Political Almanac

Political Almanac Chapter 1: Politician’s Handbook

National Domestic Politics

To ensure success in your political career, you should look for every way you can take credit for giving handouts to the voters. To have a political career, you must make friends with “special interests”, who will give you the campaign contributions you will need to run your campaign in exchange for “favors”. These favors can be found in the Tax Code every Law passed and every Regulation. These “favors” take extortion and bribery to a whole new level. It’s important that we keep this a secret, so voters don’t find out what we’re doing. You must say stuff that sounds good, so you will be popular with voters. Make voters think that if they vote for you, they will get free stuff. Voters love promises.

To ensure that voters won’t catch on, you must continue to find new ways to ruin our public schools, to dumb down the population. This makes them all the more eager for handouts. Also, if you can somehow ensure the supply of marijuana to voters, you will have no problems with them.

To keep the viability of this strategy, it is imperative that you are able to engineer continuing waves of crises from which you can promise to rescue the voters. Your campaign contributors can help to create these crises, so you won’t have to do it all yourself. You merely need to cripple the regulators assigned to the particular segment of the economy you are planning to create the crisis in. Remember, our government is not organized to anticipate events or behave pro-actively or see anything coming, therefore we must continue to be hapless and react to every crisis we encounter, even pretend ones.

When the crisis comes, you should act surprised and outraged. You can then march the scapegoats from business or the other Party before the congressional committees to receive their beatings. Then it is necessary to beat up on the regulators who will cite their budget cuts over the previous years. Finally, it’s important to craft new legislation with bigger holes in it than the previous version, so it will help to create another crisis down the road. Your congressional staff lawyers can be very helpful here. Remember, what you want is a law that doesn’t work, but that the Supreme Court still uphold.

If the voters get really angry about something, make sure to blame the other Political Party, that’s why we pretend to have a two party system. If the voters’ statements are too close to the truth, they must be discredited as crazy anarchists.

There are some tried and true areas we have been successful with in creating the continual crisis machine that has worked so well for us over the years. These are:

Health Care
We owe the healthcare and insurance industries lots of favors in payment for the billions of dollars they’ve given us in campaign contributions. Therefore, we must make the healthcare and health insurance industries continue grow in spite of their dismal performance, glaring inefficiency and declining popularity. Therefore, the goal for health care is to keep the costs rising and concentrate on the most expensive treatment we can imagine. Finding cures really won’t help us. We can claim it’s a crisis every 4 years. Health Insurance companies have been very helpful.

Malpractice Insurance
Malpractice lawsuits have succeeded in making our healthcare industry the least efficient industry on the planet, in the history of the world. We need for this inefficiency to thrive. Otherwise, we won’t be able to continue to claim we can have government provide healthcare for free. We owe the trial lawyers big time for ensuring this inefficiency and for their generous campaign contributions. Therefore, the goal for malpractice insurance is to keep costs rising as much as possible. We must protect the peoples’ right to file as many lawsuits as possible. The Trial Lawyers Association is one of you best sources for campaign contributions. High malpractice premiums are invaluable to our goal of keep Health Care costs rising.

Education
If we can’t keep the voters distracted, they may try to stop us from saving public education. Our best bet is to make them as stupid as possible, so we can tell them outrageous lies they will believe. Therefore, the goal for education is concentrate on ensuring that our students test scores decline even more when compared to other countries. Our goal of dumbing down the population is being met. Our indoctrination of students to turn them into voters who will demand more socialist reforms is going well. The Teacher’s Union has been invaluable to ensure that our goals will be continually exceeded. The population is eager to believe that a rise in test scores is just around the corner if we only will continue to throw more money at the problem. We’ve convinced them that the problems are so bad, we dare not entrust our children’s education to anyone but union professionals. We’ve got to keep raising the cost of education, so the parents will think it has some value. Also, the union teachers who indoctrinate the students would like to make more money for the key roll they play in bringing down our civilization.

