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The AGENDA!
The Pioneer newspaper has been accused of having an agenda.
That accusation is absolutely correct.
Our agenda is to in our own small way help promote restoration of the principles of our Constitutional Republic. Our republic is bleeding away, along with our freedoms, our wealth and our once flourishing middle class.
That middle class, which grew ever larger for many years, was born out of the unique U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights individual liberty and responsibility, and clearly restricted the role of government to fundamental protections of the individual liberties of the people.
The Founders knew that governments become corrupt with too much money, excessive power and too little oversight by the people. After awhile, with no one watching, people in charge of the public purse begin to think their power and security are absolute, and their decisions superior to those who supply the funds. They begin to view the money they extract from taxpayers as their own and become hostile to demands for accountability.
Today the federal government has lost track of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. The accounting in most big agencies is in such a shambles that the heads of the bureaucracies would be jailed if they were in private business.
Meanwhile, the once vast American middle class has been in a mostly silent retreat mode since the 1970s. Millions of entreprenurial neighborhood business owners, manufacturers, farmers, ranchers and wood products workers have been forced to the wall as powerful multinational corporations and environmental foundations in league with governments increasingly lock up the land and call the economic shots in the nation and the world.
For at least the last twenty years, huge new areas of public job opportunities at every level of government have taken up the slack of diminishing opportunities in the private sector middle class.
Steadily and insidiously the federal government has assumed roles prohibited to it by the Constitution to local governments and dividuals. Uncle Sam is now our mother and our father, our CEO and land manager, our pastor, our social director, our language modifier and our thought molder. It's a clever scheme. Federal lawmakers pass an endless stream of laws. Aided and abetted by the courts, hordes of anonymous bureaucrats and the growing segment of population that has come to think of the government as their savior from every problem and their grantor of every wish, they throw their laws and their officers at the states and tell them , "Do it! Quivering in fear that they might lose some federal dollars, the states do it." And do it and do it and do it to the governments and individuals below them. It's a vicious circle and it all starts with the generous and far too acquiscent taxpayer.
The number of new positions and job titles created just since 1980 from federal to town level in order to take care of all those jobs government was never meant to do fills a good-sized book. A list of building, equipment, infrastructure and technology to equip our public servants fills several books.
The shrinking of the middle class as a proportion of the population has marched step in step with the expansion and expense of government at all levels.
An increasing number of intelligent and informed Americans realize that our country has reached a turning point. We are drowning in debt, and foreigners our federal government¹s debt of $6.7 trillion. And our trade deficit (and therefore our national debt) sets new records every year. We are dependent on other countries for almost everything< and many struggling taxpayers who lost their good jobs to China or India aren't feeling so generous anymore.
Much of the public and even some lawmakers are beginning to wake up to the fact that the America where millions of independent-minded middle-class people in thousands of communities grew crops and cattle, invented, dreamed, achieved, made and manufactured the foundation of this country's well-being, the big ole goose that proudly laid the golden eggs, is in trouble.
Times are changing. The fox has been greedy and made too many raids on the goose house. He takes the golden eggs and leaves ever-more manure. As businesses struggle and the comfort level of many middle-class Americans deteriorates while they wonder where the American dream went, they are going to be keeping an ever closer and more critical eye on how, why and where government spends their money It's what good citizens should have doing all along. All governments are subject to overreach, and an alert citizenry is the best disciplinarian.
Generally, trusting and comfort-loving Americans have been pretty sloppy at keeping an eye on how their tax money is spent. Too many of them want a piece of it and have willingly relinquished to governments the job of disciplining that should belong to the strong and free people that created the real wealth of America.
But perhaps the blind are beginning to see. A drought is creeping up on the free-flow of tax revenues just as it has on the land. Our rural communities need our work back in the forests and on the fields and ranges and manufacturing plants. Otherwise, the public sector and all those who depend on it are doomed.
It is time for accountability, and accountability for expenditure of taxpayer funds begins at home.
Home sweet home is probably the only place we'll ever have a chance of setting a standard for open books, responsible, prudent and well-informed public officials committed to guarding the public purse and promoting honest discourse rather than self-serving rhetoric between the citizens and their government.
We should welcome such a change with open arms.
Payson.cc © 2004 Carrol Cox
Payson Arizona Editorial and Opinions on National USA / World / and Local News Issues