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As more than one blogger has noted, Romney's choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate is one that will make Team Obama sweat, particularly in light of the fact that Ryan has been a pitbull in regards to the out-of-control spending perpetrated by Congress since 2007 and the Obama administration in particular since January 2009.

It doesn't help Team Obama that Congress hasn't passed a budget for 1,200 days and counting. And Obama's official term runs 1461 days.

Here's some sobering facts about it:

The last time the Senate passed a budget was on April 29, 2009.
The Outstanding Public Debt as of 11 Aug 2012 at 12:38:57 AM GMT is: $15,920,131,113,709.46
The estimated population of the United States is 313,295,427, so each citizen's share of this debt is $50,815.08
Obama's $3.6 trillion budget proposal was defeated this year in the House of Representatives by a vote of 414-0.
Obama's FY2012 budget was defeated last year in the Senate, by a vote of 97-0.
By 2050, the national debt is set to hit 344 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.
By around Election Day, the total debt of the United States will be $16,394,000,000,000.00 ($16.394 trillion).

The first point brought up overlooks the fact that the budget passed then was a carryover from the end of the Bush administration, due directly to the machinations of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The majority Democrat House and Senate delayed a vote on a budget they knew George W. Bush would have vetoed. Instead they relied on six months of continuing resolutions to keep the government funded until after Obama's election and inauguration. That is the major reason "Bush's" last budget was $600 billion in the red - it wasn't his budget, but Pelosi and Reid's.

It's also interesting to note that the last attempt to pass Obama's budget died without a single Democrat vote in favor in either the House or the Senate. Is it that they didn't like it any more than their Republican brethren or that they thought it would be easier to hide increasing deficit spending through the use of continuing resolutions? I'd like to believe they thought it was as much of a stinker as the GOP did. I'd like to. Really.

Should Romney and Ryan be elected to office, and with Ryan added to the ticket it seems to be more likely, I think we can expect the budget hammer to fall. No more trillion dollar plus deficits (we hope). No more "Let's tax the s**t out of the job makers!" No more unfunded mandates or multi-billion dollar government giveaways to industries incapable of standing on their own under any circumstances. No more interference in the energy markets. No more "the government knows best how to run the economy and your lives" BS.

Are Romney and Ryan the perfect candidates for the GOP? No, not by any means. But as we have to be reminded constantly, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Romney and Ryan are good enough.

I am off to a special town meeting here in out little New Hampshire town to discuss a matter of great import - the replacement or refurbishment of one of our fire department's pumpers.

While this matter had been discussed and voted on during our regular town meeting back in February and March, the voters decided not to replace the 25-year old fire engine and considered having it repaired for a fraction of the cost of a new pumper. But the idea foundered when it was found the old pumper was in far worse shape than originally reported. And since the town can't make capital expenditures of this magnitude without a town meeting to discuss the matter and a follow-on vote the following month, our selectmen decided to call a special town meeting. They petitioned the court for permission to hold a town meeting off of the regular schedule and received the court's blessing to do so. (Towns can't just call a town meeting at anytime other than the designated dates, unless an emergency or other immediate need requires it. In this case the replacement of a vital piece of life-saving equipment was seen as meeting the conditions to allow this special town meeting to be held.)

I expect there will be lively discussions and debate at this meeting, if not some acrimony. (A lengthy series of letters to the editor in both of our local newspapers created an atmosphere that generated a lot of the aforementioned acrimony.)

If nothing else, it will be interesting evening.

And so it goes in small town America.

I just caught a report by ABC's Good Morning America covering the dismal jobs report for June. It was another almost-softball report for Obama, with economics commentator Matthew Dowd stating the American people no longer trust politicians to fix the economy.

The truth, however, is more likely that it is the President they no longer trust.

Throughout our history it has been shown again and again that both Congress and the President have the power to damage the economy, but can usually do little to fix it by any other means than getting out of the way and letting the economy fix itself. Time and again it has been shown that by getting out of the way the economy rights itself, growth returns, and all is right with the world. Then someone in Congress or the President decide that things "aren't quite right" and they start tinkering with one tax, regulation, rule, incentives, subsidies, and law after another, each of them adding burdens that puts more pressure on the economy. In turn the economy slows, falls into recession, and then the Powers-That-Be wonder why this happened, not understanding that they are the ones causing the problems.

This recession, the longest in US history, was fostered by job-killing, finance-twisting, illogical regulations, laws, and "incentives" that short-circuited the usual feedback mechanisms and allowed economic bubbles to be created. Once those bubbles burst, the economy fell and fell fast.

