17,679

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Tihngs the Government has done since the Apocalyptic Sequester

 

http://reason.com/archives/2013/09/20/sequestration-austerity-government

 

OMFG! Obamacare Armafuggindeddonthing

[Nanker]

Seventeen thousand six hundred seventy nine federal actions on the wall!

Seventeen thousand six hundred seventy nine federal actions!

 

You take one down and pass it around...

Seventeen thousand six hundred seventy eight federal actions on the wall.

 

Seventeen thousand six hundred...

[B-Man]

The one and only Mark Steyn................................

 

 

Obama Calls Congress 'Banana Republic'—He Should Know

 

"This is the United States of America," declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Missouri, on Friday. "We're not some banana republic."

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, a glorious American tradition that seems to come round earlier every year. "This is not a deadbeat nation," President Obama continued. "We don't run out on our tab."

 

True. But we don't pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, "Mebbe you've had enough, pal", we protest, "Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set 'em up, Joe." And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you'd run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.

 

Still, Obama is right. We're not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — ie, the U.S. dollar. When you're the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, "Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt."

I won't even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling "has been done over a hundred times" does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque.

 

Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news stories reveal government programs it would never occur to your dime store caudillo to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and Drug Administration blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether its Twitter and Facebook presence is "well-received." A fifth of a million dollars isn't even a rounding error in most departmental budgets, so nobody cares.

 

The National Parks Service, which I had carelessly assumed was the service responsible for running national parks, has been making videos on Muslim women's rights: "Islam gave women a whole bunch of rights that Western women acquired later in the 19th and 20th centuries, and we've had these rights since the 7th century," explains a lady from AnNur Islamic School in Schenectady at the National Park Service website, nps.gov. Fascinating stuff, no doubt.

But what's it to do with national parks? Maybe the rangers could pay Beckmann a quarter-million bucks to look into whether the National Parks' Islamic outreach is using social media as effectively as it might.

 

Where do you go to get a piece of this action? As the old saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. But the smart guys rob taxpayers because that's where the big money is.

 

{snip}

That's banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two.

 

Like to change that? Maybe advocate for less government spending? Hey, Lois Lerner's IRS has got an audit with your name on it. The tax collectors of the United States treat you differently according to your political beliefs.

 

That's pure banana republic, but no one seems to mind very much. This week it emerged that senior Treasury officials, up to and including Turbotax Timmy Geithner, knew what was going on at least as early as spring 2012. But no one seems to mind very much. In the words of an insouciant headline writer at Government Executive, "the magazine for senior federal bureaucrats" (seriously), back in May:

"The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren't Corrupt"

 

So if the vast majority aren't, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight per cent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that's the good news? The IRS is not only institutionally corrupt, it's corrupt in the service of one political party. That's Banana Republic 101.

 

What comes next? Government officials present in Benghazi during last year's slaughter have been warned not to make themselves available to Congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one email spelling out the stakes to CIA employees: "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well."

 

"That's all very ominous," wrote my colleague Jonah Goldberg the other day, perhaps a little too airily for my taste. I'd rank it somewhere north of "ominous."

 

"Banana republic" is an American coinage — by O. Henry, a century ago, for a series of stories set in the fictional tropical polity of Anchuria. But a banana republic doesn't happen overnight; it's a sensibility, and it's difficult to mark the precise point at which a free society decays into something less respectable.

 

Pace Obama, ever-swelling debt, contracts for cronies, a self-enriching bureaucracy, a shrinking middle class preyed on by corrupt tax collectors, and thuggish threats against anyone who disagrees with you put you pretty far down the banana-strewn path.

 

 

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investor...m#ixzz2fXWdf32a

Edited September 21, 2013 by B-Man

[Nanker]

Hail to the Cargo Cultist!

Edited September 21, 2013 by Nanker