One of the main problems with Congress is that Congress really isn’t accountable to anyone, because the American people have been lazy for a good long while now. That thought leads me to this excellent editorial by Herman Cain on hunting down people who try to avoid paying the highest possible amount of taxes:
Senator Grassley, why don’t we hunt down those in Congress who waste our tax dollars on failed entitlement programs and pork projects? Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee declared, “It just leaps out at you as one of the most significant opportunities we have.†What should leap out at you is the fact that lawmakers produce deficit spending and the confusing tax code.
The gist of the editorial, entitled End the $100 Billion Witch Hunt, is that Congress is excited by a promise from the IRS that, if it is given $100 billion it will recover $400 billion. In other words, the IRS is promising is that for every $1 Congress is willing to steal from Americans, it can steal an additional $3. This actually excites Congressmen and Congresswomen, because their raison d’etre is stealing money from the American people and using it for whatever pork projects and vote buying schemes have been dreamed up for the year.
Some government projects benefit some people some of the time, but certainly not most people most of the time. Of course, when the legislative body is really not responsible to anyone, that is the outcome that should be expected. It’s the same mentality that allows your Senators and Representatives to vote themselves pay raises in the middle of the night and then act righteously indignant about fiscal irresponsibility at Enron and Martha Stewart trying to make a profit from her stock investments. The same mentality allows a body of people with higher than average levels of personal financial indiscretion and bankruptcy to lecture the rest of us on what it means to be good financial stewards while they take our money and spend it like it is their own. The same mentality allows these men and women to lecture us on what appropriate free speech about them should be, via unconstitutional legislation like McCain-Feingold.
It’s the same sort of thinking that makes Congress think it is entitled to as much of your possessions and life’s work as it wants to take. And that’s just wrong. Giving $1 of your money to an organization that promises to steal $3 more will be celebrated in Washington, D.C. Elsewhere, though, the small remaining trust Americans have in Congress will be further eroded.