The Powers-That-Be keep ignoring history, keep doing the same thing over and over again, and then wonder why their various 'fixes' for the economy didn't work this time.

It's called insanity.

Now that the Wisconsin recall election is in the history books, the Democrat Machine has switched to the Max Extract Spin Mode, trying its best to make Scott Walker's successful defense against the public employee union onslaught seem like nothing more than a fluke. The union thugs lost this one by losing support of the very people they believed were firmly in their pocket - the working stiffs. These same working stiffs are also less likely to support a President they see as doing everything he can to kill jobs despite his claims to the contrary. His record speaks for itself. The spin the Dems and the White House are trying to put on Walker's win isn't resonating very well across the country.

So why did the public employee unions lose after spending millions in union funds to unseat Walker? It's simple, really.

It's tough to convince someone who's barely making ends meet all while seeing their taxes going up year after year that it's in their best interest to support state and municipal employee demands for gold plated benefits packages those of us in the private sector can only dream about. It was a major disconnect between the public employee unions and the average working folks.

What made this disconnect even worse is that Walker's actions did exactly what he said they would - turning a $6 billion budget deficit into the first budget surplus seen in years, all without raising taxes; lowering property taxes; and helping reduce benefits costs paid by school systems across the state. It's not easy convincing people who see more of their money staying in their pockets that they should "go back to the way it used to be." That's a tough sell.

Do the results in Wisconsin automatically mean Obama is doomed and Romney will have a cakewalk? No, not in the least. But it does mean that a state the Democrats saw as safely in the Obama camp is now in play, and that does not bode well for the President.

Too bad. Or not.

We've all heard news reports about thieves stealing things like copper pipes and wiring from empty or abandoned buildings. It's not all that surprising considering the price of scrap copper and other metals. (Some thieves have gone so far as to steal bronze plaques from grave yards and buildings.) We've heard about Darwin Award nominees trying to steal electrical cables from power poles (usually frying themselves in the process). But this bunch of thieves have taken it to a higher level by stealing an entire building.

(The thieves] first apparently called the owner of a business next to 18400 Frontage Road along I-55 and told him the structure was being dismantled that day because the property had been sold, the Will County Sheriff's office says.

They then pulled up two semi-trucks to the building -- and tore it down. They removed the steel from the structure and then carted it away in the trucks.

The audacity of this crew! This is a crime that took a lot of planning. It was not a spur of the moment "Gee, that building is mostly metal, let's steal it!" kind of plan. They pulled off this large scale theft in less than a day and got away clean. That means a lot of organization and the use of an experienced crew.

While still a crime, it's success has me admiring the crew that pulled it off.

(H/T Scary Yankee Chick)

I caught the end of tonight's World News on ABC. Since it was Friday their usual last feature is Person of the Week.

This week it was the three mayors of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Mesa, Arizona. What is it that moved ABC to select them as Persons of the Week? They want the federal government (specifically Congress) to stop dickering around and do something about America's crumbling roads. After all, the US used to be number one when it came to the quality of our highways and byways. But no longer. We now rate 20^th in the world behind Malaysia and Cypus.

"If they pass the surface transportation bill and America Fast Forward, it will allow us to accelerate the building of that 30-year project in a 10-year period of time, creating 166,000 jobs," Villaraigosa said. "These are the kinds of innovative things that the Congress has an opportunity to do that they haven't done up to now. ... Their failure to address the No. 1 issue in America, the jobs issue, is akin to the captain of the Concordia jumping off the ship before the passengers had been rescued. This Congress needs to get back on that ship and do their job."

I have to admit that I agree with these mayors that our highway system has been seriously neglected over the past few decades. Some states do an admirable job keeping their roads in good shape but they have to struggle to do it, sometimes sacrificing other infrastructure programs to keep the roads open.

But there's something I must point out that the mayors have conveniently forgotten: the ~$800 billion stimulus package put forth by President Obama in 2009. If every penny of that money had gone to fixing roads and other infrastructure they wouldn't have had to try to cajole Congress into dealing with the issue now. We would be almost 3 years into the 10 year rebuilding effort and plenty of people presently unemployed would be working. But no one mentions that out of the entire stimulus package less than 10% went to infrastructure, and not just roads. The rest of the stimulus went to expanding government and lining the pockets of Obama supporters.

