OPEN FORUM: When Will We Ever Learn

I have another question: will we take this opportunity, once and for all, to learn how our government works? Will we notice, possibly, how few problems a sitting president is really in charge of resolving? Will we have time in our busy schedules to recall the promises made to us by a polished candidate, as he skillfully delivered line after line of speeches crafted for him by career wordsmiths? Will we figure out how to stop the cycle in which, during these election years, we continually fall prey to the hypnotic hummmm of recorded sound bites, that are worded to lull us into a deep sense of security by people who have not delivered and will not be delivering on the promises they make to us?

Will we, one day, stop believing that a person who raised our taxes repeatedly, when she was a state legislator, will begin to act favorably toward us if we would just give her a national-level job.

If this was your ten year old child who pitifully mismanaged a weekly allowance, you would not put that child in charge of the family budget and all of your PIN numbers to your sensitive banking information and retirement funds. Yet, time after time, we do this with our elected officials and hope that someday it will work out. Well it’s not going to.

Our government is not that complicated. We tell ourselves it is complicated, so we won’t have to think about it.

We vote to approve more and more funding, hoping we can buy our way out of our bad decisions in the voting booth. Nowhere can I find evidence that throwing more money into any financial problem has ever had a bearing on helping to cure the initial financial problem. Why haven’t we learned this?

We’re letting them destroy us from the inside. Don’t we remember that’s how Detroit got into the latest mess they’re in? Michigan raised taxes at the state level, now look who’s paying for that.

When will we ever learn that the only way to dig out of these problems is to back out, and improve our strategy, and hopefully learn from these bad decisions, and not vote that way again.

The ignorances we show by the ways we vote are more far reaching than many of us realize. In my not-so-humble opinion, most of the people we have just put into office will over-legislate and over-tax us right out of our freedoms before we realize what is going on. And it will all be because we have no idea how our government is put together, so candidates are free to mislead us at will.

Now, hopefully, we will start at the beginning of this changing of the guard and take notes and think about the promises that were made to us so that we will know wherein we have been fed a line and strung along and remember these things for future reference.

In my opinion, this years voting booth mistakes will prove to be too far reaching to be fixed. Start watching now. Some new faces will be mandating that we pour even more of our tax dollars into the problems that are about to be created by them. And they will be wording it carefully in hopes that we are daft enough to believe that their upcoming ill-begotten programs and entitlements are for our own good, and hence, the new taxes unavoidable.

Mark my words. We need to grow up and learn that piling more taxes onto what is considered a tax problem will not fix the tax problem, it will just make us all more broke.

We should all surprise ourselves one day this week by each learning one new fact about our government, and share our information with each other.