Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

 

Free-Falling off the Fiscal Cliff

“What could possibly go wrong?” I asked. Doctor Dennis did not grow up a ranch kid, so pregnancy testing a small group of my cows would give him valuable experience. Because I also needed a trailer load of horses hauled from my place back to Montana for an upcoming elk hunting trip, sending Dennis killed two birds with one stone. (For leftists, whose reality has been warped by Walt Disney, the previous is a figure of speech and no birds were actually killed in the composition of this column.) To speed my exit for elk hunting once Dennis returned, I loaded camp gear in my pickup and trailer the evening before he went preg-checking.

Six inches of light, fluffy snow fell during the night, and the countryside appeared so peaceful the morning I hooked to my gooseneck trailer. I drove to the clinic, tossed Dennis my keys and he headed to Wyoming. Around lunchtime, I walked across the parking lot and noticed strange marks in the snow following my trailer. The track led all the way home, so I figured a rubber matt must be slipping under the rear trailer gate. “No biggie; so I will lose a trailer mat,” I thought.

Forty miles east of Laurel and finally on dry pavement, Dennis was making great time before a Montana Department of Transportation employee pulled him over. Passing motorists had reported sparks shooting from under the trailer, so Dennis and Charlie, the state employee, crawled under the trailer to investigate. Noticing the distinct odor of propane, they discovered the shiny skeleton of an empty 30 pound propane tank trapped between the trailer axles. Apparently, a full propane tank rolled out the back of my pickup when I hitched to the trailer. As I pulled forward, the propane tank popped under the slightly higher first axle before becoming trapped in front of the second axle. On the snow packed roads, the tank happily rolled along as if enjoying a leisurely Sunday drive. Lucky for all, especially Dennis, the tank valve broke off early in its joy ride thereby releasing all the propane prior to the dry asphalt grinding the tank into a shower of sparks. Can you imagine explaining to your employer how you were driving down the road minding your own business and the horse trailer “just blew up?” The cause of the problem would not be found at the scene of the explosion; the mistake was made two hours earlier and 40 miles to the west. This brings me to my point.

News outlets are warning of America’s “fiscal cliff.” Just like the propane tank trapped between the axles, the mistake leading us off the fiscal cliff happened much, much earlier. For the first 125 years, the US Constitution successfully limited federal government power. However, in 1913 the “Sixteenth Amendment” empowered government to collect disproportionate amounts of income taxes from wealthier Americans to redistribute to large numbers of voters. Taking from the few to give to the many is pure Marxism, but for the next 99 years no one cared. The populace demanded their free stuff.

Over the decades, different administrations tweaked this new power. President Roosevelt committed American seniors into dependency with Social Security. (Although it is funded with payroll rather than income taxes, it is still founded on the redistributive tenets of Marxism.) President Johnson’s Great Society brought Medicare and Medicaid, while President Bush’s compassionate conservatism created Medicare prescription drug benefits. Finally, as the death nail in the coffin of American liberty, President Obama gave us Obamacare. America is $16 trillion in debt and borrowing 46 cents of every dollar it spends, so our transformation is nearly complete. President Obama’s new America has three classes of citizens with the producer class enslaved by debt and the non-producers enslaved by dependency. Only the ruling class will have the freedom and means to spend Christmas in Hawaii.

The Democrats warn inadequate taxation caused this, so they adamantly refuse to cut spending. The establishment Republicans claim even though our debt was caused by excessive spending, they will compromise with the Democrats—they always have and always will. Forget 2013, America dropped over the fiscal cliff 99 years ago and we are still falling.

 

 
 
 
 
Home     |     Products     | Copyright (c) 2009 Krayton Kerns  All rights reserved.