By Peter Churchman
Are you better off with ever increasing government control and government spending? Will your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren be more enriched by inheriting a country that is plagued with generational debt? Every year, our congress votes - generally by omnibus - to increase government spending. As the government is spending more money, shouldn’t we be receiving better things from them? Despite this increase in spending, I’m not receiving better, or more, from the federal government. I think it’s time for a change. It’s time for the government to decrease in size and decrease their enormous spending. This will facilitate our country becoming stronger.
In the most recent election we had a few seats switch from red to blue, and a few seats switch from blue to red. The end result will be the same - the government will grow. It doesn’t matter which party is in control, every year government spends more and becomes larger. The people of this great nation deserve to be represented by legislators that realize they are made of the same clay that everybody else is and Representatives that do not try to run our lives and spend our money.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I believe a large part of the legislation that is expanding our government and increasing government spending was intended to help specific segments or specific problems of our population. However, this is rarely successful. The originally well intentioned bills are too often a detriment to the country and, in turn, damage the very people they were trying to help. The bills are inefficient and ripe with waste, fraud and abuse. They help very few people, and it’s often at the expense of everyone else. They are heavily influenced by lobbyists that want a sweet government contract or a tax subsidy. It’s imperative to end these government programs before they drown our country in debt.
The federal government does a few things very well, a few things okay, and fails miserably at the rest. Most of what we call discretionary spending is full of crony capitalism, and is unconstitutional. Congress should follow the plan laid out in the enumerated powers of our Constitution (Article 1 Section 8) and leave the rest to the states, as prescribed by the 10th Amendment. Our Constitution is the best in the world. The most appropriate thing that our federal government could do would be to do ONLY what is authorized in our founding document and nothing more. If we followed the Constitution, we could balance the budget and pay off our debt without the need for an income tax, and we would be stronger for doing so.
Those in power will always crave more power, and having the government do (and spend) more is their way to attain that. They want more of our hard earned money because they think that they can spend it better than we can. Our elected officials are not some elite ruling class with the innate power to control our lives better than we ourselves can. It is time we returned our country back to the people. It is time for the government to do less so that the people can do more. We the people are the ones this country belongs to. We have the right to spend our money without another big government program reaching into our pockets.
