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The Real Side | Commentary by Joe Messina
| Monday, Jan 19, 2015

joemessinamugIf any of you have taken Dave Ramsey’s financial classes, you know he uses an “envelope system” to help you budget and save money. You can easily see where money is being spent, how it’s growing or dwindling, and so on.

The government can’t make envelopes that big, so we talk in terms of buckets. Based on the way it spends money, it’s obvious it doesn’t t just think we have buckets-full; we must have skip loaders-full.

We all know about the basic buckets…

Military, health and welfare, education and a few others. For those of you who really don’t get it, the government does not make “revenue,” it collects taxes. Or in plain, simple English, it takes your money.

I don’t have a real problem paying taxes. I don’t want to do it, but I do understand the need to pay taxes for the basics like first responders (fire, police, ambulance), military, “basic” healthcare (hospitals and clinics), road work and maintenance (in the form of tire or gas taxes), snow removal, landslide removal – you get the picture. Paying basic taxes for services received.

But I don’t want to fund the government’s stupidity and inability to spend money wisely.

Enter the Progressive Left. Who made the noise when we were paying $90 for a toilet seat and $300 for hammers? (Republicans.) When we paid that EPA employee who never showed up for work for eight years? (Republicans.) And what about the millions of dollars in new buildings for government workers when we have numerous empty ones that we aren’t even renting out? (Republicans.) When can I scream for you simply to stop wasting money?

I keep hearing from the left how the “rich” can afford to pay more, when in reality they are already paying more of their income, percentage-wise, than the 99-percenters. Why? They made better decisions, took greater risk and therefore made more money. Guess what? A majority of those “rich people” are Democrats.

Democrats keep saying rich people should pay more taxes, but where is their money? The Dems have some of the richest congressmen on the Hill (they don’t all arrive rich, but most leave rich). They keep talking about closing tax loopholes, but what bill has Pelosi, Reid or Feinstein put on the table that will close the loopholes that they themselves take advantage of? None.

President Obama is going to come out on Tuesday telling us all the good things he has done and how everything is going to be butterflies and rainbows. Unemployment is at 5.6 percent; however, we have 1 million fewer full-time workers today than when he took office. We have less worker participation than when he took office. There’s not enough money in the unemployment and disability buckets (now being funded by these new part-time taxpayers). They’ll say the government is paying the shortage, but we are the government, so taxpayers are funding it.

He is going to tell us how families can now afford health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, and for the first time in history many families have insurance that couldn’t get it before. Another program carried on the backs of the taxpayer through the HHS tax bucket. Many of these policies are subsidized by the government – sorry, I mean taxpayers. All those new, part-time taxpayers.

Many families lost their health insurance and had to go to a substandard health policy with longer wait periods and longer drives for people to see their doctors and get help. Additionally, they now have larger deductibles. And let’s just get past all of that “You can keep your doctor” BS and discuss how he said it would “cost you less than the average cell phone bill” but then switched to “you will need to tighten your budget and cut out some things you don’t have to have.”

Instead of saving the average family $2,500 a year, it will end up costing the average family about $5,000 a year. That’s the projection from the Congressional Budget Office, not The Real Side.

He’s also going to tell us families will have a chance to save money and get ahead and realize the American dream and own a home. In reality, home ownership is down from when he took office by 3 percent, median income is down, many people are working part-time instead of full-time jobs, the poverty level has increased, and people on food stamps have almost doubled. These government-subsidized programs are paid from the welfare bucket. Apparently in the president’s world, having less somehow translates into a better chance of realizing the American dream.

He’ll say “The market is doing great.” How about we pull the $85 billion a month the government is using in the prop-up-the-market bucket (more taxpayer money going down the drain), and see what the market really looks like?

He’ll say gas is at an all-time low (as if he deliberately had a hand in making it happen). I doubt he’ll issue a big shout-out and “thank you” to ISIS. If you want to thank Obama for this, I suppose you can. His inactivity in squelching the JV team known as ISIS has allowed them to steal millions of gallons of oil, ship it in stolen tankers, and sell the oil at prices that make the Saudi Arabians look bad. The Saudis then dropped prices to match so that they could stay in the game and drive the price of a barrel of gas so low that the American oil companies couldn’t afford to produce and would therefore shut down local refineries.

Congratulations, even more people on unemployment. The welfare and unemployment buckets are going to need more taxpayer money.

Several economists have said even if we took 90 percent of the money from the country’s richest people and richest corporations, it wouldn’t make a double-digit dent in America’s woes. All it would do is make the lower 99 percent feel better because you dinged the rich guys.

How many of you get most or all of your income tax money back? We have more people than ever on food stamps, welfare and assisted medical, and we’re getting ready to wipe out school loans and give free college educations. And don’t get me started on illegal immigrant benefits. No money in, lots of money out. It’s sheer lunacy.

