Under the Hammer

I say the Republicans should get a running start and jump over the fiscal cliff with both feet.

The government is borrowing over one-third of the money it spends every day. In very rough terms the federal government collects about $2 trillion annually in revenue and spends about $3 trillion or sometimes $3.5 trillion. It is time to go over the fiscal cliff, to jump the shark, to do whatever it takes to get some real spending reform in Washington.

The Duke Endowment is the largest private foundation in the Southeast. It was established in 1924 and just passed the $3 billion mark in spending. So it has taken the Duke Endowment 88 years to spend $3 billion. The federal government spends $3 billion in about 7 hours according to one set of figures. Federal spending is so out of control nobody really knows how much it spends or where or how.

From the way he is negotiating it appears that, despite what he says, President Barack Hussein Obama does not think the country has a spending problem. The problem according to Obama's position is that the rich people are not paying enough in taxes. Obama can tax the rich people down to nothing and it's not going to balance the federal budget. The problem has nothing to do with taxes; it's a spending problem. Whether rich people pay 33 percent in income tax or 35 percent or 92 percent isn't going to solve the fiscal problems this country is having.

There are some solutions. One is to get the economy going again. Obama's idea of getting the economy going is to hire more government workers, and that really doesn't help. Hiring more government workers, even if you don't borrow the money to pay them, just moves money around, but it doesn't create anything.

One thing that is widely accepted is that tax cuts stimulate the economy. Tax cuts are an incentive for people to work to make more money because, if they do, they get to keep it. Also, tax cuts put more money in the private sector. Right now our governments are doing well. Government employees are well paid. There are lots of jobs, with great benefits and unbelievable retirement plans. The government doesn't need help; it's the private sector that needs a shot in the arm.

The tax increases that Obama wants aren't going to have much effect on the deficit, but they can have a disastrous effect on a struggling private sector. Taking more money from the people, even from rich people, and giving it to the incredibly bloated government is not a solution.

But Obama is up against the Stupid Party, so it is beginning to appear like the Republicans are going to shoot themselves in both feet and then stuff those feet in their mouth and surrender, but hopefully not.

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After the horrible tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, everybody wants to do something to prevent anything like that from ever happening again. The easy answer is banning the type of gun used in the attack.

Norway has strict gun control laws, yet last year a lone gunman went to a summer camp and killed 69 people, mostly children.

The problem is not guns, it's society. We have made some horrific choices regarding people with mental illness.

There is no doubt that Adam Lanza should not have had access to guns, or any dangerous weapons. From the reports I've read he was known to be violent and had some form of mental illness. Rather than blame the guns, it seems to make more sense to blame a society that takes a young man who needs help and puts him out in society to fend for himself. Some people need protection from society, and society needs to be protected from some people.

I know nothing about the mental health system in Connecticut, but I do know that the mental health system in North Carolina is an embarrassment. The mental health department for Guilford County, which used to operate out of a big building on Friendly Avenue, will soon be headquartered in West End, North Carolina, and that is supposed to improve mental health services for the people of Guilford County. It is absurd. Talking to people who run the system, the people who are caught up in the system, and the people who observe the system, I haven't heard anyone ever say that it is better now than it used to be. Shouldn't it be getting better?

A number of years ago the people of this country decided that something had to be done about the number of people who were being killed by drunk drivers. What society didn't do is find the type of car that most drunk drivers drove and outlaw those cars. In fact, that solution even sounds silly. What society did was make the laws against driving drunk more severe, increased enforcement and did a lot of advertising. When I was young no one had ever heard of a designated driver. Has drunk driving been eliminated? Not by a long shot. But it appears that the tide has turned and things are getting better, not worse.

The US government has vast resources. It's hard to believe that if it trained those resources on the shooters, not the guns, that something couldn't be done.

Banning assault weapons is banning a gun, not for what it does but for the way it looks. An assault weapon is made to look like a military weapon but operates the same as a hunting rifle. Banning guns because of the way they look is not a solution.

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The Obama administration thinks that the American people are so dumb that they will believe that the secretary of state of the United States of America had a fainting spell so severe that she cracked her head on the floor, or something hard, and suffered a concussion but didn't go to the hospital for a check-up, tests or just to make sure that her brain was intact.

The incident was so severe according to the official story that Hillary Clinton could not appear before the joint congressional committee investigating the murder of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans.

It was a very convenient fall for Clinton because she did not want to have to testify under oath about what she knew.

The State Department might just as well have said that the dog ate her paperwork or that she didn't have the right shoes for a congressional committee.

The committee so far has found that the security for the American compound in Benghazi was inadequate. Really, we needed a joint congressional committee to discover that a compound that was overrun with militant terrorists in minutes and then burned, killing the ambassador and another embassy employee was inadequate? Not allowing the secretary of state to testify, thereby not providing any real answers to the committee, it would appear the cover-up on Benghazi is in full force.

The fiscal crisis is a great smokescreen for Obama for Benghazi. It doesn't appear that Obama has negotiated at all, but he is using the negotiations for all they are worth because when they end then he could be asked about Benghazi.

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Even for the News & Record editorial page – which has shoe-sole high standards – going after the soon to be administration of Gov. Pat McCrory for having too many patronage jobs is low.

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Sunday's lead editorial was downright silly. It noted that McCrory will be the first Republican governor in 20 years, but failed to note that it will be the first time in over 120 years that the Republicans will control not only the governor's mansion, but the General Assembly and the Supreme Court as well. This will be far different from the administration of the last Republican governor, Jim Martin, where the legislature did everything it could to restrict the power of the governor.

But what makes the editorial so silly is that appointing 1,000 Republicans to state jobs is not going to change anything. Because the overwhelming majority of state employees are Democrats. Sure, you have a few hardheads who work for the state government who are Republicans, but if you go to Dallas you can find a Redskins fan.

The Democrats have been packing the state government with their cronies for over 100 years and the News & Record has the audacity to complain about 1,000 Republican appointees. It should be 10,000 or 20,000. The state has over 135,000 employees. The N&R is complaining because after over 100 years of being locked out the Republicans are going to take less than 1 percent of the jobs. The Democrats in this state have had everything for so long that they can't even see that there is another side to the story.

There are Republicans who have been locked out of jobs for years simply because of their political party. Is it going to harm anyone for people looking for jobs in state government to suddenly have doors open for them because they are Republicans?

People should not get jobs because of their political party, but for over 100 years in North Carolina the Democrats have run state government like their own employment agency. Now to complain because the Republicans are taking a measly 1,000 jobs would be beneath most newspapers. But, alas, it isn't beneath ours.

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Words, when used well, are so powerful. I was reading in The New York Times about the relationship between Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Obama. It had the phrase that after Obama's first two years in office when Republicans "seized" control of the House that Obama had not been able to get anything done.

But it was the word "seized" that caught my eye. The Republicans seized control. Seized from whom? From the Democrats, of course, who rightfully should be in control of the House.

Seize, the first definition is "to grasp suddenly and forcibly: take or grab." And then down at definition five we find "confiscate."

What the Republicans actually did was win control of the House in free and fair elections. The control of the House wasn't seized from anyone. It wasn't confiscated. It was given to the Republicans, not "confiscated" from the Democrats. In a long article it is not a remarkable word choice, except that it is so common that it is apparently how many (or, judging from the last election, most) Americans think of Republicans.

Word choices like that in article after article in newspaper and magazine after newspaper and magazine all written and edited by liberals, put Republicans at a huge disadvantage. Even when Republicans manage to get their message out, it is often obscured by the language of those telling the story.