The Unbearable Stupidocity
So, Nate, what’s the most retarded thing you’ve heard today?
Well, the day is still young so there’s not much of a competition, but I feel like there’s already a clear enough winner to make the call early (unlike the ridiculously over-publicized state caucuses). The biggest Do-Nothing Congress in half a century have teamed up with the chimpanzee in the White House to bring you the NRA (or National Recovery Act). I’m sure the fact that it has the same acronym as Georgie’s favorite charity is a coincidence. A great and reputable article on that act can be found here, but allow me to streamline it for you: the US government is going to give money to millions of Americans under the banner of “tax relief” with the hope that those folks will immediately go out and spend it, thus giving a much-needed boost to the economy.
The amount of money depends your household. Individuals will receive a check for $600, couples will get $1200, and $300 per child. But how do you qualify for this great little chunk o’ change? You have to get about half-way down the page to see that you need to make, as an individual, at least $75,000 a year, or $150,000 as a couple. They called that “middle-class.” If that’s true, then I’m sitting right around poverty level. The other option is if you paid no income taxes but earned at least $3,000, including through Social Security or veterans’ disability benefits, then you would get $300. Let me see if I can illustrate that for you:
Yes, it’s true, I’m greedy. They give money to the poor people who are going to use it to buy the things they need to survive, and to the rich people who are going to blow it on something they aren’t going to want five minute later. What do I get? Passed over like doorway with lamb’s blood on it, penalized for having neither too much or too little. I just have to wonder where all these hundreds of millions of dollars are coming from. Considering that if I ran my personal credit the way the government runs theirs I’d be either homeless or incarcerated, I know that there isn’t any actual money to be spent. Therefore, I have to assume that this is just getting tacked onto the National Deficit, a monster so dark and horrifying that I believe it was the inspiration for the film Cloverfield.
If you had a friend who was as in debt as our government, would you accept a gift from him? I think that if the folks on Capitol Hill really want to give their people something great, they can get themselves out of debt. But what’s their answer to over-spending? Spend more. A bunch of freakin’ brain surgeons is what they are.
I have to say that this is just the latest bad idea in a long, sad history of bad ideas from the Bush administration, and my one shining hope is that a few years after he’s been kicked off of the world stage, George W. Bush will awaken suddenly in the middle of the night and burst into wracking sobs of anguish over what he’s done to this nation.