Paineful Truth

The Third Republican Debate Of all the areas of our lives that the government touches, which is the one that we as individuals probably feel the most? The economy. Whether it be at the gas pump, the grocery store, or our highly taxed paycheck, we feel the effects of governmental fiscal policy all the time, every day. For these reasons I was very interested to watch the third Republican Debate last Wednesday since it was the proclaimed main topic of the event. “Your Money, Your Vote.” But as policies and ideas are bantered back and forth on a debate stage, it can get very easy to get confused about what is what, especially when the topic of ‘billions’ or ‘trillions’ of dollars comes up. People throw numbers back and forth like a tennis ball, while we’re left sitting at home wondering, “How am I going to make ends meet this month?” We had ten candidates up on that stage (and four at the earlier debate), ten different tax plans, ten different ideas a...

Leadership in Crisis   Dear Citizens of the United States:  As the election for the new Speaker of the House draws near, all eyes on on Paul Ryan as he looks to take the reigns of leadership. Many of the leaders of the Conservative movement have been less than pleased at the recent performance of our GOP majority Congress. And I get it. There is a sense of frustration throughout our country. Americans as a whole know that something isn’t right even if they can’t put a finger on it. And as this frustration boils and simmers we look to our leaders hoping, praying for something, anything to change. But it never seems to. The House has been prolific in passing good legislation that Americans want (as demonstrated by the 2010 election ), it just hasn’t made it through the Senate and received a presidential signature. However when pressed on this fact, many complain that since they do not have a large enough majority to override a veto, anything that Presiden...

American government is not complicated. Allow me to rephrase that.  American government is not supposed to be complicated. The United States Constitution has under 8,000 words (including signatures and amendments). Put forth in this document was a concise, simple, straightforward approach to governing, unlike anything that had been done before. And it worked amazingly well. Until recently. Nothing brought this fact more to the light than the Democratic debate that was held last Tuesday. The issues that were addressed (or avoided) and argued over by these presidential hopefuls, were incredibly complicated. As were the solutions that these presidential hopefuls proffered. Whoever is elected president is going to take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. However, most of what was put forward by the candidates Tuesday night, was in violation of what the Constitution says. And that is a problem. A candidate who is wanting to run your country needs to ...

No question, the last several days have been very busy. Speaker John Boehner is gone. Or at least on his way out, set to officially step down on October 30th. That was big news but even bigger has been the aftermath. Not only that, but we have Congress passing a short-term spending bill that will fund the government for another ten weeks. Obama and I actually agree on something when the White House issued a statement saying “Americans deserve far better than last-minute, short-term legislating.” Well put. Then on top of all that, we had House Committee hearings on the Planned Parenthood sting videos . Well over three hours of discussion of a completely ridiculous “issue”, because it shouldn’t even be a question in the first place. But I’ll get to that. With this article, I want to show you how these three issues are integrally connected, why that matters and what the solution is. Because I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of these kind of items hitting the news, bein...