Ronald Reagan's faith in the American people's better judgment about how to spend their own money was . . . misplaced

"Well, our loyalty lies with little taxpayers, not big taxspenders. What our critics really believe is that those in Washington know better how to spend your money than you, the people, do. But we're not going to let them do it, period."

-- Ronald Reagan, Nationally Televised News Conference, June 30, 1982

The secret of Ronald Reagan's success was that he stroked the vanity of the people. 

Nominal return from SPX since he made those remarks has been 12.48% per annum through April 2026.

Just socking away a one time investment of $2,000 in the S&P 500 that summer and forgetting about it would have yielded you almost $353,000 by now.

But today just 2.6% of Americans in general have at least $1 million in a retirement account, and HALF of retirees aged 65-74 have only $200,000 or less.

Meanwhile, our betters in Washington have put the country $39 trillion in debt, and 73% of us die in debt ourselves, with the average owed just under $62,000.

The government we deserve!

 

I'm so old I remember when politicians ran on less government, now it's less corrupt government lol

 

Less Corrupt, More Accountable Government Wanted

America's New Majority Project

 

This is so silly. Politicians buy voters with spending legislation. Right now they want to give families and businesses $70 billion in new tax credits, and to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan $95 billion in new defense aid.

You don't get $34 trillion in debt by accident.

We have the government we deserve. It's the voters who are corrupt.

Oooh, but that's a surer third rail statement than "I want to cut Social Security" ever was. You cannot insult the voters and get re-elected.

That's what pulpits used to be for, but no one goes there anymore. Somebody has to say it.

Smaller government means less money sloshing around to help your friends and hurt your enemies, which is what this is really all about.

Repent, and believe the gospel. The alternative is oblivion for the U. S. A.

Trump threw a tantrum on January 6th, blaming mommy for not stopping it is pathetic

 

Trump: Nancy Pelosi Is Responsible For January 6th

There's an old saying which says don't get in the way of your enemy while he's busy destroying himself.

And she didn't.

Trump is indeed responsible because he scheduled the event for that particular day. He could have chosen any other.

No one is responsible for the crowd getting out of control but the crowd, but Trump is responsible for the unique intersection between the crowd and the Congress on January 6th.

The Democrats’ prosecution of the trespassers has been wildly excessive, just to make an example of Trump for his childish stunt.

We are children behaving like children, and we have the government we deserve, on all sides.

 

Idiots elect idiots, news at Eleven

 Liz Cheney on What's Wrong with Politics: 'We're Electing Idiots'...

The debt ceiling compromise freezes spending in the next fiscal year about $400 billion too high, and does nothing to pay for the $4.9 trillion added to the debt over and above "normal" deficit spending

The Washington Examiner, here:

In exchange for a two-year hike in the federal borrowing limit, the legislation roughly freezes next year's spending at fiscal 2023 levels, followed by a 1% increase in 2025. The legislation also imposes some changes to work requirements for food stamps and will speed the development of energy projects with permitting reform.

Fiscal outlays for 2023 are projected to hit $5.792 trillion. Adjusted for inflation since 2019 that should be more like $5.385 trillion.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, deficit spending since 2019 through fiscal 2023 has added, will add, $8.5 trillion to the debt, which has been the solution to, and the cause of, all our problems.

We are not governed by serious people.

We have the government we deserve.

Michigan's growth of breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths through August has made it the poster child for vaccine failure as it sits atop all other states in the autumn outbreak

Aug 26: More than 20% of recent COVID cases, hospitalizations have been among Michigan’s fully vaccinated:

In the last 30 days, vaccinated individuals in Michigan have represented 23.4% cases, 28.1% of hospitalizations, and nearly 15.4% of COVID-19 deaths, according to data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

 More. 

Even without reporting cases in the last two days Michigan remains #1 in the nation for daily new cases over the last two weeks.

Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties around Detroit remain ground zero for daily new cases.

The lack of reporting during Thanksgiving week is emblematic of Michigan's underlying laissez-faire attitude to life. It is under-vaccinated compared to the rest of the nation, and gave up on social distancing and masking months ago.

That's as true of its so-called conservatives as it is of its liberals, including the Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel who got ignominiously drunk in public at the Michigan football game at the end of October, sans mask.

The government we deserve!

If essential federal government employees will continue working in a shutdown, haven't we identified who ought to be eliminated?

The non-essential federal employees, who numbered about 850,000 in 2013.

But that would make too much sense for this farce in which we star.

We have the government we deserve.

Trump still has a big problem on H-1B flip-flop, appearance on Savage Nation today did nothing to assuage fears he's just telling people what they want to hear

Sympathetic critics like Laura Ingraham are exactly right that the time has long since passed for Trump to stop winging it, show more discipline, and spend some money on TV ads.

