Balancing the Budget, Reducing the Debt

The other day, I attended a meeting of the conservative wing of the Tea Party — the Have Some Jack Daniels With Your Tea Party — and the conversation naturally rolled around to the stalemate in Washington about raising the debt ceiling and the out-of-balance budget.

A lot of suggestions and plans were bandied about, and ultimately there came out of all this a manifesto for how to use the lessons of our history (with some borrowed from other countries) to get us out of financial trouble and reassert ourselves as the most powerful economic nation in the world. Here are some highlights:

* Unemployment is a multi-faceted problem and as such requires a multi-faceted solution: We must come to realize that it is not immigrants who are taking jobs away from Americans. It is women. Is it any coincidence that the rise in the number of women in the workplace and their ridiculous demand for "equal pay for equal work" (as if their work could ever be as good as a man's) has paralleled the rise in unemployment for men? I think not. If we were to ban women from the workplace (except of course for the low-level jobs that no self-respecting man would be caught dead doing) we could then hire all the immigrants we want and put them into the cushy jobs in meat packing factories and cotton fields.

* We need to get rid of the unions. The whole idea that workers should be paid a fair and equitable raise completely undermines the right of the boss to pay them whatever he feels like and to only give raises to his friends and relatives.

* We need to get rid of OSHA. How can you expect a company to be profitable and create more jobs if they have to work about whether one of their workers is going to lose a finger or two.

* Entitlements have to be wiped out. (Oops, we mean entitlements for poor people, not the corporate entitlements — they can stay.) For years we have had to put up with all those bleeding-heart tree-huggers who believe that it's not the poor people's fault that they are poor. What a load of crap. It's a matter of character and strength of will. If they didn't want to be poor, they'd stop being poor. (It's similar to the argument that only people who can afford to live in Marin County should be able to live in Marin County.)

* Corporate entitlements must be maintained. The rich and the powerful should be rewarded for being rich and powerful. Otherwise, why put in the effort of all your employees to make you rich and powerful.

* Medicare and Medicaid should be elminated completely. We all know that healing begins in the home, and once we get women to stop working they'll be home to tend to the sick. Problem solved.

* Public education must be completely revamped. We have moved away from the educational system put together in the 1840s to prepare workers for the drudgery of factory line work in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. If they want jobs today, then they're going to have to learn about drudgery in school, just like their forefathers.

* We need to decide at an early age who is smart and who is stupid and educate them accordingly. Making smart kids associate with stupid kids just makes them stupid, too. And stupid people vote for Democrats.

* Now we turn our attention to the military. We have all these kids coming home from war complaining of headaches, and dissassociation and PTSD. It's not war's fault. It's the fault of American parents and schools for coddling our children when they are you. How can you expect an 18-year-old to go off to war and savaging brutalize and kill our enemies when we raise them to believe things like, "It's important to share" and "Don't hit your sister." We need to help them get in touch with their natural aggression, and distrust of people who don't speak American, at an early age so that by the time they are old enough they'll be in peak military condition mentally as well as physically. And if they can't shut it off after their tours are over, we'll just build more prisons. And that's great for fighting unemployment, too!

* And last, but not least, we must immediately return to the golden age of colonialism. We can no longer afford to be held hostage by OPEC and those other selfish resource hogs. We Americans invented oil and gasoline, and we damned sure have the right to take it from whomever we please. If Third World countries protest our approporiations of their resources, then let them just try to stop us. Remember, we make more weapons that all other countries combined.

The Romans may have popularized imperialism, but we can do it better.