As a sailor

I am required to have various licenses and documents.

Back when I started, my Merchant Mariner's Document (Z-Card) was free and supposidly good for life. My license was good for 5 years and renewal took about an hour.

Now I have to have a Transportation Workers ID Card (TWIC) on top of a license and document. 

The TWIC ran me $135 and the license renewal cost me about the same plus the price of a physical, passport photos and an 8 hour car drive.

When they charged me the first time I really was angry but I am not anymore. Although the Coast Guard has made it a lot more difficult to get these documents I guess I'm the one that needs them and uses them to make my living with so unless they drive the price up a lot higher I really have nothing to gripe about.

Someone posted a picture of a national park next to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and asked which one should be cut from the federal budget.

I said both and pointed out that a modest user's fee should be enough to offset the expenses of the National Parks.

We're in hock up to our ears. We actually should have a small surplus if everything was going right but the people in Congress have set up so many programs and giveaways that we are spending more money than we are taking in.

A LOT more money than we're taking in.

I have no problem with paying a small user's fee to go through Yosemite or Yellowstone because it isn't like I am going to go through the park every three or four days. Parks like that are generally a once or twice in a lifetime thing and spending a few extra bucks here to do something isn't a lot to ask.

Another thing that the feds ought to do is get out of the social programs business and delagate it to the states. Let the states or even the counties decide what kind of social safety nets they want to pay for.

For one thing it will be a lot cheaper because being run by the states means there will be a lot less bureaucracy involved and that means a greater part of every dollar spent is going to go to where it is supposed to instead of being eaten up by federal bureaucrats.

It also means that there is likely to be less fraud because it will be easier to spot and be dealt with. It seems like just about every federal program out there has a lot of people riding the gravy train that ought not be on it.

I see this in Philly all the time and don't like it one bit. 

One other thing, too is that if a state didn't want to implement a social safety net plan they don't have to. I suppose there are a few states out there that do not want to do this which is up to the voters of that particular state.

This also means that the taxpayers of that particular state that doesn't want to have a safety net would not be forced to pay into the federal system for something they don't really want.

I am a sailor in private enterprise and I have seen that a number of companies pass a lot of responsibilities down the chain to us guys on the boats and it is because we are the ones in the position to see what is going on firsthand and call the shots.

The same holds true for a lot of things. When the Great Father in Washington decides things they are light years from the places where things are going on and have to rely on a lot of reports from down the chain and to put a point on it, many reports are either inaccurate or patently dishonest.

The people in Washington seldom get to the bottom of things before they make a decision and they are more often than not off base in some form or another when the final decision is made.

In the services there is generally a Sergeant Major in every battalion sized or larger unit. While a lot of them are chair warmers, a Battalion Commander that gets a good one has something special.

A good Sergeant Major is seldom in his office. He is out and about looking things over and keeping his hand on the pulse of the battalion and is constantly reporting his findings to the BnCo. I know of few if any congresscritters that have people directly in the field that they can rely on.

Occasionally one hears of a Cogresscritter going off on a 'fact finding mission' but generally that is little more than a way of getting the taxpayer to take him somewhere he wants to check out for personal reasons.

Any fact finding mission that even stops at Bangkok is instantly suspect as far as I'm concerned. It is a red flag because Bangkok is the commercial sex capitol of the world but I digress.

The point is that generally congress is making decisions with little or no information, or worse yet, with bad information.

Back to the original part of the post and that is the part where we are going to have to start coughing up hard earned cash for what used to be freebies.

We just better start getting used to it.




To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html