How to make Congress want to save our money

The R A N T of G L E N N glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
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Pay them lots more

Letter to the editor;

A reader proposes we pay our Beloved Leaders only what they are worth. It would save a fortune, he said, because most of them are worth very little.

However, I propose to pay them all much more -- and save a thousand times as much.

You ask, “How could you possibly save money by throwing it at politicians?”

Here’s how: Pay the President, the Vice President, the Cabinet members, the Justices of the Supreme Court and all the Congresscritters a million dollars a year each. They would have to pay their own staff, office rent, retirement, limousines, stationary and stamps out of this million.

(Probably they would each run an office the size of a motel room, with a staff of one. See, they would want to take home as much of that lovely money as possible rather than waste it on riotous DC living.)

AND – they would be paid at the end of each fiscal year – out of whatever is left in the Treasury.

See, if they spend us into a deficit, there would be nothing left in the Treasury to pay them. They wouldn't get that million. They wouldn't get anything at all. This would be a very powerful personal motivation in the direction of fiscal sanity.

They would be, as it were, spending their own money.

They would all catch on to this in about three seconds.

We might never see another deficit or another war.

That's how.

Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona

Home production of food

T H E O P I N I O N P A P E R glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)

Victory gardens

Letter to the editor;

Anybody remember the yard-gardens during World War Two? (Slogan: “We will win the war with food!”) Many American women took part in the war by digging up their lawns and planting corn and peas and beans and squash from the street to the front door. (Others worked long hours at defense plants.)

Every bushel of produce they grew potentially released truck-and-tractor fuel from the farms to the battle front. Every door-garden potentially released farm-raised food to feed the troops. Every dollar not spent at the grocery stores was potentially available to buy war bonds to finance the war.

We have a different sort of war going on now, and we cannot even tell who the enemy is. There does not seem to be trouble feeding the fighters. But somehow that I cannot tell, this war is tangled up with the constantly rising prices of food and fuel. We may need to follow the sterling example of out mothers and grandmothers, raising a significant part of our food right on our private premises.

Every dollar we don’t spend on commercial groceries is at least potentially available toward paying off our obscene credit card debts. Every trip we don’t make to the store is a gallon or a quart of gasoline not bought and burned. And, who knows? It might even benefit our children and grandchildren to bring food into existence from earth, water, seeds and labor.

Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona