I hate to sound like a cynic; even more, I hate having my cynicism proved prescient. I am suspicious when the ‘lady doth protest too much.’ For example, today when I walked into the office where my kids were playing Wizard 101 online and chatting, my eldest ran up and started hugging me and telling me how much he loved me. Him being sweet but nine, and therefore not commonly so affectionate; this mom went straight to his chat log to see what he didn’t want me to notice. Praise God it was just him inviting everyone to ‘The Ice Palace’ to see him and some little girl get ‘married’. He was embarrassed. Phew!

Unfortunately, the bait and switch played by the used car salesmen in D.C. was not so sweet and innocent. I was fuming at the hearings on TV yesterday. Every time some puffed up hypocrite invoked the name of “My Constituents” or “The Taxpayers” I think I got a little taste of what Jesus feels when the Westboro loonies curse fallen heroes in His name. The whole time these two-bit shysters were railing on behalf of the people of this nation, attacking Liddy who is working for a single dollar to clean up someone else’s mess, I’m thinking two things, “How dare you act like you are doing this for the PEOPLE!” and “What do you NOT want us to see you sneaky bastards?”

Well today the word is out. The Fed went to work at 4 p.m. yesterday and the echo chamber of the media decrying $165 million in contractually obligated bonus payments was so loud you couldn’t hear the printing presses churning out one TRILLION fresh dollars. This is money from thin air; an unprecedented influx of cash into an economy that is shrinking, not growing. I said to my sister, “I guess China isn’t buying our debt anymore.” “I guess we’re buying our own,” she replied.

It made me think of an old episode of Married with Children. Peg gets into one of those Mary Kay style businesses but she’s a lazy bum. She doesn’t go out and stir up new business. She just buys everything herself and she thinks she’s going to make money that way. Tragically, this appears to be the mentality of our leadership. 

You cannot print your way out of debt. You can only print your way into a Carter economy. In very, very simple terms, all of the cash we have in circulation is really only worth the amount of genuine wealth accumulated by all of the personal holdings in the nation; all of the physical stuff we have. If you double the amount of money in circulation without doubling the amount of stuff in the economy, the value, or buying power of the money was just cut in half. It doesn’t happen overnight of course. It takes time for the excess cash to place an impossible demand on products which then become artificially scarce causing shortages of particular items. Shortages drive increased prices in order to allocate the scarce supplies to those willing to pay the most for them. Wages rarely rise as quickly as prices, which makes the buying power of your income decline. If you earn a dollar an hour and each dollar can buy two packs of gum, but now there are people left and right who are willing to pay two dollars for the same two packs of gum, you can only buy half what you could before with the same hourly income.

I find it incomprehensible that a man as intelligent as Barack Obama obviously is could possibly believe this is an effective response to a faltering economy. In fact, everything he has proposed is anathema to building wealth. He promises to make it more expensive to employ in an environment of burgeoning unemployment. He promises to insure 78 million additional people through government largesse while admitting that the insurance we currently provide is bankrupting us. He promises to cut the national debt in half while tripling it and enacting policies proven time and again to reduce the tax revenue of the national coffers. He promises a better energy policy and more affordable living standards, while crushing the energy market with a two trillion dollar cap and trade scheme, the cost of which will fall on anyone who drives a car or heats a home.

So if he isn’t stupid, what explains these foolhardy endeavors? Could it be that while we are suffering under ballooning energy costs, deteriorating health care and sky-rocketing inflation, this ideologue will use our desperation to institute changes to our way of life that will make the past couple of months look conservative by comparison? 

I am coming closer and closer to the conviction that Rahm Emanuel was understating things when he said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The policy of this Administration seems to really be, “Never let a good crisis end.”

For the past four years I have practiced as an Independent Petroleum Landman. For those of you who do not know what that is, I am employed by “Big Oil” through brokers to do research on who owns the rights to minerals in areas of interest for domestic oil or gas production. We make great money when exploration is up. When it is down we live on savings. Unlike the unionized GM workers, we have no health benefits, no disability insurance, no paid days off, no sick leave, no Family Leave Act, no unemployment insurance, no employer contribution to our tax burden. Most devastatingly, we have no Washington Elites crying the blues for us when our business takes a downturn thanks to the utter mismanagement and atrocious interference of the federal government.

