No One Asked Me But…

by Dr. Larry Moses
Posted July 23, 2008

No one asked me but… It’s the national debt, stupid! It’s the housing problem, stupid! It’s the costs of gas, stupid! It’s the economy, stupid!

My granddaughter often reminds me it is not nice to call people stupid. That is true. It is not nice to call people stupid, but one must wonder what we need to call the American people to get them to wake up.

It is not the lack of taxation that has killed the American economy. If you total up all the taxes you pay, you will find somewhere near fifty percent of your income goes for taxes of one kind or another.

Rather, it is the lack of discretion when it comes to spending. Those tax and spend politicians, they used to be just liberal democrats but now it is all of them, remind me of the commercial on TV for structured settlements, they shout, “It’s my money and I want it now”. Well, it’s not their money and they may need it now but that is their fault for the shabby job they have done handling the money the American people have made available to them.

When I was a kid and I had a pet project that I wanted done I would go to my father and asked for the financial help to make the project a reality. My father would reply, “Wait a minute. I will go into the backyard and pluck those funds off the money tree.” I soon came to realize there was no money tree.

The problem with the federal government officials is that they never grew up and realized the money tree does not exist. While most state constitutions have provisions that require a balanced budget, unfortunately, the federal government has no such restraint. When the feds run out of money they merely borrow more wherever they can to keep the peasants happy. However, this policy has brought the country to edge of bankruptcy.

At this point I am no longer concerned with whose fault it is that this country is in a financial crunch. I am more interested in who can tells us how to cure the problem. It is too late to fix the blame; we need to fix the problem.

No one asked me but…I have been looking at the CCSD school budget for 2007-2008. If you have an evening and the inclination, some fascinating figures can be viewed. If you take the total budget for the district, not just the operating budget, you will find that the district budgeted $5.668 billion this year. The district anticipated there would be 314,403 students. If you divide these two figures, you find the district planned to spend $18,028 per student. That is not much less than the premier private schools in Las Vegas.

No one asked me but… These are some things I have learned over the last sixty-eight years. Some are original thought and some are not. Those that are not original I have come to accept even though I cannot always trace their origins.

– Not everyone who agrees with you is your friend; not everyone who disagrees with you is your enemy.
– No job pays enough to make it worthwhile to compromise your principles.
– When measuring your success in life, accumulation of money is a poor way to keep score.
– When showing your new car to a friend, he will always tell you he could have gotten you a better deal.
– When you get directions to a specific place and someone tells you can’t miss it, you will.
– No matter what your job, you really always work for yourself.
– Everyone is fighting a tough battle to get through life.
– When someone is doing something unpleasant to you and says it is for your own good, this is probably not true. – Everyone thinks everyone else’s job is easy and they are overpaid to do it.
– He who dies with the most money still dies.
– No one on their death bed ever said, “Darn, I wish I had worked more week-ends.”
– When someone stops while you are changing a tire at the side of the road the first question they will asked is, “Did you have a flat?”
– When someone starts a sentence with “to tell the truth” he probably isn’t.
– Never refuse to shake hands with a working man because his hands are dirty, he may be the only one to whom a handshake means anything.
– Only God is more important than family.
– When your dad says, “This is going to hurt me more than you”; it will not.
– Marry your best friend and life will be a whole lot better.
– The smartest people I know are not the best educated people I know, but I still believe the more education you have, the better off you are.
– The older generation always believes they are smarter and more moral than the younger generation, but that is not necessarily true.
– If you have to argue with a woman, choose one you don’t like because you will not win and she will never forget or forgive.
– Most people who champion a cause that requires a sacrifice seldom make the sacrifice themselves.
– While you are loafing, someone is practicing and when you meet him head to head, he will win.
– The tyranny of the majority is just as bad as the tyranny of the minority or a single dictator.
– Committees are useless and are places where good ideas go to die.
– Two heads are not better than one if both heads are sitting on fools.
– The majority is not always right, but for the most part the majority should have the final say in how the country is run.
– Ignorance multiplied by thirty is still ignorance.
– Old people are not necessarily smarter than young people, but young people should treat them as though they are.
– Everyone has a right to be angry but no one has a right to be mean.
– Man does not seek freedom, he seeks comfort. That is the only logical way to explain the American citizen’s failure to respond to the loss of their Constitutional rights over the last two decades.
– Until you can understand ‘what is’, ‘what if’ can never happen; but you should still wonder ‘what if’.
– A strong belief in a religious or political creed is not evil, but the attempt to force those beliefs on others is.
– Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to doesn’t mean they don’t love the best they can.
– The best way to get the phone to ring is sit down to dinner; the second best way is to rent a movie and sit down to watch it. To be sure the phone rings, sit down to watch a movie while eating dinner.
– If the anniversary gift is the most important part of the celebration, there is something inherently wrong with the marriage.
– Doctors bury their mistakes, lawyers send their mistakes to prison, and teacher’s mistakes end up in the legislature running the country.