It would be all well and good if the Republicans would stick their necks out a tiny bit to defund these things but, all in all it wouldn't amount to shit. Sure, they could stop a few things from being funded, but the Federal government would continue to grow and grow. The money would just be pissed away on other Leftist bullshit.
No, the only real way to stop this government is so simple that I rarely have heard anyone seriously propose it: Repeal the 16th Amendment! Remove the income tax proceeds of every American from the Federal government, and it goes back to being what it was originally meant to be: small and almost inconsequential to the vast majority of Americans.
After your initial incredulousness wears off, think about it. Would it really be that hard to get 2/3 of the states onboard with this?
State-level politicians (especially the Leftists) are every bit as greedy and power hungry as their Washington counterparts. The promise of getting their hands on all of the money now being sent to Washington from their states would easily convince most of them to vote to end the Federal income tax. Sure, there would be die-hard big-government holdouts, but I really don't think that there would be that many of them.
Of course, the Statists in the MSM would shriek non-stop about children, women, lions, gorillas and old people dying in the streets, but even the low-information voters could be pretty easily subdued just by telling them that all of the "free shit" that they're currently getting from the Feds would just be administered by the state now. As long as they think that they'll still be getting their handouts, they'll quickly go back to watching Reality TV.
Even your average, uninformed Democrat voter wouldn't really have an argument against it. What could they say when it's made clear that they will still get the same services, only from the state instead of the Feds?
The middle class would be onboard as soon as you told them that, since we'd get rid of the inefficiency of sending money to Washington only to have it sent back to us, they'd be seeing a 10% tax cut.
There are some people out there that have been pushing for this, but they never seem to be taken seriously, and I don't understand why.
When the 16th Amendment was passed, the Soviet Union - the first real attempt at Socialism - was only a few years old, and Socialism wasn't yet seen as a bad thing. The world had no examples of the horrors that it would bring and, as is the case today, it all sounded like a really good idea - as long as you didn't factor in human nature or put too much thought into it.
Since then, we've seen 150 million people murdered at the hands of large, centralized governments, their people impoverished and sent to labor camps for the simple act of disagreeing with their government Lords.
And even in the not-quite-so-tyrannical American Federal government, people are disgusted by the waste, fraud, corruption and abuse of power emanating from Washington. Most of those people may not have a clue as to what to do about it, but they don't like it one bit.
And all of that could go away with no loss in the quality of their life. In fact, without the Feds regulating every tiny aspect of their lives, the quality of their lives would actually get better.
I think that it wold be an easy sell. I just don't understand why Conservatives aren't pushing this day in, day out, 24/7.
donna@mail.postmanllc.net
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