THE US REPORT

Pt. 1 in a series ‘Seeking Redress of Grievances’
Main Street USA

Can you think of anything crazier than proposing record levels of spending amid the hard economic times Main Street, USA faces right now? That’s exactly what President Barack Obama’s administration wants in the budget—an increase of 5.7 percent to $3.72 trillion. That increase, among other items,  will provide more money to the states for Medicaid, increase funds for welfare programs like food stamps and the homeless and pay lip service to so-called ‘middle class’ taxpayers by giving them a small break in the neighborhood of $400 per individual.

Lesson one in Reality Government: What the government spends, we must provide, every single one of us either through the front door or the back.

As we face a financial quagmire, the administration is also adding or has added more federal workers. The Washington Times said most of the increase will be in civilian workers—“153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people, in fiscal 2010.” Remember to add applicable taxes, retirement and insurance to those employees’ salaries.

[Image from NASA]That those claiming to lead the government would consider increasing a budget as well as the federal payroll tells me we need a few ‘locofocos.’

I learned about these activists of yesteryear in a column by Lawrence W. Reed at The Freeman Online. Reed writes, “In American history no such group has ever been as colorful and as thorough in its understanding of equal rights as one that flashed briefly across the political skies in the 1830s and ’40s. They were called ‘Locofocos.’”

Freeman is one of my favorite speakers and writers—he is one of the most interesting scholars I have ever met. His lecture on the Great Depression is one that will open your eyes to the reality of big government largesse and set many a historical record straight.

He goes on to explain how members of this faction of the Democrat Party of President Andrew Jackson  were left in the dark at a politically charged convention in 1836—the “more conservative officialdom,” Reed said, “walked out, plunging the meeting room into darkness as they left by turning off the gas lights. The radicals continued to meet by the light of candles they lit with matches called “loco focos” (Spanish for ‘crazy lights’).

The locofocos were angry about the national bank (a “tool of special interests”), monopolies (such as the cronyism so popular in government today) and federal policies in conflict with the US Constitution.

Sound familiar? I think leftwing zealots like comic Keith Olbermann might see a parallel with the Tea Partiers he and his retrogressive buddies like to ridicule. Libertarians would also like those locofocos I think.

We must admit to ourselves that our government led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Obama has lost sight of reality.

Any business experiencing a downturn in sales volume would begin to cut expenses. An eye would be turned to payroll. We have repeatedly called for eliminating federal positions by attrition—in non-vital agencies this would be very easy to do. We have repeatedly called for removing funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Dept. of Education. Neither are necessary and neither are a duty of the federal government. Those are just for starters in this first public petition for redress of grievances.

In a business experiencing the downturn our government saw in tax revenue, the owner or manager would remove any and all unnecessary expenses. Pelosi’s extravagant plane transport, the president’s own record earmarks when he was a senator (we are at the moment paying for a late Democrat senator’s think tank in an Obama perpetual earmark) and the Stimulus are but a few examples.

As an example of Stimulus insanity, consider a report from Citizens Against Government Waste: “On December 8, Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) released a “Stimulus Checkup” report citing $7 billion in wasteful stimulus spending.  The examples included $5 million for a geothermal energy system for the Oak Ridge City Center shopping mall in Tennessee, which has been losing tenants for years and is mostly empty; $1.57 million for Pennsylvania State University researchers to look for fossils in Argentina; $950,000 for two universities in Arizona to study the division of labor among ants; and, $400,000 to evaluate the drinking and drug habits for residents of Buffalo, N.Y.”

Where are the locofocos when we need them?

In truth, we’re right here. And we better speak up and act. We can vote big spenders out of office. We can seek redress, as is our Constitutional right.

We can utilize the courts, advocacy groups and other legal means. We can phone our congressmen, write them letters and tell them exactly  how we feel. We can join the nearest Tea Party and we can work to educate all voters so they realize that playing the Democrat Robin Hood game will, in the long run, impact freedom and civil order. Everyone has an equal right to his or her property and our government is overstepping by expecting to spend more and tax more.

The new increase in the budget should be offset—the total amount—by equal cuts in spending, and at least 10 percent should be cut across the board on top of that. Taxpayers can use this crisis to request government to remove programs that were never meant to be administered on the federal level anyway. Government has overlooked the fact that when you multiply the work force and increase government property, that will require an even larger work force to administer because your needs will grow larger with time.

The only hope for American liberty and sovereignty is for the government to reduce its spending substantially—not by some meek margin that simply pays political lip service to Tea Partiers, conservatives and Libertarians.

I’d suggest for starters that conservative and Libertarian bloggers post a Redress of Grievances on the same day. We could do it on Presidents’ Day February 15. That seems apropos.

The locofocos said, “The true foundation of Republican Government is the equal rights of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management.”

As for Main street, if we don’t take responsibility for these people we have elected, then we can call ourselves just plain loco.--Commentary by Kay B. Day