How would you like your neighbor to pay the bill of your favorite credit card? How would you like to max out that credit card and when you call the credit card company to raise your limit from $20,000 to $100,000 they say, “sure!” Yes, your neighbor has expressed a little hesitation about this but not much so you really don’t need to listen to him or pay much attention. You have things to buy! This is exactly what your congress and president are doing.

There is currently a limit of $12.1 trillion dollars imposed on the national debt, yes that is $12,100,000,000,000.00. When numbers get that big it is helpful to put them perspective so that we might wrap our minds around something that large. If you were to spend $1 every second it would take you 378,552 years to spend $12 trillion dollars. If 12 trillion men (about six feet tall each) stood on each others shoulders you could make 41,811 columns of men reaching to the moon.

The saddest part about this story is that congress indeed must raise the limit. There is no other realistic option. The debt is growing every second due to the interest owed. Not raising the limit would, in effect, mean the U.S. defaulting on obligations which would be catastrophic. The congress will probably raise it to 13 or 14 trillion and this may go largely unnoticed. My fellow citizens this is bondage - “a state of subjection to a force, power, or influence.” Your agency and sovereignty and that of your children is being lost, and if left unchecked one day this nation will be crushed under the weight of these obligations. We are bound to the will of the masters who own us.

When one flaw in our nation continues to grow unchecked it is only a matter of time before this flaw begins corrupting other aspects of our great country. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes how we now have a problem with what will occur in the 2010 [U.S.] census. The congress has instructed the Census Bureau not to ask if the the person is a [U.S.] citizen. It is widely acknowledged that there are between 12 and 20 million illegals in the [U.S.] at this time. Counting these people, these citizens of other nations, will skew the representation in our congress by giving Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Texas additional representatives. Assuming this story gains notice from major news outlets there will most likely be a big argument over the wrong thing, “Should we count illegal aliens in the census.” Of course this would be a debate about a symptom rather than the cause of the problem.

The United States of America cannot be serious about maintaining itself in any fashion without first controlling the boarders. Legal immigration has been a beautiful thing for our nation since its founding and will ever continue to be so. But illegal immigration is a chaotic destructive force that overloads, distorts, corrupts, and eventually destroys all the systems and ingredients that have come together to create this nation. Think about this in terms of your own house. Your house could likely take in 1 or 2 guests and manage their room and board without significant disruption. Increase that number to 5 or 10 and you would probably start to see some disruption but you could probably manage with some changes. Now increase that number to 50 or 100 new people living at your house. Now the systems can no longer keep up, everything breaks down and no one living there can go on. Because you can’t support those 100 people doesn’t mean you hate them. It’s not a question of what feels good, it’s a matter of what does good. This is what happens with illegal immigration.

If or when this census debate is picked up by the masses remember what the real cause and solution is; the census isn’t the problem it is just one of many systems within the porous walls of our republic that are failing us. Let’s address the problem not the symptoms.

The media and many politicians have been taking their eye off the ball again with this Healthcare debate. Politicans often (but not often enough) have townhall meetings when they come home from Washington. Recently the attendence and passion at these meetings have increased dramatically because of the healthcare debate, which is good! For or against the proposals, involvement of the American people is good. However, we are starting to see a lot of discussion about if the supporters or opponents are organized (i.e. astroturf) or un-organized (i.e. grassroots). The implications are that the former is illegitimate and the latter is legitimate. Don’t allow yourself to get dragged into this silly distinction, it doesn’t matter. Both groups are made up of citizens who have a vote, people who the politicians should answer to. Declaring that some of them are organized and therefore don’t deserve a clear, honest answer about positions is arrogant and wrong. It was wrong when politicians tried to marginalize anti-Iraq war citizens and it’s wrong now. The question isn’t, “Are they organized” the question is “Are they right?”

The White House recently release this video. This is the type of communication we have been fed for years from politicians. The sad thing about that video is that there are NO FACTS presented in it, only intentions. The president states his intentions, if you like your insurance plan you get to keep it. Unfortunately intentions are not facts. What matters is what gets signed into law, that becomes fact. The bill is over 1,000 pages long and that is where the discussion must stay focused. It is a tragedy that politicians today believe is it morally justifiable to sign bills into law without reading them. This almost happened, and still might, with this healthcare bill and it did happen with the TARP and stimulus bills, doing that should be criminal.

The healthcare debate is one that every American should understand. Transforming it represents transforming 1/6th of the [U.S.] economy.  The first thing to clarify is the confusion regarding the terms healthcare and health insurance. America provides Universal Healthcare now. If by Universal Healthcare, you mean every citizen can access healthcare. In 1986 congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act which requires ambulance services and hospital emergency rooms to service and treat any patient regardless of their ability to pay. What every American doesn’t have is Health Insurance. Commonly the figure of 47 million is used to indicate how many people in America do not have health insurance. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that 47 million people need our help. This is not true. This figure is misleading because it includes the following (statistics supplied by Keith Hennessey, former economic advisor to the White House):

• Almost 10 million non-citizens
• About 4.3 million who are on Medicaid/SCHIP programs but do not report that to the Census
• About 10.1 million who have household incomes at 300% over poverty levels
• About 6.4 million who are actually covered by Medicaid
• About 5 million adults without children
  

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