Has Chris Christie Set a New Low for Medicaid?

Everybody will howl, including us old folks, but Medicaid and Medicare have to be slashed, along with every other government program, including defense. The Pentagon may as well figure that the F-35 fighter is a lost cause and there will be no new main battle tank.

Obama added 200,000 new federal employees at avereage salaries of $120 K plus benefits. All those positions have to be terminated immediately.

The space program is already toast. Instead of setting aside more multi-use national forests in permanent pristinity as roadless areas, we need to allow more roads and extractive industries in. We have to quit teaching that 19th century industrialists were "robber barons." They were heroes who started this nation on the road to progress, development, growth, and a phenomenal new standard of living. To be a hero of the American dream you either have to work extremely hard, be extremely good with your money, or be very, very lucky. You don't have to be nice.

We can't just use the austerity tool to get out of this enormous hole, we have to use growth, development, and exploitation of every possible resource and advantage.

When I was a poor farm boy in rural Montana in the 1950's, everybody assumed they would have to work like a dog to get anything at all. My aunt was the first person in our town to get cancer treatment. She took the train to Rochester, MN, with a suitcase full of cash but she returned with most of it and the Mayo clinic did cure her. The only reason she went was because her cancer was thought to be curable. Most people got no treatment because they didn't want to throw their own money at incurable cancers.

There were really no surgical procedures for any cardiac problem. If you needed dialysis, you died. If you got TB, there was a state quarantine hospital at Galen that would take you. If you lost your mind, the state insane asylum was only a few miles away at Warm Springs. The wards were noisy and had no privacy, but the buildings were fairly clean, had steam heat, electric lights, flush toilets, and hot water for showers or baths anytime you wanted. The food wasn't bad because most institutions had their own gardens, potato fields, chicken coops, dairies, butchers, and bakeries, with the residents doing the labor as able. After the 1930's even the prisons had radios, movies, and special entertainments. The prison baseball team would play anybody that hopped the train into town, including the crazy hospital team, the Indian tribe teams, various semi-pro outfits that came and went, and the fraternal order teams like the Elks or the VFW team. Any inmate not in solitary could play in a home game, but for road games they had to be trustees.

There weren't a lot of medicines. Most people shared them. One farmer neighbor nearly killed himself taking calf penicillin after he stepped on a nail.

If you want to simply confiscate all the wealth of billionaires, go ahead. I could care less because "old money" types tend to get disgustingly liberal and they don't mind at all sawing off the ladder of success after they have climbed it because they don't want entrepreneurial nouveau riche climbing it behind them.

If you want to increase taxes on millionaires or those on the verge of millionaireship, you are standing on the throat of entrepreneurship and this will not further the recovery America needs in any way.

I am a late bloomer and it makes a huge difference to me and those like me whether my tax rate on the few years of profit taking I will be able to enjoy is going to be 25%, 36%, or 50%. The liberal Democrat wealth redistributors are going to face a huge and boiling mad backlash in this coming election because Tea Partiers believe that when we control the investment of the wealth we created through our own blood, sweat, and tears we do a better job of stewarding that money for our own good and the good of all than would the 100 smartest Keynesian-trained government technocrats you can find.

Besides, those Democrat technocrats czars and college credential kings are drawing big $250 K. plus excellent government benefits while mainly playing crony capitalism with their buddies.

There is a new book out titled Reckless Endangerment, How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Lead to Economic Armageddon. It is well researched and well documented and it names names on exactly how our economic crisis came to be so dire.