Energy
We’ve decided that the American people use way too much energy, so we’ve restricted U.S. oil and gas exploration for decades, hoping that energy costs would rise and force the people to conserve. Therefore, the goal for energy going forward is to keep the costs rising by imposing taxes on the utilities and to ensure periodic shortages and impressive price hikes. The Environmental and Arab Crazies are your best bet to keep this crisis reoccurring with no end in sight. The global warming story we invented should help us for decades to come. This myth will allow us to tax energy so we’ll have less of it. So, we want to tax utilities $642 billion for cap and trade. They will pass all of this tax on to consumers. This will drive everybody crazy. This will result in a doubling of everybody’s electricity and gas bills. We are so proud we finally have an energy policy.

Global Warming
This hoax has given “political science” a whole new meaning. If it weren’t for the reductions in funding higher education periodically over the past several decades, we wouldn’t have our global warming scam. Our most enterprising college professors and scientists invented global warming to market their services for federal grants and contracts. This has sparked job growth within our most loyal political voter base. I think we can count on the Darwinists to support this fantasy. They owe us big time for driving God out of all government owned property and for insisting that Darwinism is too real science.

Auto Bailout
The last vestiges of American Unionism in manufacturing is in danger. Our campaign contributors, the UAW and U.S. automakers have followed our lead to be hapless and blind-sighted. To reward them for not noticing our flat production of oil over the past 20 years, we should give them $50B for their executive compensation budgets and other purposes. Then we can march their CEOs in to yell at them regularly for their greed and stupidity. We can parade laid-off and retired UAW members in to whine to the Senate about their healthcare and pensions. Everybody loves a soap opera.

Monetary Policy
The 1913 dollar is now worth 13 cents. You can track our current level of inflation by watching the growth in the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is the myth we use to make us think we are making progress. We are fortunate to have the Federal Reserve System to keep quietly printing all the money they can to help to keep costs rising. The voters will never notice that we have debased the dollar for decades. We should continue to drive interest rates up and down every 10 years. This will continue to throw the financial markets into boom and bust cycles which should coincide with presidential elections.

Bank Bailout
We forced the banks to give mortgage loans to folks who couldn’t pay for them. They not only did it, they invented sub-prime and no doc loans and then sliced up these loans into untraceable bundles and sold them as securities to unsuspecting investors world-wide. They pretended that house values would continue to go up in this bubble forever. Then foreclosures increased and prices stalled. Just before that we imposed a mark to market accounting standard. Now our campaign contributors, the U.S. banks are insolvent and need our help. We encouraged them to loan money to our impoverished voters who have no money to buy houses and other stuff. Now, these groups need $10 trillion for their executive compensation budgets and other purposes. The key to continuing this crisis is our mark to market FASB rule. It forces the bank to write off every dollar they spent investing in mortgage based securities. Most of these are worth 50 cents, but our hedge fund campaign contributors will buy them for 10 cents. We are lending the banks trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on this scam. None of this would be happening if we had suspended the mark to market rule earlier, so it’s important that nobody talk about this rule.

Market Crashes
Whenever our campaign contributors can’t make double digit earnings in the stock market, we try to arrange a crash. Our campaign contributors start by pulling their money out. We tell the folks to keep their money in the market while this is going on. Then we threaten to tax everybody to death and the rest of the market tanks. When it hits our prearranged bottom, we all buy and we’re back to making double digit earnings again.

Crime
It’s important that we keep enough dangerous criminals on the street and coming over the border to hold the voters interest. Our best bet here is to appoint Goofy Judges and continue border fence litigation. We will continue to provide inmates with drugs and internet access, so they can continue to harass the folks. Our refusal to help the border states keep drug gangs from coming over the border is finally paying off. There are now almost as many kidnappings in Phoenix Arizona as there are in Mexico City. Our hedge fund campaign contributors are now looking at investing in Phoenix housing for 10 cents on the dollar as retirees flee to South Dakota.

Civil Rights
The goal here is to get the ACLU to attack majority’s values and beliefs until they stop having them. Once again, the ACLU, Trial Lawyers and Goofy Judges are our best bet. Everyone agrees, one indignant atheist can now shut down any public school that allows anyone to mention God.

Water
The voters will just go nuts when we run out of water. This crisis is timed for just when voters think their home values have gone back up from the lows we created with the Community Reinvestment Act. This one will dwarf the $4 a gallon gasoline shock. They’ll really need us then.