Do we really want Congress to drop another trillion dollars on projects that won't do anything but waste taxpayer dollars we don't really have? If we're going to drop a bundle of tax money on roads, then the appropriations will need to be specifically targeted to each state and limited to use on roads only. No "bridges to nowhere", no side projects that have nothing to do with improving roads, and provisions to do away with the Bacon-Davis Act restrictions (saving tons of money in the process).

I know, I'm a few days late on this, but I'm still trying to catch up. Gimme a break. I've been sick.

Now that government subsidies for ethanol have ended, as have the tariffs on Brazilian ethanol, what will the effect be fuel prices? In the end, probably not a whole lot. After all, ethanol is only 10% of the volume in E10 gasolines. Assuming Brazilian ethanol becomes more popular with blenders, you might see an approximate 5¢ per gallon drop in gasoline using it. For blenders using US corn ethanol, you might see an equivalent rise in price. But the main thing is that you and I and everyone else will be paying for it up front rather than having the cost of it buried by taxpayer funded subsidies (to the tune of $6 billion a year).

As many of you know, I am not a fan of gasoline/ethanol blend fuels. They cause too many problems, particularly in small engines (lawnmowers, snow blowers, chainsaws, etc.) and in marine use, where nominally humid conditions can cause the ethanol to settle out and clog the fuel systems of boats, something I've had to deal with over the past couple of years. And while the end of subsidies and tariffs are a good thing, that will not make me like the blended fuels. There are still too many downsides. (One of the 'benefits' of ethanol sold to us by the EPA was that it would make gasoline burn cleaner. And it does..for carbureted engines. But it has no effect on fuel injected engines other than decreasing fuel economy by 5%. This is a benefit?) Of course the EPA wants to boost the ethanol content in fuels to 15%, but so far the Congress has said "No". Even Congress understands the downsides to such a move and the EPA has not shown the move will be beneficial to anyone but the EPA and ethanol producers.

By way of the Barrister at Maggie's Farm comes links to two related posts dealing with wealth and how the wealthy actually deal with it.

One has to admit that the wealthy handle their wealth in different ways, running between over-the-top ostentatious displays of how much money they have to being frugal and appearing no different than any other middle income family.

An example of the second: Sam Walton, founder of WalMart. The man was worth billions yet lived in the same ranch-style house he'd lived in for years and drove his old pickup. Perhaps the only display of his wealth was that both his home and pickup were in good repair.

Another example (though not quite so humble in comparison to Walton): Mitt Romney. About the only time he'll spend a lot of money is to spoil his wife, Ann. Otherwise he takes the attitude of "Just because you can afford something doesn't mean you should buy it."

The flip side of the coin are those who revel in the wealth very few can understand, with multimillion dollar mansions, private jets, yachts, exotic cars, and vacations to all the "right" places. It is this group that has done more to fuel the fires of class warfare. What's worse is that many of them have no problems promoting social agendas from which their wealth will insulate them. Talk about hypocrisy!

Then there's those who believe that wealth is a Zero Sum game, meaning they believe that in order for one person to become wealthy that someone else had to be impoverished. It's an oft repeated myth.

As P.J O'Rourke writes:

They believe in the Zero Sum Fallacy -- the idea that there is a fixed amount of the good things in life. Anything I get, I'm taking from you. If I have too many slices of pizza, you have to eat the Dominos box. The Zero Sum Fallacy is a bad idea -- dangerous to economics, politics, and world peace. It means any time we want good things we have to fight with each other to get them. We don't. We can make more good things. We can make more pizza -- or more tofu, windmills and solar panels, if you like.

As I have argued on more than one occasion, wealth has not been measured by how much gold, silver, jewels, or other valuable items you have managed to steal from your rivals since the Industrial Revolution. The size of the proverbial pie is not static. It grows and shrinks as the economic conditions dictate. Everyone can get more pie if their willing to work for it.

That still doesn't mean that I'm all right with those clueless low-class wealthy who seem to think that the only way to win the 'game' is to be even shallower than their neighbors and to dazzle the 'little people' with overpriced and, in the end, useless gewgaws, doodads, and dreck.

After watching this ABC News story about how the Treasury has come to its senses and stopped minting dollar coins no one wants, I had to ask this question: Why did ABC come to the wrong conclusion about these coins?

On more than one occasion I have posted about how the government has gotten it wrong when dealing with the dollar coin. I've posted about it three separate times this year alone.

