Posts Tagged “government handouts”
By Larry Oscar
The New Year is here, and, being an election year, you can count on a lot of laughs as the political clowns running for office get cranked up.
Over the past eight years we have seen a rapid decline in the United States economy and the standard of living for Americans. The average income for US households has fallen from $57k per year to $53k per year, a 7% decline.
We are still the leading country in average income per household, but if this trend continues future generations of Americans can expect to see their hopes for a better life than their parents evaporate. Not many people thought our country would decline so rapidly. However, it was President Ronald Reagan who said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. “
The poor leadership this country has suffered through for the past eight years has not only led to an economic decline, but our country is now in decline when it comes to worldwide leadership and influence with other nations. When our politicians started buying votes with promises of government handouts our fate was sealed. It was Thomas Jefferson who said “Democracy will cease to exist when people realize they can vote themselves more money“.
Tom was obviously right about that one. It is my belief that our politicians don’t realize the extent of the damage to our society that their behavior has caused. Our president is supposed to be the president of ALL Americans; not just the poor, or middle class, but all of us. That includes the poor, middle class, and yes even the rich.
Instead we have seen these politicians proclaim that they “ want to be for the middle class”, or “I am a champion of the poor and the downtrodden.” Then they proceed to make promises of big government handouts and entitlements in return for votes. It is illegal to offer money for votes, and it is immoral to offer government handouts for votes when they are funded with other people’s earnings.
These same politicians preach about immorality and fairness, and then the hypocrites turn around in the next breath and try to buy your vote with promises of monetary government handouts. Unfortunately, I don’t think Americans are smart enough to see through this and realize the damage it is doing to the fabric of this country.
The people who vote for these bozos are indeed selfish and unpatriotic. They are cutting off the opportunity for their children and grandchildren to have a prosperous and productive life. The future Star Trek movies will no longer have the Vulcan phrase “Live long and prosper”. It will be “Live long so you can pay for your grandfathers’ debt.”
Our founding fathers and ancestors would be appalled at what we have become.
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.
By Larry Oscar
Just smack me down with Hillary’s e-mails! It’s presidential election time again, and this election cycle may prove to be the most entertaining in decades.
And it would be far more fun if it the world was not in such a state of chaos. For that reason alone all Americans should step back and take a hard look at what this nation has become over the last several years. We have gone from the world’s leader in individual liberty to just another nation of moochers with our hands out waiting for a government check.
But the politicians are out in force promising even more government handouts for your vote. Funny thing, if a politician was to offer you a dime for your vote it would be illegal, but they can offer you a big fat welfare check for your vote, and somehow that’s okay. It should be illegal for any politician to offer anything of monetary value for your vote. The left wing party of our nation has a distorted collection of welfare promising “vote suckers.” They range from a mad socialist from Vermont; a Muppet version of Miss Piggy; to old Gaffy Duck Joe himself.
All of them claim to be the champion of the poor, the downtrodden, and the ever shrinking middle class. And their solution to all of the ills of these “oppressed” groups is to take more money from the producers in our nation and distribute it to the non-producers. Never mind that this didn’t work out so well in the former Soviet Union, North Korea, East Germany, Cuba, Venezuela, or any other socialist nation.
Old Gaffy Duck Joe recently proclaimed that corporations should do the “patriotic” thing and gladly pay more taxes. I guess old Gaffy flunked his history class. I seem to recall the patriots were the ones who dumped the tea into Boston harbor in protest of high taxation. It is time for Americans to restore our country’s commitment to individual liberty. There is a movement taking hold in this country and that is one reason the controversial New Yorker Donald Trump has been drawing huge crowds. New Yorkers are not known for their calm cool demeanor, and “The Donald” is no exception.
The United States was a beacon of hope for liberty for the entire world at one time, and we need to reclaim that title. When immigrants came to America the first thing they saw was a statue standing tall in the New York harbor that was given to us by France. It was the Statue of Liberty. It’s not the statue of welfare handouts, or gay rights, or illegal immigration, or political correctness, or even right-to-life, but the statue of LIBERTY!
Liberty is the main founding principal that this county was built upon. It is our national belief that liberty is more important than life itself. Liberty is what we fought and died for in every war this country has ever fought. And just in case some of you don’t know. The belief in liberty is why about 500,000 mainly white men fought and died to set the black man in this country free.
A fact that those who live in Baltimore and Fergusson need to think about. When you yield your individual liberties in exchange for big government handouts, excessive government regulations, or government social laws that favor ones religious beliefs, you are carving out the path to your own destruction. Liberty costs lives. We pay the price in lives every year for our liberties. Over 30,000 lives per year to have the liberty to own and drive an automobile. Over 4,500 lives per year to keep and bear arms. And we will pay a high cost in lives to maintain and ensure that our military is ready to defend our liberties in a world where those would take it away and remove your head.
America may be at a crossroads. Those of us whose parents fought against tyranny and won will soon be gone. We have now raised a generation who have never lost their liberties. They don’t know or understand the value that individual liberty adds to their life. And the big question is will they wake up and work to restore the greatness of America that brought hope to the rest of the world? Or will they sell their liberty for the promise of a government regulated and controlled life? Will they yield to the cry of those politicians who cry out, “We are all in this together. The government is here to help and, of course, I need to be in charge?”
What this nation and the world needs right now is a Patrick Henry in the White House.
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.
Leadership is not community organizing. Leadership is when you step up to the plate, take a firm grip on the bat, and face the challenge of the curve ball on the outside corner. Thereby, setting the example for others to follow.
From the outset this president has failed miserably when it comes to leadership. You don’t sit in the White House and wait for things to happen. You don’t constantly carp about Congress’s lack of inaction and then head to the golf course. You don’t blame and criticize the former president for billion dollar deficits while all along creating trillion dollar deficits of your own.
