Having been pretty comfortable and having been stone dead broke, I've realized there's two ways you can look at things. Basically, you can look up or down, grow or contract, create or consume. This is the fundamental difference between optimists and pessimists and between capitalists and socialists.
I grew up with the space program. I remember being in school when John Glenn was first launched into earth orbit. In school, they rolled in closed-circuit TVs so we could watch. This was history.
And now it is history.
I always despised the arguments that went: People are starving in America and we're putting men on the moon?
And that's the crux of the whole thing. When you're hungry or broke, you can pull yourself in, minimze your footprint, make yourself as tiny as possible and just barely survive, fingers crossed that something or someone will rescue you. No hope, no future, just crawl along.
Or, you can take all you've got and "invest" it in some way that expands your opportunities. In the US 150 years ago, people packed everything they had into the farm wagon and headed West. Or take your last $50 to buy a lawn mower to start a business, or bake cookies for sale, or take out an ad to promote whatever talents and skills you have. It ain't much, but at least you're moving forward and things will get better. At the very least, you're creating and employing opportunity.
You could say that the Comrade was following this last course when he begged and borrowed $800 BILLION in 2009 and "invested" it in pork barrel projects. The only thing is, he took that $800 BILLION from the profit of productive people and now they're stuck with having to pay it off, with interest. And... guess what? It did not inspire any growth. It wasn't intended to generate profit, so it was only "consumed" and not "employed." It was wasted. Nothin' left now but the deficit.
Adding insult to injury, the Comrade has laid on the regulations -- especially when he couldn't get a less ideologic -- or should we say more realistic -- congress to hog-tie business the way he wanted it to.
Let's see, the Comrade wiped out something like $500 million a year in lease royalties and eliminated abut 20,000 jobs with the shut down of Gulf oil production. There's a good idea. Not to mention what the impact has been on fuel supplies and prices.
Anybody buying those toy electric cars from Government Motors? Though I did hear today that Chrysler has paid back its bail-out money. Maybe... who knows? Those guys know how to cook the books.
Just waiting to see what the results will be from the government's fiddling even more with the financial industry with its massive new bureau and thousands of new regulations being implemented to "fix" the financial markets.
Like Fannie and Freddie fixed the housing market?
Like the Comrade fixed energy independence?
You just try baking cookies in your kitchen and selling them somewhere. No. FDA will be on your ass, probably local meddlers as well. You make $10 cutting a lawn, and about half should go to taxes -- unless you pull a Geithner and just opt out of the IRS system.
The thing is, the Comrade's socialist policies and marxist ideology is downward-looking. It all requires that we consumer less, spend less, build less, invest less, grow less, because we are forced, by law, to give more to government incompetence and boondoggles. Whatever "excess" or profits anyone might manage to squirrel away for their their own growth is seized by the IRS and thrown into the hole of public consumption -- socialized medicine, rail systems no one wants, compensating unions for the pensions they won't have because their leadership spent all their dues taking democrats to dinner.
And the result is subsistence -- you pull in, stop spending, stop growing, start looking at the ground instead of looking up into the unknown and reaching for it. You won't spend. You have no faith in the future, or no foreseeable future at all.
That's why they call it "depression."
So it's really only fitting that the Space Program ended. For one thing, the Comrade and those who voted for him aren't worthy of it.
But on the other hand, I've heard NASA had degenerated into some huge bureaucratic morass. And a couple private companies are continuing space research on a for-profit basis. So we do have hope for this and it will have a future.
Save the Republic.
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