hole in the fence?   I’m beginning to wonder.

Bob Bandy

Reprinted with only my closing comment. 

I received this via email with a request to share it.

With an apology to Aesop

Once upon a time there was a pleasant meadow in a lovely valley.

A colony of ants came to the meadow and saw that the land was good and with work would provide for a lovely place to live for them and their children.

They worked hard and put away food for the winter and cared for the land.

From a neighboring valley a tribe of locusts came to the land of the ants and decided to stay because the meadow was so pleasant and fertile.

The ants welcomed them in as neighbors and soon they all decided that they should form a government and each ant and locust would get an equal vote in the affairs of the meadow.

Some of the  locusts came to the ants and said they were poor and in need.  Being of kind heart the ants voted to share the fruits of their hard work with the locusts.

Being locusts, they did what locusts are prone to do, that is create lots of little locusts and sit in their burrows eating the food produced by the ants and watching their flat screen televisions paid for by the ants.

In time they discovered, as the little locusts grew up to vote, that they now outnumbered the ants and could vote themselves more and more of what the ants were working so hard to produce.

More and more locusts had baby locusts and invited their relatives and kin in from neighboring meadows.

One by one the ants figured out that they were doing all the work and the locusts were doing all the eating and loafing and watching television.

The ants decided that they did not want to continue to provide for an ever increasing number of locusts who did little to provide for themselves.

The ants packed up and left the now ravaged meadow and moved away to another meadow in another valley.

Winter came to the meadow of the abandoned locusts.  The locusts starved and froze because there was no longer any ants to provide for them what they refused to provide for themselves.

And the shadow of darkness fell over the formerly  pleasant meadow in the formerly lovely valley.

End of story.  If you are an ant you know the moral of the story.  If you are a locust you don’t care if there is a moral; you just want to know where the ants went.

Bob Bandy

Have not posted anything in a while.  Written a number of drafts but not been happy with the content or tone.  Following what is happening in national and world events has gotten me into something of a “funk”.

I have always thought of myself as a positive kind of person.  Tried to see humor, or at least irony,  in most of the foibles of mankind.

But, I can’t see anything cute or funny in what is happening to the country I was born in and loved all my life.  This is not a Democrat or Republican thing.  A pox on both their houses.  They both “brung us here where we is now”. 

From my view there are two catastrophic problems facing the United States and everything else is the fruit of these two things.

One: You can’t have true civilization without civility and we are loosing our ability to be civil with one another.  We are dividing into warring camps with irreconcilable differences.  Not everything can be compromised.

Two: The discipline of simple mathematics.  No matter what title or letters you put before or after you name, you cannot get 20 pounds of potatoes from a 10 pound sack and that is what we are trying to do.  The universe does not care what your political affiliation is or if you don’t like the laws of mathematics.  Ultimately, math is like gravity and spending money you don’t have is like trying to fly without wings.  Deficit spending can only go so high before it all comes tumbling down.

If you are an individual, a corporation, or even a city and you spend “what you don’t got” you can file Bankruptcy.  In the case of a corporation, Bankruptcy leaves the stockholders holding an empty bag and in the case of city (or state) the taxpayers are the recipients of said empty sack.   If you are a nation you cannot declare Bankruptcy.  Nations can do what we can’t do;  print money.   They start printing more and more paper money and the result is inflation or hyper-inflation.  Inflation is always harmful or catastrophic to those on fixed or limited income (like the elderly) and can make a lifetime of savings do a vanishing act.  As an example, gasoline that used to be $1.50 a gallon becomes $3 or $5 or $10 a gallon.  Math is not evil it is just relentless.

History is littered with the carcasses of nations that did not practice the fiscal discipline required by the laws of mathematics.  The news tells us that our nation is approaching a fiscal “cliff”.

I have reached that point where I recognize that, as a people, we lack the discipline to avoid what is going to happen very soon if we do not make some very difficult and painful changes.  I am not alone in this observation.

Is it already to late?  Is the sky falling?

Bob Bandy