Home
TOC/Forword
I. Taxes
II. Retirement Plan
III. Energy
IV. Campaign Finance Reform
V. Global Warming
VI. Subsidies
VII. The Border
Additional Points

Closing Points

In closing I would like to address several issues not necessarily related to each other:

In the last election, Candidate Obama, in an attempt to help us get better gas mileage, suggested that we put more air in our tires. This is a perfect example of the wisdom permeating from him and his advisors. They actually do not have a clue. A good mechanic would advise you to; 1) Switch to synthetic oil on your next oil change, freeing that much more petroleum to be converted into gasoline or diesel. 2) A front end alignment will allow the front wheels to roll forward with no resistance. When the front end of a vehicle has "toe in or toe out", it will cause the drive wheels to work harder to propel the auto forward, thus diminishing fuel economy. 3) The rear differential or what is commonly called the rear end is a cluster of gears inside the third member housing. These gears have different ratios, depending on their intended use. For instance, a truck used for heavy hauling will have a low gear to make the engine operate at a higher R.P.M. (revolutions per minute) so as to not over tax the engine. A family automobile does not need a low ratio gear but sometimes they come from the factory with one. Find out what your gear ratio is and if it should be changed to a highway gear, do so. The increased fuel economy will astound you. These are just three ideas of many from the private sector that could benefit us greatly.
Early in President Clinton's first term, he lowered the amount of money a Social Security recipient could earn before being penalized by the Social Security Administration. For all practical purposes it amounted to a tax increase on the elderly. At the time, that move might have had a good reason, but with today's economy and the gut punch retirees' retirement funds took, many have had to return to work, only to find out they were limited to what they could earn. Eliminating penalties on these people would be the right thing to do.
The Federal Government and Congress seem to never be happy with emission standards on today's American made vehicles. Today's automobiles are over 90% cleaner than the ones in the 1970's. In these times of turmoil, well over 90% is clean enough and congress and the special interest groups should back off and let the country heal.
Over the years, there have been many public warnings of problems or impending troubles that never passed the common sense test but were perpetrated on us anyway. For instance, back in the 50's school children were taught to "duck and cover" in the event of an atomic bomb blast. I wonder who thought that one up. Then there was "acid rain" where the evil industries were putting so many pollutants into the atmosphere that we were told if it rained, the rain would mix with the sulfur in the air producing sulfuric acid and we were all going to burn up. No one in the government came forward to debunk this one either. Freon, a perfectly good refrigerant, manufactured in the U.S.A. and was responsible for many thousands of jobs, was vilified for causing the hole in the ozone layer to expand, exposing all of us to harmful Sunshine. The scientist and others blamed Freon and other substances for the decline in the ozone layer. The only problem, within their testimony and rhetoric, was a simple statement that when an accidental release of Freon and other chemicals happened it would take fifty years for the Freon to reach the ozone layer. If someone had done their math, they would have realized that Freon could not have been responsible for anything that happened 50 years ago! Freon had not been invented back then. If you back up fifty years from the 1980's they are talking about the 1930's. In the decade of 1930 there were no automobiles that had air conditioning; no homes had air conditioners and no appliances containing Freon. Most people in the 1930's had an ice box to keep their food cool and the people who made ice back then used ammonia. Not one word from Congress or the White House and good companies and their employees were destroyed. Speaking of destruction, there were millions of water closets or commodes with 3 gallon flush tanks destroyed and replaced with 1.5 gallon flush tanks (that did not flush very well) all in the name of saving water. Do you remember the story about the first grader who screamed at her mother for leaving the faucet on while the mother brushed her teeth? The child had learned from her teacher that wasting water would destroy the planet. The teacher had told her class that we were running out of water! Can anyone tell me how this can happen? Water can not be burned, buried or blown up. Water can not leave the atmosphere. How in the world can we be running out of water? I would venture a guess that we have the same amount of water today that we had on the day the earth came into being. Not one word from the people we depend on to protect us from these kinds of scare tactics. I know everyone remembers Y2K. What a joke! With all the agencies and programs and departments we have in the Government, you would think there would be a little group of thinkers in some obscure office somewhere whose job it would be to tell us what is B.S. and what isn't. But I guess this is just too much to ask.
The last time I voted, there was a directional sign in Spanish next to the door where I was to vote. Since only citizens can vote and you must be able to speak, read and write English to become a citizen, it was only natural for me to ask the election judge why were there signs printed in a foreign language. She informed me that she did not know why and that the signs came from Election Central. I suspect it has to do with the fact that the United States does not have an official language, a problem well over due for address.
A lot of people are confused about where the problems originated in our current financial troubles. Many people blame Wall Street, others point to greed and still some blame the Bush Administration. All it takes is a little common sense and a memory not clouded by a desire to point fingers at anyone but us. It all started with the price of fuel; gasoline was going up in price at the pump with no ceiling in sight, the cost of diesel fuel was driving the price up on everything we come in contact with and we simply got scared. Fear closed our pocketbooks, pure and simple. Our employers were hurting and layoffs were imminent and we did not know if we were going to have jobs and we just stopped spending. When times are tough, the non-essentials are the first to go! Now that gas prices are down but nothing is being done to ensure they stay down (like more drilling for domestic oil), we are still not confident enough in our leaders to loosen our purse strings. The price of fuel can go back up to $4.00 a gallon at any moment. Until it is proven to us that energy cost can be stabilized and our jobs will be safer, I don't see spending increasing. The housing market is a completely different matter. Many people tie the lack of spending to the mortgage problem, but they are not related at all. It would be like a volcano eruption and a hurricane in the same area at the same time, they are both catastrophes but have nothing to do with each other. The housing or mortgage problem started during the Clinton Administration when the decision was made to make it easier for everyone in America to buy a home. On the surface this was very noble. Everyone should be able to cash in on the American Dream. The problem began when people bought more house than they could afford. These were called "sub-prime" loans. The word "sub" means below. The people buying these homes could not pay the monthly note. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not governmental agencies but acted as an extension of the government when it began to buy up these mortgages. One report stated that the directors of these two agencies were paid salaries and bonuses according to how many of these sub-prime mortgages they were able to buy. Well, the two agencies mentioned above are governmental agencies now and the taxpayers are on the hook for all of these sub-prime mortgages. It is astounding how the President of the United States and the responsible members of Congress ever expected these poor people to pay for their homes.
