It’s Classic Credit Abuse
By Marilyn Snyder
Published in the Redlands Daily Facts, October 10, 2013
When one spouse, let’s say the wife, recklessly charges on multiple credit cards resulting in massive household bills, that is fiscal irresponsibility. If the husband persistently protests but she won’t refrain, he may cut up the cards as a last-stop measure against bankruptcy. That’s fiscal responsibility — his attempt to get their spending under control.
If, during a period of great prosperity, a city council, let’s say Redlands, offers unsustainable pension and health care benefits to its employees, while disregarding the long range payables, that’s fiscal irresponsibility.
When citizens plead with the city council to be financially frugal — attempting to keep their hometown solvent — they are being fiscally responsible.
If a state, let’s say California, offers unsustainable pension and health care benefits to its employees resulting in a long range debt of hundreds of billions, and which the governor himself calls a “wall of debt,” that’s fiscal irresponsibility.
If the minority party in the legislature, powerless to stop any state spending bill, struggles to get the money situation under control, they are trying to exercise fiscal responsibility.
If a country, let’s say the United States, has a spending style that is recklessly dangerous, causing it to borrow trillions of dollars from enemy countries, that is fiscally irresponsible.
If a group of citizens uses every means at their disposal to halt the overspending, that is fiscally brilliant — because every citizen longs to lessen their share of responsibility for paying off the federal government’s irresponsible credit card charges.
None of these people are right-wing extremists — not the husband, not the local residents, not the conservative legislators.
And the congressmen who vote, piecemeal, to pass all the spending bills necessary to keep the federal government running are not right-wing extremists either. Even if they won’t approve a bill to fund one section of government that they do not like.
Yet they are called anarchists by the Senate Majority Leader, the same fellow who refuses a vote on those spending bills.
Is it fiscally responsible to close down the government?
Situated at one end of the one-third mile long Reflecting Pool and facing the Lincoln Memorial is the open-air beautiful World War II Memorial.
The Senate could easily pass the House bill providing the money to keep open this openair memorial. What do you think it costs in manpower to transport, erect and enforce barriers to keep people out of a memorial that has no walls and no gates — just the freedom to honor those who gave their lives for us?
Imagine the slap-in-the-face feeling of ingratitude experienced by World War II veterans, arriving with canes, walkers and wheelchairs, when they face those obstacles.
Imagine the anguish of vets who survived many years away from family and country, their lives threatened every day, welcomed home as heroes who saved the world, only to be locked out of a memorial dedicated to them — by a chain-link barrier ordered by their own president.
Indeed, it takes a lot of chutzpah to stand firm against a 90-year-old vet.
Veterans who stopped at nothing to take back our freedom are being stopped by economic thugs who don’t care about them or us. If you were there with me and my Uncle Mike, who survived the D-Day invasion at Normandy, would you let an insignificant chain stand between you and the right of our American heroes to stand and pay homage to their fallen comrades?
To add insult to injury, the president granted special favors to permit an immigration reform rally on the closed openair National Mall on Tuesday. I guess it’s who you know.
You can thank the current administration for doing what no president has ever done before — stopping the American people from entering the people’s open-air memorials, national parks and even private homes and businesses that sit in federal parks. What previous administration has closed the White House to the people but kept open his favorite federal golf course?
The Senate Leader applies despicable names to those who want financial restraint, yet will not put to a vote the spending bills that open up our parks to us — we the people.
The Redlands Tea Party Patriots and all tea party members value sound monetary policy.
You might say we’re in favor of cutting up the federal government’s credit cards.