The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns

What I am disgusted with is politicians treating tax money like their own personal slush fund to help them win elections. No, I’m not accusing politicians of having their hand in the till, but something far more sinister: buying our votes. The way our systems are set up, politicians who spend money on some interest group’s favourite pet project win more votes. Those politicians that cut funding get accused of being heartless creeps for hurting someone, somewhere. Consequently politicians don’t do what is right, they do what will win them more votes, or perhaps more accurately, prevents them from losing votes. Spending increases and ineffective social programs suck up tax payer money like a sponge.

At least when you give to a charity, you can research how much of the charities money actually goes to the people it’s intended to help. You can examine the principles and actions of the charity to see if you agree with their morals and methods. Further, you can choose between competing charities for the charity that best represents your wishes. Finally, you ultimately choose if you want to give to the charity in the first place.

Taxes take the money out of people’s pockets who rightfully earned the money. The money gets sucks up into a wasteful system, with little monitoring for effectiveness. The tax payers do not have the choice of where the money goes and which programs get funded. Worse, the money can even be used on programs they object to for moral reasons.

What percentage of government social spending actually reaches those it intends to help? Do you know? Does anyone? Even when we know the number, are the numbers accurate, or just a trick of accounting to make government look more efficient? What good does spending another million or billion dollars here or there on The Poor(tm), The Sick(tm), The Old(tm), The Children(tm) or other such “noble� causes if none of the money reaches its intended target?

I’m a Canadian, so I’m not just talking about the US here. If I were talking just about the US, I’d be talking about both parties: Democrats and Republicans. Democrats complain that Bush is spending like a crazy nutball, and he is, but given the chance do you honestly believe they would be any better? If you think "yes" then stop drinking the kiddie pool Kool-Aid for a minute and wake up!

For the anti-war crowd, put away the political agenda and don’t go blaming the US war as the big increase in spending. Your government spends over 2 trillion dollars a year and have been increasing your spending year after year regardless who’s in power and the war is a drop in the bucket compared to the big overall picture. Besides, everything isn’t about your president. The true culprits are your congress and senate representatives or in Canada’s case the parliament. They are the lawmakers after all!

Perhaps in BC, where I live, the voters will finally wised up, at least temporarily. In BC, we have basically two main competing parties for power: left wing (Liberals) and ultra left wing (NPD). Comically, the NPD call the Liberals here ultra-right-wing kooks.

A few years ago, the NDP went on a spending spree like it was Christmas all year round. After a few too many slurpies late at night from 7/11, one of their political geniuses decides we need to rebuild our shipping industry. Hence, they promptly build fast ferries. They were fast! Fast to suck up much more money than predicted, fast to be put on the selling block to foreign countries for less money than it took to build the ill conceived oversized sail boats. A resulting scandal ensued, and the NDP have been out of power since.

Mind you their replacements don’t exactly give me cheap thrills. Once in power, they realized just how the NDP cooked the government books and went on a slash a burn for almost all social programs, regardless of whom it impacted and how. I’m all for cutting useless social spending; but when you make a whole bunch of people irresponsibly dependent on the government then do a slash and burn and cut people off without any weaning time the results appear harsh. However, I’m not sure they had much of a choice between that and watching the province face certain insolvency.

Bottom line: the government is that mooching “friend� who hangs around constantly using what you earned and gives very little back in return. I’ve often wondered if we were allowed to take 10% of the tax money we’d normally give to the government and instead give that money to the charities of our choice, if there would be anyone left still wishing government run social programs.

I have much more to froth madly about on this topic, but in the interest of readability I’ll save some for later...