While unionized GM workers are threatened with job loss due to their own penchant for ever higher compensation and ever lower productivity, we are threatened with job loss due to third party constraints and a propagandized demonization of the people who provide our daily bread. No one is on the news slandering the people who sell milk for $3.55 a gallon, despite the fact that producing milk requires hooking a placid bovine teat into a sucker machine. Ironically when gas, the production of which requires literally billions of dollars in capital risk, hits that price it is some atrocity perpetrated on the common man. 

While the Congress throws money at a failing car company that has proven its inability to provide a product for which people are willing to pay a profitable price; while Obama shows off the solar panel company (co-owned by all whopping fifty-some employees) he will be slathering with federal largesse, thousands of people like my husband and I are wishing we could just go back to work providing a product the nation already uses for a company capable of making a profit; a company that has never taken a bailout. 

Am I asking for the government to favor me? No. I am asking the government to get the hell out of the business of dictating to the people by controlling the market. Now I know when someone hears you say “the market” they see it as something so impersonal. Really it is the most personal of all the methods of allocating the resources of our country. What is the market but everyone in the nation deciding personally whether they, for example, want a house covered in solar panels or a gas line?  I am not asking for favorable treatment of my industry, I am asking the government to not use my money, and that of thousands of citizens in my industry, to set up an unfair advantage against us. Stop banning drilling in wastelands. Stop taxing the gas we supply into the stratosphere. Stop dumping our money into a competitor’s trade that has spent four decades proving how untenable it is in an open market.

One of the great problems with government interference in the marketplace is that is promotes unpredictability. When I entered this business with my husband, we knew that gas and heating oil were things the country needed. We knew that the companies we chose to work for would be necessary for a long time to come, especially if anyone ever wised up and let us produce all of our energy here on U.S. soil rather than importing from terrorism sponsor nations. We knew that the U.S. has far more reserves than we could use up even in the next century. We understood that even if reserves in our local area started to dry up we would know within the petroleum industry far in advance and could make adjustments to a new career with plenty of time to spare.

What we could not predict, of course, was a regime so hostile to wealth creation and in particular “Big Oil.” On the free market of course, our job is as valuable a commodity as ever. In the market that has been artificially restrained by the social-engineering junta now controlling D.C. we are useless. 

Senator Vitter of our neighbor-state, Louisiana, has proposed a zero-cost stimulus. Instead of throwing billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars at industries that are failing, just let a successful industry be unfettered. Let “Big Oil” go about its business providing an essential product at a reasonable price while it employs hundreds of thousands of Americans who do not want a handout, we just want to work.

I never write for personal gain, but this once I am asking anyone who is willing, to call Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Senator Vitter and your own Representatives. Tell them you support this bill which will cost the taxpayers nothing, put hundreds of thousands of people back to work, and make your heat, gas and pretty much everything you buy that requires transportation or energy cheaper.

Pelosi:   202-225-0100

Reid:    202-224-3542

Vitter:  202-224-4623

I very much enjoyed the Texas Tea Party in Ft. Worth to protest the stimulus and wasteful spending. It was wonderful to see people desirous of returning to responsible fiscal policies. Unfortunately, what we need to realize is that there are a million small abuses every day in Washington and we cannot protest them all. Recently I watched a Democratic Congressman defend the earmarks in this latest bill as being acceptable because they are “transparent.” Let me be clear: There is no such thing as transparency in a bill with thousands of pages. Shall we simply quit our jobs and spend day and night reading through the 9,000 earmarks in this bill? The earmarks being one place, incidentally, where bipartisanship really shines. We cannot possibly stop all government abuses by coming at them on a case by case basis. This is like trying to plug a sieve with your fingers. We must take away the very ability of these abuses to arise in the first place, and confiscatory taxation by the federal government is the root of the problem.

So the first front we must attack is the taxation system as it currently stands within the United States. Thirty-nine states have already petitioned for redress of this grievance in the form of overturning the 16th Amendment, which allows for the progressive income tax policy that enslaves us today. I suggest several reforms which could be bound into an amendment to be presented to our sister states outside the control of Congress and without their approval or oversight.

