Political Almanac Government Benefits

Political Almanac Chapter 2: The History of Politics

Government Benefits

Your staffs will be in place to move our borrowed dollars from the printing press and into the hands of our campaign contributors and loyal voters. You should have a working knowledge of these benefits.

Government Support for Education
This is so bad, it requires its own section. U.S. students rank 28th in math and 14th in reading compared to 40 other developed countries. K through 12 public schools cost $8,000 to $10,000/ year / student, ten to twenty times more than most of the other countries who out-score us. Education costs have gone up 20 fold in the U.S. over the past 40 years due to our inability to teach on reading and math. We must keep the “professionals” in charge and give them more money.

Expensive Health Care
This is also bad enough to require its own section U.S. health care is the most expensive on the planet, but the state of our health as a nation lags many other countries. This gives us every excuse to continue to ruin it, like we are doing with public schools. We spend 35% of our health care dollar on paperwork, 60% on treatment and 5% on cures. Health care costs have gone up 20 fold over the past 40 years. We started this when we had our campaign contributors purchase hospitals from the nuns, They invented HMOs and let the government impose crippling bureaucracy everywhere in healthcare. This debacle has given us unlimited opportunity to pander to all voters until they can no longer afford private schools, automobiles or cigarettes.

Medicare
With 45 million retired and disabled subscribers, this costs $480B a year; that’s $10,666 per person. Medicare Advantage plan participation rose to 10.1 million subscribers by 2008. We let our campaign contributing health insurance companies in on this so they could get the $10,066 from the taxpayers for all who signed up to Advantage. This is like spending $150,000 on a sweet sixteen birthday party. Nobody needs to spend over ten grand a year for healthcare, but it still doesn’t cost enough. So far it’s working like bottled tap water for a dollar a bottle. They love it because they think it’s free.

Energy Policy
Our new energy policy is to drive the cost of energy up to what it costs to run everything on wind and solar. We will tax the electrical power companies to death under cap-and-trade and make them build nuclear power plants and charge their customers in advance. Then make them buy solar panels and wind generators. We could double everybody’s energy bills every year as far as the eye can see. To start, we will refuse to allow any more drilling of oil and gas. These people simply must stop using energy. But we won’t stop there, we will continue to drive up the cost of wind and solar until everybody has to live in communes in the forest.

Social Security Retirement
This is the great chain letter started by Franklin Roosevelt to raise more revenue the government can borrow from the voters. This is a ponzie scheme that runs in real-time, that we need to reinvigorate by debasing the currency on an on-going basis. This one can really sink the boat; they’ll really need us then.

Labor Law
This is part of our indoctrination through punishment program for cowboys, who are largely the small business owners we get most of our tax money from. We have laws protecting our citizens from polygraphs, accidents and their failure to get along with anybody, We kept our labor unions alive by organizing all government employees. But now we need to increase union membership by allowing our union organizers, Guido and Vinnie to spend more time with potential union members to convince them that joining the union would be good for their health.

Laws Protecting us from ourselves
We must continue to pass laws to prevent people from hurting themselves or annoying us. After all, if we are eventually going to provide everybody with everything free, we need to get really anal if they cost any money. We need everybody to wear bicycle helmets while not smoking.

The Postal Service
When the easterners headed west, they demanded a postal service so they could send letters back to their eastern friends and relatives. Unemployed cowboys formed the pony express and charged them to deliver mail from town to town, it took weeks, even months to get mail. Now the U.S. Postal Service delivers mail we still need to deliver in envelopes. This works ok for us unless we need to go to the Post Office in person, where it takes weeks, even months to wait in the lines.

Access to Favors
We have been working hard to increase political campaign expenses for decades. This allows immediate access by the rich and crazy to give boatloads of money to candidates. These “Special Interest Groups” are then invited to write all and House and Senate Bills themselves. It’s a “partnership”.

The Courts
We like to let the Courts interpret the Constitution. Most Judges think the words used in the Constitution should be ignored. Instead, they prefer to make their interpretations based on what the Constitution could say if they wrote it.

Support for Crazy Stuff
Our campaign contributors often want their crazy schemes required by law. Most laws are written to support crazy schemes and what would ordinarily be illegal activity like extortion, bribery, gambling and murder.