I have been thinking: do I want to celebrate Independence Day this year? Or ever again?
But you know what? I'm glad to think that nobody owns Independence Day. The celebration is about a single thing: the Rule of Law. In an Election Year, we select someone to oversee the law, and whether, and how, the law is obeyed.
These last few years, a large portion of our fellow-citizens—not a majority, in my belief, but I could be wrong; it's a matter of knowing what people are thinking—have come to think that the laws are not working out, and that something desperate has to be done about it. It's just that they have put their faith in a weak person. Who has to, every once in a while, make a show of how strong he wants to appear.
Freeloaders. A large portion of the Conservatives* believe that too many people are enjoying the national wealth, specifically those who have little or no income. We have those who believe that these poor folks are mostly immigrants, and are in the situation they're in due to self- inflicted reasons.
But it's important to examine just how much of the National wealth is being siphoned away by these so-called freeloaders. Very little indeed.
Big Businesses. The biggest businesses have used their influence—allowed by congress who mistakenly thought that these business will use their lower taxes to benefit the people—to negotiate extremely low taxes, and to get congressmen friendly to these businesses elected. Their low rates, lower than the rates of citizens, are an enormous loss of revenue. And what's more, they keep influencing elections, resulting in low tax rates for them, forever, until someday, Congressmen realize that the low rates of the biggest businesses push everybody else's rates higher!
So there certainly are freeloaders. But they're very rich freeloaders, and they don't fit everyone's image of a freeloader.
