Everyone should have an Aunt Anna. While my grandkids and their Turner cousins were in Laurel over the Independence Day, Aunt Anna treated them all to a double feature drive-in movie and a sleepover. It’s only been five days, so they haven’t fully recovered.

Friday night Aunt Anna hopped Allison, her five-year-old daughter, in their Explorer, and then stuffed in Allison’s cousins Clara, Mae, Katie, Shane and Trevor. With a mini-Kimmel count of six; ages four to seven, the total payload was under 150 pounds. (These are some skinny kids.) Fortunately, Aunt Maggie rode along shotgun as an adult chaperone.

The first stop of the evening was Candy Town USA; a five-year-old’s paradise. If you’ve never been there picture this: Wall to wall and floor to ceiling stacked with candy of every possible color, flavor, and texture and Aunt Anna says, “Help yourself”. Thirty minutes and 27,000 calories later, the fun wagon rolled to a stop at the drive-in theater just as “Toy Story III” began.

The next four hours are peppered with small children ping-ponging between hyperactivity and collapse. Finally the movie ended and the Explorer rolled to the Tooke home so everyone could sleep off the sugar hangover. It was around two the next afternoon when granddaughters Clara and Mae staggered back to our house with vacant stares and chocolate scared faces. They were so much fun the rest of the day.

Every parent reading this has seen the infamous “free candy” crash. Getting something for nothing is intoxicating but eventually the offender collapses in a pathetic disheveled heap of humanity. It is not pretty and yet so predictable. The exact same thing happens in politics, thus my mentioning it here.

President William Taft laid the foundation for federal “free candy” with the implementation of the progressive income tax in 1913. For the first time since our founding, and entirely against Biblical and Constitutional principles, Americans were taught everyone was entitled to the first fruits of others. The Sixteenth Amendment fallacy uses the tax code, enforced by the full power of the federal government, to punish achievers and gift their property to the non-achievers. Our great, free, republic would never be the same. Elected statesmen who swore an oath of office to “support, protect and defend the Constitution” were rapidly replaced with politicians promising voters “free candy” from the treasury. Each election cycle brought greater and greater promises of gifts from the treasury for the 50 percent of Americans who don’t pay taxes. Obviously, this can’t go on forever.

Our nation is $14 trillion in debt and when you look ahead to the unfunded promises we have made to Social Security and Medicare, we are $130 trillion in the red. (This is all before we pencil in the cost of the “free candy” Obama Care.) Several states are in default and Montana will begin the 2011 legislative session $400 million underwater. We are entering the end of a 97 year feeding frenzy and the sugar crash is around the corner. Is your elected official part of the solution, or part of the problem?