We're voting for him in Michigan tomorrow, but I predict Trump is going to disappoint us going forward even more than he already has.

It's almost as if he's prepared to hand this thing over to Ted Cruz, who doesn't give a fig for anything but himself.

One way or another, we're going to get the government we deserve, good and hard.

From the story here:

"Furious supporters of Donald Trump . . . are now FORMER supporters of Trump".

The anatomy of an ideologue: Right winger Ace of Spades is a manipulative hope peddler, just like Obama

But dumber than Obama because he comes right out and admits it, here:

One of the things that political movements offer its [sic] adherents, similar to religious movements, is hope. The fecklessness, failures, and flat-out betrayals of the current GOP leadership has [sic] destroyed all hope in the GOP. And a political movement without hope is not a political movement at all; it is simply an advocacy organization for getting a very small number of people cush jobs in the federal government. If there is to be any hope permitted to the rank and file of the Republican Party, then we need big changes that permit us the illusion and fantasy of hope, without which we are nothing at all, just dejected former Republican voters. ... Hope requires a change -- Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Cathy McMorris-Rogers are no change at all; they are simply John Boehner's less accomplished inferior employees. ... And if you want to entice the alienated back into the fold, you have to at least let us dream of the possibility of actual change. That requires allowing us hope -- and not simply doubling-down on the current crop of failures and fainthearts we are obligated, sourly, to call our "leadership." Hope is a silly illusion, but it is a necessary, sustaining silly illusion.

Textbook George W. Bush that, trying to fight ideology with a better ideology, except the right doesn't have a better ideology. Better ideology is an oxymoron because you can't just bottle up and export what it took 500 years to develop on these shores and expect it to work elsewhere, or even here the same way it used to. Nor can you tell your fellow Americans that the people they are happy to keep reelecting don't represent them when they do and hope to succeed in getting them to follow you instead. We had the government we deserve and 30 malcontents just got rid of our leader who gave us $3.25 trillion reasons to be pretty happy with him.

I predict the president who was reduced to playing the tyrant to get his way as John Boehner gently strung him along will act more boldly now that he's gone and Republicans are in disarray and are about to crack up. Obama has nothing left to lose.

Tom Coburn Is Mistaken: He Thinks Changing The Actors In Washington Will Change It

It won't.

This is the conceit shared by many Republicans, and by many of their supporters in the country, but it is mistaken.

We have the government we deserve, and it sucks because we do, and it will keep on sucking until we stop sucking as much as we do.

And what do you think are the chances of that changing?

Video here.

Sen. John McCain, Who Approved 'A Tale of Two Mitts' Then, Now Endorses Gov. Romney

“It’s with some nostalgia that I return to this place that I love so well. I’m really here for one reason and one reason only and that is to make sure we make Mitt Romney the next president of the United States of America. And New Hampshire, and New Hampshire is the state that will catapult him onto victory in a very short period of time. That’s why I’m here.”

See the video here.

I don't know what's worse, Mitt Romney's flip flops or John McCain's.

Here's a recounting of 61 of the latter's, and that's just through June 2008. In the 2010 Arizona Republican primary, it cost McCain $21 million to convince Arizona's Republicans to vote for him again, flip-flopping even more all the way if that were possible, as recounted here:

Moving sharply to the Right, the senator supported the controversial new immigration law in his home state that opponents said would discriminate against legal residents of Hispanic descent.

The move was in contrast to failed legislation he had drafted in 2006 that would have provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants and had dismissed the effectiveness of building a fence on the US-Mexico border. This year he filmed an advertisement with a border sheriff which delivered a message to the federal government of: “Complete the danged fence.”

In a further bid to please the party’s Right-wingers, who tend to vote in party primaries, the senator also reversed his support for a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals in the military. He then distanced himself from a measure to cap carbon emissions that he had been developing with Sen Joe Lieberman, an independent Democrat.

“What McCain did was recognise he had a real race to run and move to the right,” said Martin Frost, a commentator who was formerly a Democratic congressman in Texas.


Americans have the lowest opinion ever of the US Congress not because of gridlock, partisan bickering, or even its fantastic personal wealth, but because of the utter faithlessness of the men and women who populate it.

And people don't like to be reminded too much how these chameleons represent them all too well.

Alas, we have the government we deserve. 

In NDAA America Embraced Authoritarianism With Little More Than A Pause Between Drinks

So says liberal Jonathan Turley.

Read the whole stinging rebuke of Obama and both political parties, and of the American people, here.

You have the evil government you deserve.