The problem isn't that the Treasury is making coins no one wants. It's that it's still printing dollar bills that last for a small fraction of the time that a coins lasts. The cost to print a bill is half that of minting a coin. A dollar bill lasts between a year and a half and two years. A coin lasts between 25 and 30 years. In the long run the coins costs less. But as long as the government keeps the dollar bill, no one will want or use the dollar coin...except maybe for commuters on certain public transit systems. (The 'T' in Boston uses dollar coins as change in its "Charlie Card" dispensers.)

The US taxpayer could save billions of dollars by getting rid of the dollar bill and switching to the dollar coin. But no one seems willing to make the switch, particularly when the vending machine companies start bitching about how reconfiguring their machines to accept the dollar coin will be expense. But expensive to whom, even if the claim is true? Why should the taxpayer subsidize that particular industry (for that's what it is if we stay with the dollar bill)? When Canada switched to Loonie (their dollar coin) and the UK switched to the pound coin, the vending machine companies did not fail. (Of course this part of the story is but a small part of the non-decision to stay with the bill.) All it takes is for someone in government to finally step up and say "Sorry folks, but it's costing everyone too much to keep printing this small denomination so we're switching over the the coin."

Oh, there will be the typical hew and cry by those who just don't like change of any kind (no pun intended). But eventually they'll use them just like everyone else.

The time to retire the dollar bill is long overdue.

It seems yet another EU country is reconsidering its reliance upon the euro. This time around, it's France.

Not that France's economy was all that great before they switched from the franc to the euro. The issues with the euro has merely made it worse.

The French have growing reservations about the euro: 36% want to withdraw from the eurozone and go back to the franc, the old national currency; 4% have no opinion, which means that they don't warmly support the single European currency; 44% say it is a handicap in the present context of a world economic crisis; 45% say it doesn't serve the national interests of France; and a staggering 62% say it is damaging the average French family's standards of living and purchasing power.

With the economies of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain teetering on the edge due to steep sovereign debt with little means of paying it off. These nations are depending upon the rest of the EU and the IMF to bail them out even though some of them haven't managed to trim their government spending to sustainable levels. A bailout will only delay the inevitable, not prevent it.

It is said the truly smart will learn from the harsh lessons of others' failures. I can say that one member of the WP clan is that smart, that being the youngest of the WP sisters. (As she says, she made her own mistakes while growing up that our parents never found out about.)

It would be great if the political class presently ruling the US was as smart as my youngest sister. Unfortunately they are not.

They see the economic meltdown occurring in the Euro-zone, yet refuse to learn the lessons countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain are teaching us, the primary one being that eventually you will run out of other people's money to fund all the wonderful social programs that have been used to bribe the electorate.

Italy is the latest to teeter on the brink of insolvency, and should it go over the edge it is quite likely it will pull the rest of the Euro-zone with it. Greece's default damaged the European economy yet it has only a fraction of the GDP of Italy. Should Italy default Europe will take an additional $2 trillion hit it cannot afford. Is it any wonder Germany is considering abandoning the Euro and going back to the mark? Can anyone deny that this problem has been driving the British public to demand a referendum about whether or not to remain in the EU? At least those two countries see the problem and realize they'll have to bankrupt themselves in a doomed effort to prop up economic policies from Brussels.

But too many of our own politicians at the state and federal level, regardless of party, seem oblivious to the fact that unless we make some drastic changes in how our federal government taxes and spends we will be headed down the same path. Labor leaders ignore the fact that neither businesses or taxpayers are a bottomless source of funds, shortchanging their own members by making promises no one can keep.

Should the US fail to put its financial/economic house in order, and right quick, it will pull the world economy down with it into a depression unlike any we've seen before.

Is it possible the Occupy Wall Street protests might succeed where indoctrination has failed?

While the OWS protests are obstensively supposed to show "the people" the evils of capitalism, it is having an unexpected side effect. It's teaching the OWS protesters the evils of socialism up close and personal, by way of Ayn Rand.

Not surprisingly, Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for thieves and con-men. As one organizer complains, "Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment."

Then there are the bums. Originally, from what I can tell, street people were actively recruited by the Occupiers as a way of adding to their somewhat anemic numbers. But the naïve young hippies who make up the bulk of the movement are quickly discovering what the rest of us, with the benefit of actual life experience, already know about "the homeless."

Over at Occupy Boston, a protester complains, "It's turning into us against them. They come in here and they're looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don't bring anything to the table at all." Another report concludes with a similar sentiment.

"We have compassion toward everyone. However, we have certain rules and guidelines," said Lauren Digioia, 26, a member of the sanitation committee. "If you're going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back," Digioia said. "There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled."

