STEALING OUR MONEY: EILEEN TOPLANSKY
NO URL THIS IS AN ORIGINAL ESSAY FOR RUTHFULLY YOURS
Since most Americans have not had the chance or inclination to read 5,000+ pages of the latest stimulus package, we owe Jesse Watters a debt of gratitude for his accounting of how politicians are misusing taxpayer money. Instead of assisting Americans, many of whom are on the brink of disaster, the virtue-signaling Democrats want to give
- $700M to Sudan
- $10M to Pakistan for gender studies
- $506M to Central America to fight corruption
- $300M to Caribbean countries to study how many fish are in the sea
- $500M to build a border wall between Jordan and Syria
- $86 million to Cambodia
- $1.3 billion to Egypt
Watters emphatically asserts that these politicians are “stealing our money to send it to other countries.” Moreover, the politicians also dream of the following distributions.
- $1.3 million to see if Americans will eat bugs
- $2 million to see if going in a hot tub will reduce stress
- $150K on Kenyan art classes
- $37M to stop Filipino students from playing hooky
- $3M to send Russian students to American community colleges
- 5M to walk lizards on a treadmill
- $4.5M to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine
If Americans were not hurting so much, I would have thought that the above list of disbursements was actually a comedy skit to relieve the tension of living from check to check or no check as the case might be. Gender studies in Pakistan — the land where women are murdered for any Islamic infraction. As Bruce Thornton explains,
Like nearly all Muslim majority nations, Pakistan’s constitution encodes sharia law, the totalizing guide and authority for every aspect of human life. One product of this code is the social and juridical inequality of women. And many of the dysfunctions like honor killings and legal inequality that this ill-conceived $10 million program seeks to eliminate derive from these strictures. That’s why Pakistan is ranked second to last in sex equality. Given this simple reality, how successful can any program be at correcting sexist laws and customs predicated on deeply held religious beliefs?
Or Central America where drug cartels rule the day; or a border wall between Jordan and Syria — wait, isn’t Nancy Pelosi against border walls?
In noting the above, I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience . Thoreau refused to pay his poll taxes because he was opposed to slavery as well as the Mexican-American War.
There is an ongoing war — it is a war against the American people and American values. The First Amendment is under attack as people are punished for their speech and religious beliefs. Freedom to assemble is debatable depending upon your political views and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are daily being shredded.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
It may be high time for Americans of all stripes to consider Thoreau’s famous saying that “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
It was Cicero who penned
What of the many deadly, the many pestilential statutes which nations put in force? These no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly. For if ignorant and unskillful men have prescribed deadly poisons instead of healing drugs, these cannot possibly be called physicians’ prescriptions;
neither in a nation can a statute of any sort be called a law, even though the nation, in spite of being a ruinous regulation, has accepted.
When I see the restaurant owners being fined thousands of dollars for wanting to stay open, I am enraged. When I see Pelosi parading in a beauty parlor after sternly haranguing us to wear a mask, I am furious. When I see Cuomo, with not a shred of decency, accept an award while families still grieve about the unnecessary deaths of their loved ones in nursing homes, I am incensed. When I see people punished for the alleged crime of wanting to work, I realize that
. . . the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength.
Yes, we need to vote out these politicians who, with their royal airs, think they are our masters. But we also need to stop the financial spigot with which they waste our money. Refusing to pay taxes may bring attention to this harsh reality.
The hypocrisy and the waste of those who would sign on to any of the expenditures in the stimulus bill is beyond comprehension. Watters was highlighting the complacency of Americans as Congress debases the dollar, disrespects our citizenry and preaches from on high as they clamp down from their positions of power. It is truly overdue that we stop taking orders from those who are supposed to do our bidding, not the other way around. Indeed,
. . . The authority of government… — is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
A slow rage is building in this country and it should not die out until these people are removed from their positions of authority and the power of the purse is restored to sanity. Taxation without representation is not some old-fashioned battle cry from the past.
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com
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