United Liberty

A recent Rasmussen poll revealed substantial support for small government amongst Americans:

Sixty-six percent (66%) of U.S. voters prefer a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes over a more active government with more services and higher taxes.

Even if they prefer a small government, Americans are faced with a country in which the federal government is the largest employer and the pay afforded its employees dwarfs that of a private worker:

While many workers in the private sector have despaired of a pay increase in the past few years, Congress takes care of federal employees with annual raises, awarding 3.9 percent in 2009, 3.5 percent in 2008 and 2.7 percent in 2007.

The average pay for the nation’s 1.9 million federal workers is a little over $71,000, with the 372,041 federal workers in the Washington area earning an average of $94,047. The average salary for the nation’s 108 million private-sector workers is $50,028.

Government employees are often unionized and have infrastructure built to keep them from being fired even if they fail to perform their job functions. They tend to vote Democratic and their unions are among the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party. Is it any wonder then that the average American continues to face a vacant job market while a Democratic Congress provides increasing raises for federal employees?

From the same people who brought you the bailouts, stimulus and the deficit, comes the soda tax:

Charging a few more cents for a soft drink, legislators claim, will not only refresh exhausted state and federal revenues; it will make us thinner.

Several versions of this year’s health care bills included a soda tax to help offset new costs. In a September interview with Men’s Health, President Barack Obama called it ‘‘an idea that we should be exploring” because “our kids drink way too much soda.” The idea had been dropped from the health care legislation at press time but is expected to resurface next year.

The proposal is perennially popular on the state and local levels too. Thirty-three states tax the sale of soft drinks, at an average rate of 5.2 percent, and politicians in other jurisdictions are eager to jump on the bandwagon. After New York Gov. David A. Patterson floated the idea of a soda tax in December 2008, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched his own campaign to tax sugary drinks. “All the studies show that young kids drink an enormous amount of soda, and if they drink the sodas with all the sugar in it, it adds a great deal of weight to them,” Bloomberg said in April.

This all seems quite silly from the onset, but let’s dive in deeper.

Recent in the news has been former Senator Tom Daschle’s withdrawal of his nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services, along with President Obama’s additional nomination of him to a newly-concocted post of “White House Health Czar” (isn’t it interesting how increasingly popular the term “czar” has become in the government lexicon as of late?). The main issue that brought Daschle’s nomination down was his failure to pay more than $128,000 in taxes from 2005 to 2007 (which he ended up doing last month in the form of back taxes with nearly $12,000 in interest). Naturally this raised once again the whole matter of double standards over such matters, one for government officials (and others in positions of power or privilege), and another for everyone else. The President seemed finally to recognize that such a double standard would not serve him well, after noticing a disturbing pattern among a few of his other nominees.

I really don’t like school.

This has been a constant since I was a kid. As a child, I never paid attention and didn’t really learn to read, until I found a reason to outside of school by way of my enthusiasm for comic books. In my opinion, school was nothing but a good way to get harassed by other children with dominating personalities and humiliated by psychopathic teachers desperate for a government wage.

I read plenty of classic books in high school, but not on assignment from classes. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut and Malcolm X’s autobiography while considering dropping out of the public school system altogether as a freshman. While community college was an improvement in terms of intellectual quality, I still don’t see the reasoning of why people must dedicate so much money and time to higher education just to spruce up their resumes for employers, who offer jobs in which experience is far more important.

The news is dominated by all the talk and debate of the so-called economic “stimulus” package, which, in the House-passed version is said to be $815 billion, while the version under consideration in the Senate is (not surprisingly) even more expensive at something closer to $900 billion. None of these figures take into account the true cost of the program when the interest on newly incurred debt is added (those figures have a range beginning at $1.2 trillion with a limit no one even knows).

According to The Raw Story, Democrats have ending the ban on federal funding of stem cell research (it’s worth noting that independently funded research is perfectly legal) at the top of their agenda:

Democrats in Congress are debating whether to push for an end to the ban on stem cell research once President-elect Barack Obama takes office.

Both Obama and the Democratic leadership have said stem cell research is a top priority, but some worry the fight will get the Democrats’ first year off to a rocky start, even if a win is certain in both the House and Senate.

“It is a very divisive issue, and it is a tough way to start,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat. “You don’t want to stumbleout of the box.”