We can’t keep it up. The buckets are empty and no one cares. There is a bottom to the bucket and when we finally find it, America will be in a world of hurt.

 

Joe Messina is host of The Real Side (TheRealSide.com), a nationally syndicated talk show that runs on AM-1220 KHTS radio and SCVTV [here]. He is also an elected member of the Hart School Board. His commentary publishes Mondays.

 

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12 Comments

  1. Sara Jones says:

    Thanks for the insight, it is so frightening to me the amount of middle American’s still think everything is great.

  2. Bizarre that a public school board member would enumerate the good things he perceives you “buy” with taxes – and leave out public education. “I don’t want to do it, but I do understand the need to pay taxes for the basics like first responders, military, “basic” healthcare , road work and maintenance , snow removal, landslide removal – you get the picture. Paying basic taxes for services received. “

    • Bill says:

      Of course he would leave out public education…In keeping with his narrative he has to be for privitization of education and charter schools set up for profits. He works as a public school board member the same way politicians who “hate government” work in it.

  3. Mandy says:

    Thanks for saying something…to many people don’t have the true story. What can a citizen like me do to stop this deception from our government?

  4. msc545 says:

    When it comes to Joe the Clown, we all get the picture. I wouldn’t mind commentary from an intelligent conservative (is that an oxymoron?), but why we are subjected to an ignorant one is beyond me.

  5. J Schwartz says:

    I have to agree with Mr Tannehill, it seems wrong to have you deciding the education fate of local children when you practice in such poor research and distortion of history.
    “Who made the noise when we were paying $90 for a toilet seat and $300 for hammers?” Democratic senator William Proxmire (term 1957 to 1980) from Wisconsin did. He regularly held press conferences to announce “Golden Fleece Awards” in government; Republicans and fellow Democrats alike didn’t follow back then, thought he was a side show but he specifically highlighted those $90 toilet seats that turned out to be covers for various governmental black ops developments such as the SR-71 Blackbird.
    “I keep hearing from the left how the “rich” can afford to pay more, when in reality they are already paying more of their income, percentage-wise, than the 99-percenters.” There is no published study I’ve found that substantiates that except by as a side discussion qualifying that the 1% pay more in taxes because their sector has seen kept more of their income and the percentage largest gain in income growth since the mid ’80’s.
    “His inactivity in squelching the JV team known as ISIS has allowed them to steal millions of gallons of oil, ship it in stolen tankers, and sell the oil at prices that make the Saudi Arabians look bad. The Saudis then dropped prices to match so that they could stay in the game and drive the price of a barrel of gas so low that the American oil companies couldn’t afford to produce and would therefore shut down local refineries.” Actually, the Saudis cite the newly competitive U.S. shale oil industry as their biggest threat; studies show that if the price of oil dips below $55 for too long the American industry is not sustainable so the Saudis are competing with that. ISIS has been selling their oil at $20 a barrel directly to the bottom feeding economies and other terrorist run states. The overall state of Iraqi oil refining has been reduced however due to extension damage due to the fighting there.
    “In reality, home ownership is down from when he took office by 3 percent, median income is down, many people are working part-time instead of full-time jobs, the poverty level has increased, and people on food stamps have almost doubled.” You have the right answer but the wrong reasons. What I’ve seen is that the millennials are failing to enter the housing market in large numbers due to the double whammy of high student loan debt and being unable to find good paying jobs to both support loan and house payments. Your good Republican friends have done a marvelous job in creating and backing companies like Sallie Mae that practice predatory loan practices that leave many students and exstudents in deep debt due to poor billing practices causing penalty fees and interest penalties to rise sharply so the cost of a loan often doubles in less than 5 years. Plus both sides of the House and Senate are in favor of restructuring the H1B visa program that will ship jobs overseas or allow major tech companies to import lower paid technical employees here thus displacing the entry level tech jobs these college graduates need.
    After reading your biased and ill-researched opinions I can only conclude I will be looking forward to voting for your opponent in the next election and changing the radio station anytime your show comes up.

    • SCVNews.com says:

      The Hart District is switching to electoral districts to appease voting-rights attorneys. Unless you live in Saugus, you will have no say in whether Mr. Messina is reelected.

  6. Franciscus Huijbregts says:

    So now the Republicans get to show what they can do, after all the BS they have talked about this is going to be good to watch

  7. J Schwartz says:

    #SCVNews – thanks, i live in Saugus so the campaign to unseat him effectively starts today.

  8. J Schwartz says:

    Mandy – educate yourself, the answers are out there. Rely as little as possible on the predigested ideological pap that talk radio wants to feed you. Look at both positions on any question, even when it’s the ‘other side,” you might learn something you might not have found out any other way.

    • Franciscus Huijbregts says:

      Mandy any time you are telling someone to look at the other side (of the coin) you are ignoring the third side and that is the only side it can roll forward on

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