Article V of the Constitution allows States to elect a convention to craft amendments and present them to the other states for ratification. This is specifically designed for the situation at hand: A congress drunk on its own power and unwilling to relent. Only thirty-eight states are needed to amend the Constitution and we are in a situation where thirty-nine agree with us on this most important point.

Secondly, abuse and inefficiency is exacerbated and enabled by the method in which bills are drawn up, including multiple unrelated issues in a single bill. This practice must end. These bills have thousands of office budgets in one document receiving millions, often billions of dollars each and there is not a speck of direction or explanation on how this money is to be spent. For example, among many, many other offices listed in the Agriculture portion of the latest spending bill, I was struck by an appropriation for “The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights.” The Office of the Assistant Secretary will receive $871,000.00 for “necessary expenses.” That is just the Assistant Secretary’s Office. The actual Office of Civil Rights will receive $21,551,000.00. And this was not something I cherry-picked. I use it because it was on one of the very first pages of the bill.

Well I have some questions. Why does the Agriculture Department need TWENTY-TWO MILLION DOLLARS in an Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights? Who is this Assistant Secretary? What necessary expenses does he have that total nearly a million dollars for the office in addition to the twenty-one million the department under him is getting? Do we not have an entire Civil Rights Department in the budget already? What civil rights are we protecting specifically in the field of Agriculture to the tune of twenty-two million dollars every year?

As it stands I will never get an answer. My Congressmen likely do not have an answer. It seems the majority of Washington bureaucrats collude with one another to pass these ludicrous appropriations en masse, having no clue what they are for and not caring, so long as no one gets in the way when it is their turn at the trough.

We can end this waste and unaccountability by requiring the following:

1. Let each office prepare a budget listing exactly how much they need and for what purposes. All expenditures should be clear, including number of employees to be compensated, at what salary, and what purpose they serve.

2. Let each budget be presented to Congress individually. Require Congress to vote up or down on these individual bills. Will this take more time than the old way? Yes. Congress may have to come and vote more than eight hours a week. Might this inspire Congress to cut some useless projects to save time on the floor? We can only hope so. It would also stop our representatives from being able to dodge tough questions about an appropriation they voted for by pointing to a more popular portion of the legislation.

3. Let the bill and the budget be posted online for all to see. Expenditures such as a lump sum given for office supplies should be left online throughout the fiscal year, in the format of a checkbook register. Every time expenditure is made out of that budget the receipt or invoice should be scanned and available online for all to see.

4. At the close of the fiscal year money still available in the budget should be rolled over into the following year's budget. If that money cannot be accounted for the office in question will find it or find a way to live without it.

These alterations in the method of Washington business would effectively castrate the Washington power base. We would see unemployment lines filled with lobbyists. The next greatest accomplishment would be to see unemployment lines filled with IRS agents, and I have a formula for that as well.

No longer should Washington dictate what the ‘General Welfare’ of our citizens is to be. Every Sovereign State should be empowered to determine the extent of involvement she will have with the Federal bureaucracy. Our states have failed us by jumping at the chance to let Uncle Sam feed our hungry and clothe our poor in exchange for our independence. Are there states who will wish to continue feeding at the public trough? Certainly, but no longer should we be forced to provide the slop.

I recommend an Amendment that would allow States to opt out of federal programs they find undesirable, harmful or wasteful. The citizens of those states that opt out of certain programs should not be burdened with taxation for proportion of the federal budget that supports those programs. When the federal budget is proposed, states should be responsible proportionally to both their population and the percentage of federal involvement they desire, in their tax contribution. There are certain very limited areas a state could not opt out of, for example defense spending.

In keeping with state sovereignty, the individual states should collect these taxes in a manner acceptable to their people and turn them over to Uncle Sam, cutting off his ability to reach into the pockets of any one of us.

More importantly, this would rob Washington of its power to damage our prosperity as they are currently doing. We are watching the collapse of our economy exacerbated by fools in D.C. who haven’t the first notion of market forces, or simply do not care. While several states have been flourishing by providing friendly business climates, Washington will undo all of that by imposing nationwide destructive tax policies that will chase capital completely out of the country no matter what the individual states do to make their markets attractive to investors.