The secret to peace in the Middle East is to completely separate the Israelis from the Palestinians. It is obvious these people can not live or coexist together. The 1948 U.N. resolution stated all lands west of the Jordan River is to be the country of Israel. With this in mind, the Palestinians will have to move to the East bank of the Jordan River and the rest of the world will help them form a country and the entire infrastructure that goes with it. The United Nations of that era was truly a world body with the best interest of the world in mind, but the U.N. of today has deviated from that original intent so much that it is hardly recognizable. Therefore, if the United Nations wishes to move to Europe, the United States should not stand in the way.
Now that General Motors and Chrysler have filed for bankruptcy, the American people want to know where the bailout money went and to what purpose. The President of the United States told G.M. to fire their CEO and also told Chrysler to cut its advertising budget in half. How can the Executive Branch of the government do this? Where in the Constitution does it state such powers exist? If the government decided the auto companies needed to be saved and they should be saved, there were many people advising there was a much better way. But no one in Washington, D.C. listened or even acknowledged that there was another plan out there. The best plan I heard was to give (before the bailout money was given to the auto makers) every head of household making less than $200,000. a year, a check for $5,000. to be used to buy a new automobile from Ford, Chrysler or G.M. Every check would have to be cashed from a recognized dealer of these three automobiles. The pundits in D.C. hate the term "trickle down" but this plan would have been a perfect example of Trickle Down Economics: every factory, vendor, dealer, parts manufacture and citizen would have benefited from such a plan. The only reason this plan was not considered is because the other way secures more power for the President.
I believe in Conservative Principles and I was thinking the other day about just exactly what are Liberal Principles. I can perfectly define what I believe in. But for the life of me, I cannot define what a liberal believes in without going into Socialism or Communism! I know they want Big Government and a Nanny State which explains the take over of the automakers, insurance companies, mortgages and some banks and parts of Wall Street. But why can not the public see that what they are doing has failed in Russia and Germany and many other places in the world and will FAIL here! Every one knows the old fable about robbing Peter to pay Paul, but if the people are comfortable being Pauls; they should know that Peter is not always going to consent to be robbed. The Bible teaches us to give a man a fish and he will eat for a day but teach him how to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life. Benjamin Franklin was a proponent of not allowing poor people to be comfortable in their poverty. When you think about that sentence, you begin to realize just how brilliant our founding fathers actually were. Some people have begun to enjoy the comfort of poverty and are perfectly content to allow the government to care for them from the cradle to the grave. I guess I have just defined LIBERALISM.
The Founding Fathers were an incredibly intelligent group of men. It is hard to imagine how these men in the late seventeen hundreds were able to craft such documents as The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States with the limited education they had at the time. These two wonderfully crafted works of art spelled out exactly what we were to do and how we were to run our government. They were crystal clear about the balance of power and what rights and freedoms each individual and each state were to have. Back in their day, government was small and limited by design. Down through the years, government has grown to a level and a degree completely not recognizable by the original framers. President Clinton declared the "era of big government over". This statement turned out to be something less than the truth. Other than the military and some policing agencies, the Federal Government does not do much correctly at all. When you consider all the agencies and bureaucracies and the endless redundancies in every aspect of our government, it is little wonder that they can not get much done! But now the government is into banking, mortgages, auto manufacturing and insurance companies, they also want control of our health care. Can you even imagine what health care would be like, considering the total ineptitude of the federal government's record in the last 30 years? It has to stop; someone must step forward and declare this to be insane. The government must be scaled back and forever get out of the peoples business and let us right this ship. I am afraid for our country on this present course. The private sector is the only segment of the country that can fix these problems that we are facing today. It is sad that long ago the people in elected office and the voters abandoned the practice of applying the common sense test to any and all decisions. We should revisit this thing called COMMON SENSE.

Please, I beg you to get involved. And the best way to get involved is to reproduce this paper and give it to as many people as possible. Form a grassroots political action committee. Then go to your primary meetings and see who likes these ideas and if they are willing to run for office on these principles. When you find someone that will adopt these principles into their platform and campaign on them, support that person, go door to door, talk to voters about your candidate and donate as much as you are able. The "grass roots level" is the only way we are going to be able to stop the CATASTROPHE that is coming. We must also be prepared to start a "recall" campaign on a candidate who promises us one thing and when they get to Washington, D.C. they simply bow to the pressure and start voting as the leadership instructs them. They must be made to understand that they work for us, answer to us and are employed and paid by us. These principles are conservative principles and it would be wise to select a conservative candidate. Thank you and may God continue to bless AMERICA.

Fred Balke
29031 Deadwood Lane
Shenandoah TX 77381