These kids had better watch out. If they start thinking that like this, pretty soon they might find themselves at a Tea Party rally.

"There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled." Gee, that sounds familiar. Could it be because the very ones complaining about the takers are themselves takers of a higher order? What hypocrites. They're finding out that the socialist/marxist creed of "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need," does nothing but create a large amount of 'needy' while diminishing the number filling the needs. It's right out of Atlas Shrugged, where the takers (looters) take more and more while creating a huge disincentive for those producing what is taken to keep working. At some point the producers end up becoming nothing more than slaves to the takers, as Rand outlined in her novel.

It seems the OWS protesters are "dominated by 20-year-old white middle-class college boys ." What the hell do these college boys know of real life and how economies actually work? From what they're showing the world, not much. But they're sure as heck learning the hard way that nothing free is actually free. Someone else has to pay for it. This time around, it's them.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

I've seen this both at Instapundit and on a friend's Facebook page. It's too good to pass up, so I knew I'd have to link it.

While the so-called 99% are protesting for free stuff, we, the 53% who actually pay for that 'free' stuff, are voicing our own opinions about it. One shot from the site:


Yup, I'd say that covers it.

As the foreclosure crisis drags on, it appears banks holding some of the foreclosed properties are taking drastic measures to lighten their burden.

As we've seen in Detroit, foreclosed and abandoned homes have been demolished. In a number of the hardest hit suburbs empty housing developments, some with hundreds of empty never-occupied homes, are being bulldozed to remove the need for the banks or the towns to maintain and police them. (Some of these upscale homes have turned into squatters dens, housing drug dealers and prostitution operations.)

The trend has been spreading, with a number of cities passing legislation to enable them to work with banks to demolish foreclosed properties that are unlikely to ever be occupied before they molder away from neglect. One of the latest to deal with this issue has been Cleveland.

The sight of excavators tearing down vacant buildings has become common in this foreclosure-ravaged city, where the housing crisis hit early and hard. But the story behind the recent wave of demolitions is novel -- and cities around the country are taking notice.

A handful of the nation's largest banks have begun giving away scores of properties that are abandoned or otherwise at risk of languishing indefinitely and further dragging down already depressed neighborhoods.

Four years into the housing crisis, the ongoing expense of upkeep and taxes, along with costly code violations and the price of marketing the properties, has saddled banks with a heavy burden. It often has become cheaper to knock down decaying homes no one wants.

As the linked article states, a number of other states and cities have passed laws allowing the same kind of operations to demolish distressed properties and ease the burden of supporting empty properties.

One area I predict will see such demolitions in the near future is the Las Vegas area. Entire neighborhoods sit empty, with street after street of new homes never sold and never occupied gathering dust and becoming the icon for a modern ghost town.

While not nearly as eerie as the modern ghost cities seen in China, it's still a sad testament to the housing bubble enabled by Congress with their weak oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Via Facebook:


That's the best way I know to do that. Unfortunately too many on the Left seem to think it's easier to steal...uhh...tax it away from the very people who made it to begin with.

It seems yet another attempt to do away with the dollar bill is in the works, something I have advocated since the Sacagawea dollar coin made its appearance.

Proponents of keeping the dollar bill cite the unpopularity of the coin because no one is using them. But the reason they don't use them is because the dollar bill is still being printed. It also wastes billions of taxpayer dollars to keep printing bills that wear out in 18 to 24 months. Coins last at least 20 years.

Two of those working against doing away with the dollar bill? Senators Scott Brown (R-MA) and John Kerry (D-MA). This doesn't surprise me because the sole company that makes the paper used to print all of our paper currency is located in Massachusetts. Without the dollar bill they won't make nearly as much income as they have been, meaning they'll probably have to lay off some employees. So the two senators from Massachusetts are working to protect a small number of jobs in the Pay State at the cost to the taxpayers of $183 million per year.

This rant by a small business CEO tells it like it is, something the folks inside the Beltway no longer seem to understand. Do they really think "incentives" to hire will induce business to hire anyone? Businesses hire only when they need more people, not because the government provides some kind of lame incentive to do so.


If the government really wants to give businesses an incentive to hire, then maybe it should get the hell out of the way. Maybe government should stop sucking so much money out of the economy that there's less available to invest or to buy goods and services that create the demand for more jobs. Maybe rogue government agencies should be reined in before they do irreparable damage to the businesses that actually create the jobs.

If we want to save billions of taxpayer dollars, stop the negative effects of government interfering with market forces, and let food prices seek their own level, then maybe it's time to get farmers off the federal dole.

