My Many Pet Peeves

LIVING LIFE RESPONSIBLY:
A common subject in my household is how much it costs just to be a responsible member of society. Besides food and housing, two things you can’t get around, accountable Americans have to pay for health insurance, auto insurance, carry some amount of life insurance, pay for water, pay for electricity, pay for phone and, these days, internet connectivity. We even pay for cable televisions so we can surf 300 channels to proclaim, “there’s nothing to watch on TV,” and a monthly gym membership so we can go nowhere on a treadmill while watching 300 channels on the attached TV the one time a month when the mood strikes.

It all adds up to sucking away nearly our entire paycheck and squeezes the rhetorical question out of us, “how do people afford to live this way?” The answer may be, they don’t.

The sad fact is America has become a place where it’s better to get by with less than more. A household with a family of four earning $65,000 per year is better off making $45,000 per year and availing itself of public subsidies. Said another way, a person earning less makes the person earning more poorer by having them pay for their food, electricity and anything else that helps politicians bring in votes by giving away things for free. Of course it’s not free, it’s just that there are fewer and fewer votes available from the haves than the have-nots.

LIFE WITH IDIOTS:
Years ago, travelers used to be able to hop on an airplane without disrobing and going through metal detectors. We can largely thank the disappeared hijacker D.B. Cooper for pre-boarding harassment we started to face in 1972. Because of a single screwed-up person, hundreds of millions of travelers are forced to subject themselves to low-level radiation just before being squeezed like a sardine with plastic forks and knives in an airplane for a four-hour flight to visit granny.

We even have to remove our shoes because one person wanted to show off his Jihadiness. Fortunately similar travel requirements weren't put in place following another would-be terrorist carrying a bomb in his undershorts.

And this is where the pet in my peeve lies. In nearly all areas of our life, we’re subjected to some nuisance because of the past actions of a tiny minority. Have you ever tried to open a bottle of aspirin that’s been wrapped in that hard plastic, with a childproof cap, covered at the top of the open bottle by an impossible-to-remove hard paper lid, and then filled with cotton? That’s all mandated now because manufacturers have to entomb their products based on the lowest of human intentions.

Governments at all levels spend billions of dollars each year imprisoning criminals who can’t distinguish right from wrong. How on earth is that right or proper to those of us who follow the law? Just think how much more money we’d be able to keep or how much simpler our lives would be if we weren’t continually having to engineer around the lowest common denominator in our culture.

In a society that doesn’t intend to conquer people or land, the military is strictly defensive. Even looking at a military that plays a good cop role around the world, all of the money spent to build and maintain a modern army wouldn’t be necessary if governments and people didn’t behave so hostilely to its people or neighbors. Call this $400 billion per year spent just to keep the barbarians from the gate or protecting our country from a single megalomaniacal nutjob from parking a nuke in Cinderella’s Castle in Disneyland. I’ve always thought the best military deterrent would be to place some guy named Eddie in front of a nuclear button and feed him coffee and Red Bull all day. The world would always have to make sure they didn’t push Eddie over his fragile edge just to ensure their capital doesn't glow.

Maybe there’s a day not long in the future when humans won’t have to make allowances for morons and union leaders. I’m not counting on that happening in my lifetime, however.

THE LUNATICS ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM:
Is anyone else tired of our Sequester-Jester president? I mean, wtf? Complaining of having to cut bloated government spending by anywhere from 1% to 2%, depending on whether you believe the Congressional Budget Office (1%) or the rhetoric of politicians (2%), would be comical if it weren’t such a problem. It’s a drop in the federal bucket and less than every working American was forced to cut when the payroll tax jumped up by 2.5% in January. Of course less than half of Americans are actually working, so pass on news of the hardship to the person hanging out at the beach while taking in money from Unemployment and Disability Insurance.

Workers seem to be surviving the payroll cut, although it made me cancel a trip to tour the White House.

How is it we were able to keep the drunks in the airport towers, the TSA gropers yawning at airport check points stealing watches from travelers and our precious parks open when federal spending was $1 trillion less five years ago when Bush was president, not exactly a spendthrift president?

Notice spending was noted and not the word “budget.” This is because we haven’t had a legally required budget for more than four years. The real unspoken truth is neither party has wanted to be constricted by a budget, opting instead to work on continuing spending resolutions in which any reduction to an increase in government outlays is met with howls of recrimination.

The federal spending baseline includes the nearly $1 trillion is stimulus spending that didn’t work when it was put out in 2009. Now, in effect, we spend the same $1 trillion on stimulus each year and it still doesn’t work. In addition, the Fed is pumping $1 trillion per year into the economy by buying unwanted Treasuries, which is keeping the markets artificially high and on the precipice of a meltdown when it eventually has to stop its easing program.

Our spending is at an all-time high of $3.8 trillion and is adding to our already massive debt of $16.5 trillion (just to make a point, the GDP for the U.S., which is the total of all goods and services in our country, is only $15 trillion). Additionally, and unspoken, our unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare are estimated by some to be as much as $90 trillion. While it’s easy to get lost in numbers, the simple fact is the government is taking in more money than ever before and every level of it, federal, state and local, is out of money and running a huge deficit. I’m not sure how anyone can say we don’t have a spending problem when looking at such a disparity in inflow versus outflow.

