Free money?

About a month ago, I got an envelope in the mail from the IRS, offering me a handful of free cash, an "economic stimulus" payment, free cash so I could "help the economy".

I tore it up and threw it away.

Why, you may ask?

I read a story once, called "Not Yours To Give", about how Colonel David Crockett, at the time a US Congressman from Tennessee, came to understand the true purpose and powers of the federal government. If you're not familiar with the story, PLEASE read it. It will open your eyes, and probably make the rest of this post easier to understand.

What it boils down to is this: it is not the job of the Federal Government to give money away, and I refuse to make myself complicit in the crime by accepting any of their so-called "free money".

Think about something. If you wanted to buy something, don't you need to have the money first, before you can buy it? If you want to go to the store and buy a gallon of milk, don't you need to have enough money to pay for that milk?

The same is true of Congress- if they want to SPEND money, they need to HAVE the money first.

So my question is this: Congress is spending twelve to fifteen BILLION dollars a month to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They're giving billions of dollars every year to farmers, in order to NOT grow crops on their land. They're spending money on new security systems for airports, courthouses, and other federal buildings, surveillance systems for the highways, cities, and pretty much the entire country, all in the name of "security"...

And now, on top of it all, the government is handing out free money to the people. If 200 million people get these checks, at $600 each... that's $120 BILLION DOLLARS they're just handing away to people.

Where is all this money coming from?

Taxes, you say? Use a little common sense- the government is spending several times as much money as they were ten years ago. Have your taxes gone up by the same amount? (No, in fact they're giving money back to you.) Do you really believe this extra money, these trillions of dollars every year, are coming from taxes?

Think about it from a different angle- if you want to buy something and don't have the money for it, what do you do? You may put it on a credit card, or "finance it", or some other scheme, but what it boils down to is that you borrow the money, and pay it back later, and in the meantime you get "the stuff", whatever it was you bought with the money.

The government is no different- they've been borrowing the money to pay for everything they wanted to spend it on but didn't want to raise taxes to pay for. The difference is the details.

The government has what amounts to an open line of credit, like a credit card with no limit, with a private bank called the "Federal Reserve". The US Treasury first took out a loan of one billion dollars from the Fed back in 1918, and to this day the Treasury is still paying on that same loan every month... while Congress borrows more and more money against that same loan every month.

And the money they're borrowing now, to pay for the occupation of Iraq and these "economic stimulus" checks, won't actually be paid back until 20-30 YEARS from now, when your children and grandchildren's tax payments finally catch up with it.

How does it feel, America, to know that this "economic stimulus" money is actually coming from your children and grandchildren's piggy banks?

Personally, I'm not comfortable with the idea of taking ANYTHING from my children, or my grandchildren (who haven't even been born yet.) Which is why I won't accept, and won't even ask for, one of those "economic stimulus" checks.

In fact, I'm not comfortable with the idea of ANYBODY taking money away from my children or grandchildren. So if you've already accepted the government's "free money", don't tell me about it. As far as I'm concerned, the ONLY conscionable thing you can do with that money is to put it into a trust fund, or use it to buy gold or silver, or some other investment, FOR YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN. Don't touch it yourself, just put it aside and give it to them when they're old enough to use it.

If you took their money and used it for yourself, SHAME ON YOU.