Three Things Congress Can’t Do

We all know that there are many things that Congress can’t do. However, there are things that they can do, ought to do, and were elected to do; but it appears that the residents of the House and Senate are ill-prepared, ill-advised and ill-suited to do their jobs. Among their many inadequacies our Congressional leaders lack are the intellectual prowess to confront the issues of the day, lack the Yankee spirit & fortitude to persevere in tackling our country’s problems, and lack the American integrity for fulfilling their responsibility to their countrymen.

Congress shows no talent or ability in three areas where they should be able to step up to the challenge, and where they ought to be actively engaged in creating the legislative and policy directions to craft an American future that will be sufficiently strong to fulfill its fundamental promises and obligations to its citizens. And unfortunately for us, these areas have one vitally important consequence for us: Congress takes our money to subsidize the budget to cover for their deficiencies.

First, Congress continues to create programs that require increasing governmental spending. Now if these programs produced corresponding benefits to the country and/or growth in the private sector that outweighed the costs, then the costs might make sense. But they are not; most programs are fraught with mismanagement, waste & fraud. And it’s not that these Congressional stalwarts are unaware of the abuse of the budget, they are usually neck deep in the morass. The indications can be observed in obvious and visible ear-marks peppered throughout the mire of their bills.

Second, our members of Congress are addicted or subservient to numerous special interests that urge, prod and coerce them into forging bad laws and bad policy. The results of their pandering to their special interest masters is that the public is provided with the opportunity to fund not only their special friends but we get to pay for the interest on the monies that we likely borrowed to fund it. Now isn’t that special!

Third, Congress refuses to recognize or admit to the one problem that supersedes all other problems combined. They will do nothing to address the Public-debt, a mere $13 trillion dollar problem. To put this in prospective, think the USA’s GDP for this year. Essentially we owe as much as we produce in a year. And to make things more impressive, Congress lets us pick up for the tab on having borrowed the money to pay for this excess. Now don’t go off and think that this is a Democrat problem just because they are in office, the Republicans are as aggressive a set of co-conspirators as you will ever meet.

Be they Democrats, be they Republicans, or be they the uber-wealthy new political candidate of your dreams; if they do not step up to the real problems for our country then you have just elected another politician who is telling you what you want to hear and who is the champion of your most sacred single issue. Of course, your most sacred single issue is one of the reasons that the country is in the sad sorry state that it is. The persons you want to serve you in Congress need to be people who can tell you why you need to do those hard and difficult things that we are all going to have to sacrifice to achieve.