The obvious question is where to reduce the increase in spending. Understanding it’s far too painful to cut $2 million to study the sex lives of snails (true story) or $200 million in aid to Pakistan and a like amount to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, maybe there are other places the feds can look to without encountering the sound of skewered pigs. The CBO produced a study that says there’s $125 billion per year in wasteful federal spending and another $250 billion per year in duplicative programs. The CBO didn’t do the study on a whim, it was asked to do so by Congress. What’s the point of Congress asking if the members are going to tuck away the answers?

In looking to reduce anywhere between $44 billion - $88 billion a year in spending because of the sequester, maybe the spenders can take a gander at the CBO study and start at the wasteful spending or duplicate spending areas. Unless that’s too much like shooting fish in a barrel and all involved want to really earn their money. Or perhaps they want to make cuts to more public programs while in a bout of an impish tantrum because the cuts have to be made at all.

How long has it been since the public had trust in the government to spend our tax dollars wisely? Maybe the answer to that says it all.

TALKING ABOUT YOUR GENERATION:
Well, this is going to offend some good people, but it has to be said. In trying to figure out what’s wrong with current culture, I stumbled on an easy answer: it’s because of my kids. Not them, per se, but their generation.

My generation, such as it is, is sandwiched between the “Me” generation of the Sixties and the Reagan kids that are a bit younger than me. I consider mine to be a miscellaneous generation that essentially accomplished very little and has no notable identity. But I can say proudly of my generation, “at least we did no wrong.” Unless we’re counting giving birth to my kids’ generation.

The screwy generation of my children may have been sired by my generation, but they were raised under the guidance and feelings of the Sixties generation who were running the schools and the television programming back then. When one examines the fact my kids were given “good try” grades instead of letter grades and that everyone got a trophy even if their team stunk, it’s directly attributable to our current condition of a hysterical sense of fairness. This ultimately devolves into the government interpreting “fairness” into taking a larger portion of wealth from the producers and sinking it into Obama phones, solar energy boondoggles and PBS.

I'm not opposed to fairness, per se. It just gets kind of muddled when fairness is confused with equality and that equality of outcome is considered fairness. The notion that all people should have what everyone else has, whether earned or not, is far different than everybody starting out equal. I'm familiar with the notion that not everyone's born in an advantageous situation. However, the most common way to correct that problem under a fairness argument is to bring those with advantages down to the level of those who are starting with socioeconomic hardships. That route may sound really nice and really fair in an After School Special, but I'd rather make sure the barriers to successful starts are eliminated so achievement is easier for everyone.

There is also a belief in this generation that those with handicaps or social differences who have a modicum of success are stories to be on, well, an After School Special. It's the old "Good Try" theory come full circle in which the country decides to support a team like Louisville in the NCAA Basketball Tournament merely because a player averaging 3.5 points a game suffered a horrific, freak injury. Or look at the accolades Oscar Pistorius had bestowed upon him, along with a free pass to be a caveman, followed by surprise when he turns out to something of a flawed man.

We don't vet people beyond the length of a Twitter statement and nowhere is this more true than our current president. In this politically correct world, this may seem tactless, but Obama was elected based on the color of his skin and white guilt over centuries of racism by our long dead relatives. It certainly wasn't based on weighty votes in a brief and obscure Senate career or his occupation of being a community organizer. Sure, he had great 10-second ad hominem, but the vacuity of what we could learn about the man and his designs for the country appealed to emotion and kept their distance from reason. Likewise the entire debate on gay marriage under review by the Supreme Court is based on fairness and not on the limits placed on the Court that states have their own rights. Certainly this generation would need a collective sedative if the Court ruled gay marriage unconstitutional. It doesn't seem to occur to them that nine imperfect people in robes make bad decisions, too, starting with the Dred Scott decision that kept slavery alive and led to a civil war, or in Korematsu in which the Court declared it was legal for President Roosevelt to lock up all Japanese Americans in internment camps, or even Plessy v. Ferguson, which kept segregation lawful until Brown v. Board of Education until 1954. Relying on the courts as an end-all demonstrates the generational impatience of big societal change. Demanding the balance of the population get there, and get there now by virtue of five Court votes, is like asking mom to demand equal playing time for their loser of an athlete kid.

This generation doesn't get that sometimes the seal pup with the broken flipper bites. Much better to do an After School Special on saving the baby seal instead of considering how much money could be made off the fur. Logic seems to always be trumped by feelings. And so it should be no surprise that a few million people change their Facebook profile photo to the marriage "equity" flag in the misguided view that the sheer emotion of the empty gesture will be picked up by the Court where Justice Kennedy will say, "Wow, if that many people changed their Facebook profile photo, I need to vote with the sentiment and not the law!"

I’d love to hear from this tatted-up, pant-sagging, backward-hat-wearing, bi-sexual, un-shaven, t-shirt, sweater-wearing and tight-leged pant wearing, pierced up, Lulu-Lemon, social-networking generation and tell me where I’m wrong. In the meantime, stop fucking up my country. That feels much better…