If you ask people who was the worst president in modern history the answer always comes back Jimmy Carter. But Jimmy Carter was the one who took the bull by the horns and got Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David.
Carter provided the leadership that resulted in the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt which stands to this day. Not an easy task! For the most part the election of our president is a popularity contest. The average American on the street doesn’t know the first thing about what goes on in the world. Nor do they seem to care. We are a spoiled lot. We take our liberty for granted and we don’t understand how easy it is to lose the liberty that so many Americans have given their lives for.
We are too willing to trade liberty for government handouts these days. Liberty is more important than life itself. It was one of our founding fathers, Patrick Henry, who coined the phrase, “I know what course others may take, but as for me give me liberty or give me death.”
This cell phone generation we are now raising may just wake up one day and find out they live in a far different world than the hope and change they envisioned and voted for. A world where a
tyrannical government rules them based on a narrow set of religious beliefs and enforces those beliefs with a deadly iron fist. After all, if we don’t guard our liberty and the freedom to live our lives as we wish, we can all say hello to tyranny. Or maybe we should just follow our presidents’ lead and go play golf!
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.
Separating truth from fiction is not always easy these days. We have our politicians and the air-headed media to thank for the majority of confusion about reality. It’s easier to just accept what some bozo says rather than think about the truth behind what you hear. This is probably the reason we get so many people repeating the bogus statements the political class makes. However, if you are going to go through life repeating what these people say without thinking, you are going to look foolish.
Over the past several years we have seen more and more jealousy and envy surface than at any time in modern history. The so called “War on the rich” started during the first decade of the new millennium. This war has progressively gotten worse, and with the shrinking in the global economy it has reached epidemic proportions. One of the most notable comments by the liberal, or “left brain dead community”, as they are often called, is “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”
Now this typifies how a lefties brain works. They repeat this bit of tripe and misinformation, and most of us just listen and accept what they say as fact. Let’s step back and examine what they are saying. First, the rich are getting richer. That is a fact, and as long as the rich keep doing what made them rich in the first place we should not expect the rich to get poorer or remain the same. They should, indeed, be getting richer.
My answer to that is “SO WHAT”. Who cares if Bill Gates is worth $80 billion today and $800 billion next year? There is no shortage of money. Lord knows the government is printing billions of dollars more every day. If Bill soaks up more money the government will just print more. Bill’s net worth has no impact on us at all.
Now let’s examine the second half of their comment, “The poor are getting poorer”. Really, well I don’t think so! Just what brings these left wing do-gooders to that conclusion? The United States considers our poverty level for a family of four to be just under $25,000 per year. That is just under the average income of $26,000 in good old Greece, and just $13,000 less than the average income of $38,000 for France. The United States has the richest poor people in the entire world. The poor are NOT getting poorer in this country.
On the contrary, the poor in the United States are better off than the majority of the world’s middle income earners. Not only do they earn more, but they are given more government handouts to boot. When you add in the value of Medicaid, Welfare, WIC, Social Security handouts, HUD Section 8, Food Stamps, Lifeline free cell phones, and just about anything that our big government politicians can think of to buy votes, the poor in the United States are actually better off than almost all Europeans.
You know the Europeans don’t you. These are the big socialists from the old country that the idiot left wingers want us to be more like. By the way, the poverty rates in Europe are about 16%. The United States poverty rate is about the same as Europe if you consider $25,000 to be poverty level. However, if you consider $15,000 to be poverty level, as it is in Europe, our poverty rate drops to about 9%. Which begs the question, would you rather be poor in the United States or poor in Europe?
And when you compare the so called poor in the United States to the poor in Asia and Africa the difference in poverty and income is astounding. It’s time that the people in this country wake up. Screw Europe, and all those fools who want to make the United States a European clone. It’s time we told Europe to mind their own business. We are doing just fine here in “The Colonies” and we don’t need their advise. And the next time they get into a fight with each other they can look to some other country for help. No more European war involvement. In fact we are now approaching energy independence. When that happens Europe can send their own troops into the Middle East to look after their oil supply.
The truth is that the poor in our country are getting richer. The poor may not be getting richer as fast as the rich are getting richer, and that will continue to be the case, but they are definitely not getting poorer. The poor and the rich in this country are driving in the same direction. So the next time you hear some left wing feathered goose tell you “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer” you can inform them that their low IQ is showing and indeed “Unlike Europe, the rich and the poor are both getting richer in the United States”. And you could also mention that they need more dentists in Europe. So long Piers Morgan, you left brain-dead bozo!!!
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.
Never let it be said that America has not changed over the past several decades. If Harry Truman were alive today he would find a very different country than the one he led at the close of WWII.
Harry was a no nonsense person and is famous for the sign on his desk that read, “The Buck Stops Here.” Our political leadership today embraces a far different attitude. With the election of Barack Obama, often spelled “Oblama,” our nation is being lead down the road of the blame game. “It’s not my fault” is now on the desk of the commander-in-clown in the White House. Leading our nation is not a job that is to be taken lightly. The President is supposed to represent ALL Americans and not just the poor or middle class. He is the president of the rich too.
One thing about Harry Truman, he was not afraid to make the tough decisions. He was thrown into office during one of the most difficult times in world history and under very trying circumstances with the death of FDR. Harry didn’t blame everybody for the circumstances under which he found himself. He set his emotions and politics aside to be able to make hard decisions based on rational thinking.
And Harry did not allow the American people to blame others for the circumstances in which they found themselves. He lead this nation down a path of personal responsibility and accountability. As a result, the period in American history following the war was one of increasing prosperity.
Harry displayed a personal belief that we as individuals could pursue and accomplish our individual dreams and ambitions without big government handouts.
In contrast, our leadership today says that “you can’t do it by yourself.”
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.