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OPEN FORUM: Who Is Really Responsible

By Esther Ramos
Published September 10, 2008


Here are some questions to consider. Why do we overwhelmingly believe that the President is the cause of our National problems? Why, if both Republicans and Democrats are against deficits, do we have deficits? Why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, do we continue having inflation and high taxes?

It’s come to my attention, lately, that politicians are the only group of people in the world who have created a whole host of problems, so that they can campaign against them.

And, just so we’re clear, the President actually does very few things, as part of his job description. One of those things is to propose a Federal budget. He cannot vote on appropriations or expenditures or laws or the tax code.

The House of Representatives has the Constitutional authority to decide on appropriation of funds. Congress, both houses, write the Tax Code and set fiscal policy. The Federal Reserve Bank controls our National Monetary Policy, not the President!

All of the promises we’re being given, by the people who want to be our new leaders, should be weighed with a durability check before we put anybody in office. The president does not run our country, nor make laws, nor fix our education or insurance systems, nor raise our taxes. Congress does all of that. All 535 of them do those things collectively.

Now I can hear a select few of you out there screaming at this page, “The President has veto power!” And, yes, yes he does. However, congress can still override any veto with a 2/3 majority. It’s not rocket science!

Do any of us know what the Senate Majority Leader does? How about the Speaker of the House? Do we know who either of these people are, or how they were selected to “man” their positions?

When the sitting president proposes a budget, or an energy package and Congress cannot manage to come to a consensus and act on it year after year after year, whose fault is that? The speaker, who’s the leader of the majority party in the House is in charge of seeing to it that bills and budgets get “seen” and passed, or not passed. Am I the only one who wants to know how she, (yes, she), earned her job?

Now that we’ve brought “her” into the light of day, I wonder, when she laid our budgetary woes at the feet of the President recently, did she actually believe that he is in charge of our money, or was she just testing our collective knowledge of current events?

To me, it seems absolutely unbelievable that a group of some 300 million voices cannot manage to replace a few more than 400 people who, to me, don’t seem to be really doing their jobs. If I didn’t do my job for even a week, I’d be on a short list to be replaced; and sooner rather than later.

Our “state” of the nation is directly resultant from Congress’ actions and inactions, not the President. From our unfair tax code to our domestic problems to our defense overruns, our national conditions are in existence because they want them to exist. The budget is in the red because they want it in the red. If our troops are in Iraq, it’s because they want them there.

The Congress tries to shift blame to bureaucrats, who they hired, and could, in fact fire! They blame lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they could easily reject. Then they blame the regulators from whom they could easily strip the power to regulate.

Don’t let them fool you, as they refer to magical mystical powers such as “inflation” and “politics” and “the economy” that mysteriously prevent them from doing the jobs they vowed to do for us when they took their oaths of office.

To restate, this group who have “created a whole host of problems, so that they can campaign against them,” are responsible for these ills and they alone have the power to fix them. If they asked me, (and they probably won’t), they, en masse, should be held accountable for this mess by the people. That’s us. We are their bosses. We pay their under-earned salaries. We should vote them all out of office and clean up their mess and start over.

(By the way, I’ll give you a hint regarding the Senate Majority Leader: He’s one of Nevada’s own.)

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