The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yep, everybody seems really really happy that the debt ceiling crisis got resolved. Me, not so much as some. I don’t really care to negotiate budgets with a threat to bring down the economy, instigate a recession and ruin our financial standing in the world. Don’t ask me why, just doesn’t seem like the way to run a government. Unless the goal is to run it into the ground.

I particularly don’t like deals that spare the rich and rob from the poor. Okay, maybe rob is a bit over the top. Borrow, you like that better? We’re compromising, you like that word?, we’re compromising by agreeing not to raise taxes on the wealthy by cutting 20 billion from the IRS in return for asking food stamp recipients to find a job. It might seem fair, free food but you have to work. Unless of course you can’t find a job because maybe you have a criminal record and no employer will hire you. Or where you live doesn’t have many job openings and the commute into high-priced cities makes a minimum wage job a joke. Or maybe you have kids and working means hiring child care for more than you make. Lots of reasons but none that matter to the compromisers.

Back when I was on unemployment the Social Services people would always send me and my ilk to a sawmill 30 miles north of me, minimum wage, bad shifts, basically a sweatshop … but… if you turned down a job there the good folks at Social Services stopped paying you unemployment. For me and probably a lot of us down-and-outers, it was better for our mental health to turn that job down. Good racket, though. For that sweatshop and for the bureaucrats who bought into the scam, money saved all around.

They say work gives a person dignity. What they don’t say is that a lot of work does just the opposite. What they also don’t say, ever, paying your fair share of taxes might give the rich a deserved sense of dignity too. And maybe even an honest sense of patriotism. Just saying….

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