6 Print * Email

About AJ DiCintio A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up. Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and polished by experience, to social/political affairs.

Social Bookmarking

Recent Articles Fixing Washington the Old-Fashioned Way Pundits Woeful on Obama Primary Challenge Crime, Punishment & The Liberal Gene Thanksgiving Exposes the Liberal Mind Living in a Dream Is Free Trade Stupid Trade? Liberal Intellectuality & The Election Paul Krugman & A Modest, Priceless Proposal A Universal Leftist Gene? Obama the Ideologue Friedman, Immigration & An Amicus Brief Changing Washington, Again! The GOP & The Tea Party More Than a Little Crazy Sliming America Red Hot Liberal Arrogance Liberal Is As Liberal Does Who’s to Blame for the Bad Economy? Liberals Discover Root of Evil Salem Witches & False Charges of Racism The NAACP & The Tea Party Paul Krugman, Politician Celebrating the Fourth with Washington The McChrystal Affair Liberals Expose Themselves (And It's a Good Thing) Epidemic of Foot-in-Mouth Borders, Polls & Statistics Schmatistics Blowing Up a Pornographic Boycott Looking Like Europe Car Bombs & The English Language Slouching Toward Columbia & Belgium Washing Out Dirty Mouths A Dangerous, Unbeautiful Nanny The TARP-Profit Lie Stink Bomb Democrats Dissing Emilia War Irreconcilable Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics There Is Method in Obama's Healthcare Madness Perverse Financial Elites PIGS Flying Under the Radar Hope Run Amok Obama: No JFK Stunningly Shameless Massachusetts: Vote! For God's Sake, Vote! Cowardice, Expediency, Language & Liberals Max, Tax & Principles Christmas Times Four A Tax Snake in the Grass Bad Gifting as Metaphor Obama’s Narrative & Afghanistan Prostitution & The Healthcare Bill The Viruses That Killed at Fort Hood Prize Winner Perversity Healthcare: Who Are the Know-Nothings? Let’s Kill All the Tomatoes! It's Not a War Against FOX News Beware CBO Healthcare Estimates (Let's Hope) We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore Hyperpartisanship, Propaganda & Hypocrisy Afghanistan & Sherman's Legacy Epistemology, Materialists & Morality Cleaning Up the House Worse Than the Stench of the Stable Obama's Shameful Education Affair Healthcare Reform: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly The Real (Audaciously Arrogant) Mob News Anchor Uncles Goldman Sachs America Krugman & The Boiled Frog American Aristocrats Long After the Last Cow Has Come Home Obama Being Obama Liberals and The Big Hate The Frog-Worship Scandal Thomas Jefferson: Don’t Question a Supreme Court Nominee Without Him I Never Knew That!

AJ DiCintio

Fixing Washington the Old-Fashioned Way
December 17, 2010

Mitt Romney is fond of saying Washington is "broken," a concept with which the great majority of Americans agree heartily, even though they may prefer to describe the nation's capital as a morbidly massive, amoral, incompetent, wasteful, reckless, hopelessly reeking wealth and power sucking morass.

This widespread attitude explains why, with the help of the Tea Party's message, the great majority of the public increasingly understands that the survival of the America bequeathed to us by the Founders depends upon draining the fetid swamp that encompasses the White House, Congress, the courts, and the bureaucracy and replacing it with a new, fruitful landscape of, for, and by the people.

Foremost in this transformation — given how international economic competition has combined with our internal follies to produce a painful, ugly "new normal" — is the need to change the rottenness that is Washington's addiction to taxing, spending, and borrowing.

Thus, the following old-fashioned ideas for fixing Washington's fiscal problems — ideas that will be perceived as radical only by the mutant minority who, like the arsenic-metabolizing bacteria recently discovered in Mono Lake, prosper famously in Washington's poisonous muck.

Regarding the disgustingly porcine federal government in general:

The first thing the federal government needs to do, as Shakespeare may have put it, "Let's kill the 10 or even 20% of make-work waste, shameless excess, and outright fraud associated with the entire federal bureaucracy."

About this necessary reform, four things need to be said:

...Only politicians could, year after year, attach the word "budget" to the moral and intellectual monstrosity that details the US government's income and spending, for example, the one which for FY '10 projects tax revenues of $2.4 trillion but expenditures of $3.6 trillion.

...Only politicians (in this case, the pol named Barack Obama) could subtitle the FY '10 abomination "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise."

...Only occult-arts-practicing politicians whose fraudulent brothers and sisters hocus-pocused much of today's $3.6 trillion travesty of profligacy into reality could argue that federal spending is not rife with waste and fraud. Part of the fix, therefore, must be declaring such "leaders" hopelessly non compos mentis and therefore not worthy of assuming authority over a pet lizard, much less the people of the United States.

...Only arrogantly parochial politicians who think the people's money is theirs could dare speak of raising taxes before they have suctioned out the last percent of filth and fraud that fetidly bubbles below the ugly, uncaring, treacherous tangle of the federal swamp.

Regarding the unsustainable Social Security program:

Despite the raging shrieks of liberals who are certain to cry "radical, irrational, and inhumane!" questions regarding Social Security benefits need to be decided by employing the mainstream kitchen table behavior that asks of any proposed expenditure, "How much does it cost?" and "Is it affordable at our current income?"

Moreover, the answers to those questions must be determined by independent demographers and actuaries who employ conservative assumptions in total harmony with Social Security's "pay as you go" nature.

Finally, politicians who argue for a Social Security program that ignores objective data must be required to take a televised test of basic first grade arithmetic skills with the understanding that passing it will expose them as dangerous, repulsive demagogues, failing it, dangerous blowhard nincompoop buffoons.

Regarding bankruptcy-destined Medicare and Medicaid:

Turning once again to Shakespeare, the government must say, "The first thing we do, let's gain the public's trust by instituting the following:

...vigorously enforced national best practices standards aimed at eliminating hundreds of billions in legal healthcare fraud

...vigorously enforced policies hospitals "can't refuse" when they are ordered to take the simple steps that eliminate infections and other maladies incurred by patients under their care, thereby saving an enormous amount of needless pain, suffering, and as much as fifty to a hundred billion dollars annually.

...the toughest possible policies aimed at preventing outright healthcare fraud and punishing healthcare criminals, whether they are doctors or administrators

...a fair, tough-minded reform of the nation's tort laws, the shutting off of a good part of the Democratic Party's cut of the Lawsuit Cycle notwithstanding

...policies that create efficiencies that range from using computer technology to effectively organizing the manner in which medical practices are structured

...policies that require every American citizen covered by a healthcare plan to pay something, even as little as a dollar, with every use of the healthcare system

Then, the public having been shown the improvements and the money, the states can be empowered to solve the problem of the nation's great number of uninsured.

There are numerous other examples of how Romney's broken Washington needs some old-fashioned fixing. However, every fix Washington needs cannot be discussed here.

Thus, this piece ends with the following observation:

It is a sad thing, indeed, that the kinds of old-fashioned ideas proposed here are considered radically irrational by some.

But sadness aside, it is imperative we keep up the fight for common sense fixes to Washington's problems, lest, like the ironically irrational power lovers and foolish dreamers, we find ourselves condemned to a hell in which the damned can stand neither their problems nor their solutions.