While some may decry such an action as being against the interests of small family farms, those same folks speaking out against such cuts don't understand that it isn't the small family farms receiving the benefits of the government subsidies and tax breaks, but the large agribusiness corporations. They don't need those subsidies and shouldn't be receiving them because in the long run all they do is raise food prices (and the taxes keeping them there) to the detriment of everyone else, including the small farmers.

Government subsidies obviously aren't necessary for food production: people have fed themselves and traded their surpluses for thousands of years. The system doesn't help consumers. Reducing supplies and imposing price floors obviously are bad deals for the hungry. Paying off farmers might lower some prices, but steals back through taxes any benefits received by consumers. Agricultural subsidies are designed by farmers for farmers.

But which farmers? Not the idyllic family farmer. The majority of payments go to farms with average annual revenue exceeding $200,000 and net worth around $2 million.

Many of the subsidies date back to the Depression and the reasons for them no longer exist, but here we are seventy years later and we're still paying for them.

Before anyone gets on their high horse about saving the American farm, we should look at what happened when another country eliminated farm subsidies, in this case, New Zealand.

In 1984, New Zealand's Labor government ended all farm subsidies, which then consisted of 30 separate production payments and export incentives -- a striking action given that New Zealand was five times more dependent on farming than the U.S. economy.

A report from [2001] from the country's main farmers' group, the Federated Farmers of New Zealand, documents what happened:

While land prices initially fell after reform, by 1994 they had rebounded and remain high today.

The predicted farm bankruptcies never materialized -- with just 1 percent of farmers going out of business.

The value of farm output soared 40 percent in constant dollar terms since the mid-1980s and agriculture's share of national output rose from 14 percent to 17 percent today.

Since subsidies were removed, productivity in the sector has risen 6 percent annually -- compared with just 1 percent before reform.

New Zealand's farmers have competed successfully in world markets against subsidized producers in much of the rest of the world.

Can anyone successfully argue that we shouldn't do the same thing, and quite likely, see exactly the same results? Oh, I'm sure someone will try, particularly the folks from the "corporate farm" lobby. But maybe it's time we wean these folks off the government teat and let them succeed or fail on their own rather than allowing them to continue dipping into the taxpayer's wallets.

This is an update to a previous post about how our government wastes taxpayer money on creating money, in this case on dollar coins no one wants or uses.

Now ABC News is on the case (thought they got it from NPR), reporting on how billions are wasted on those dollar coins that end up sitting in Federal Reserve vaults.


While the report points the finger at legislation that mandated the minting of the coins, specifically the Presidential series coins, the blame is being laid in the wrong place, or on the wrong piece of legislation.

As I have written far too many times, the reason the dollar coin is unwanted is because Congress hasn't had the courage to do away with the dollar bill. As long as it is still in circulation the dollar coins will sit in those vaults, unused, unwanted, and costing the American taxpayers plenty.

The ongoing disagreement between Congressional leaders and the President about the debt limit, taxes, and spending is showing the American people more than they wanted to see. To me this means far too many of the Democrats still seem to think we can fix the the deficit problem by spending even more money we don't have and can't pay back even if they make "the rich" pay their "fair share" in taxes, and the President acting like a spoiled and petulant child, placing all the blame for the outcome of his ill-advised and fiscally disastrous policies on the GOP because they don't or won't recognize his genius.

As much as the Democrats and the media try to spin it, the Democrats are about to reap what they've sown, namely a seriously broken financial system and the enmity of a large majority of the American people, particularly those in flyover country.

One commenter to a previously linked WSJ piece has proposed a solution to the spending problem with deep cuts for agencies and programs that manage to do nothing but waste billions of taxpayer dollars and create misery for far too many of the people they say they're helping.

Here we go. A quick way to save a few bucks.

2011 Budget Line items to consider - spending at the federal level, independent of state spending:

$129.8 Billion Education (why is the federal government involved in this?) - Zero out

$495 Billion Welfare (that's charity, right? Is this an enumerated power at the federal level or is it a state power? My take is I didn't see a charity power and Grover Cleveland agreed with me.

Grover Cleveland veto statement when vetoing charity to help Texas farmers:

"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood."

-zero out.

--snip--

$22.7 billion Fuel and energy (as in Ethanol?) Why does energy need a subsidy, it's suppose to provide the value, not absorb it? - Zero out.

There's plenty more, so I suggest you Read The Whole Thing. While I don't agree with every point brought up, I can live with these proposed cuts as compared to some of those proposed within Congress.