Thank God and Government! Breaking news. You'll be so relieved. Last week the media reported the reassuring fact that the FDA had finally imposed new labeling requirements on bottles of sun tan/sunscreen lotion. Whew.
Sure, the entire economy is a shambles and unemployment is stubbornly stuck at 9 percent and threatening to climb. Billions of dollars are purportedly being lost to waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare. The national debt is at $14 trillion - $4 trillion of that just at Obama's hand - and we're borrowing billions more from China daily. The federal government is at war with private companies like Boeing and with numerous states - essentially a new civil war brewing. The ATF is running guns-to-drug-cartels schemes. Thousands of exemptions are shredding Obamacare. The debt ceiling battle is on high heat. We have multiple foreign wars in disarray and our incoherent foreign policy is catching up to us.
But we can still sleep as peacefully as a baby in momma's arms knowing that sun tan lotion labels have been made easier to understand. Snookie will be safer.
We're broke, and it's way past time to put government-amok back into a much smaller box, confined to performing only absolutely vital and essential tasks and no others, and eliminating every expense large or small incurred in doing anything but those most vital and essential tasks. The FDA, for example, should be focused on food and drug safety, period. Nobody eats sun tan lotion, nor is it a prescription drug.
The government is fiddling while America crashes. Obama outright chuckled as he admitted that his beloved and hyped shovel ready projects weren't so shovel ready after all. So, where did those billions disappear to? And, did everybody get that this arrogant incompetent is laughing at all of us? At you? He thinks it's funny. It being his waste, fraud, abuse and failure. Has any president ever so flagrantly and repeatedly displayed disdain for us?
Imagine this bunch of buffoons functioning in a business. When Iaccoca was dragging Chrysler back from the brink of extinction the first time, up to his ears in red ink, desperate for saleable new product, into his office comes some V.P. to announce that they are nearly ready with new signs for the rest rooms to more clearly convey that washing your hands after peeing is important. In comes another V.P. responsible for a marketing program on which a billion or two was just spent, that failed miserably. 'Well, I guess they weren't as ready to buy three-wheeled mini-vans with no doors as we thought,' he says, laughing at his own failure. How long would these guys be employed?
I heard the big news about the FDA's grand accomplishment reported on two cable-TV stations, drawn from, of all places, The Wall Street Journal.com's obviously vitally important journalism. I heard no one say: hey, wait a minute - why is anybody wasting even a dollar on this horse-puckey when the whole darn place is in flames?
As much as I respect Rep. Paul Ryan and the courage to at least propose a budget plan, I'm with Trump on this. We don't need to be talking about whacking Medicare, whether Ryan's way or with the $500-billion in cuts inside Obamacare. At least not yet.
Instead, let's cut the size and scope and expenditures of the federal government by no less than 33 percent right now. Thirty-three percent in 33 days. Give me an axe and get out of the way and I'll get it done. Starting with everybody over at the FDA working on the sun tan oil label crisis. Off with their heads. I once took over a money-losing company with 46 employees and had it down to 13 in 36 hours. It was tiring, but somebody had to do it.
I want to hear a credible candidate step forward with this. With a call to stop work and spending on everything but essential defense and dire, public safety-related matters - like e.coli breakouts, not sunburn. I want to hear a candidate say we need to repair dangerously neglected bridges and roads - not build new high speed trains nobody wants.
We don't need the debt limit raised, we need it lowered until the buffalo on the nickel bleeds. And don't start the usual crap about kids going hungry and veterans left homeless. There's plenty of places to cut all the way to 100 percent without affecting kids or veterans. Oh, and might I point out: we shamefully have lots of homeless veterans now, while we get easier to read suntan lotion labels.
Where is the media on this? Poking at it. But not relentless. And we desperately need relentless. Our elected officials and bureaucrats need exposed and shamed and confronted ruthlessly, relentlessly, daily. Their waste, fraud and abuse of power are far more shameful than Wiener's nonsense and the perfectly predictable arrival of Gloria the Lawyer-Pimp Allred.
Ignore that stuff. No story should distract us from putting pressure on these thieves and incompetents, and demanding those who would replace them lay out in clear terms what they will do to dump all the junk and right the ship.