I love paying $4 a gallon for gas, how about you?

The oil companies are making record profits and not paying taxes on top of it. That is a fact. The subsidies that they and other huge corporations enjoy are at the heart of many economic issues facing us today. I know that if we take away the corporate welfare the economy will not turn completely around, but it would be nice if the people and companies that are making the money share in their responsibility of paying their share of the burden. The top oil companies share in $4 billion in federal tax credits and subsidies. The home heating subsidy for the average American costs us, $2,5 billion a year. They want to cut the home heating, but not the oil companies. That is what John Boehner and the Republican party would like you to believe. Both programs may need to go, but why take away from people and keep the one for companies? If the Republicans and the Tea Party are serious about reducing the deficit, then repeal the "Bush" tax cuts. This has already cost us $1.5 trillion and is projected to cost us two to four trillion over the next ten years.  If you are short in income in your own budget, you do two things. You cut what you can from your expenses and increase your income. You have to do both. If you go to your doctor and are told you need to lose weight, do you then tell the doctor that exercise is off the table. I will cut back on what I eat but I refuse to lift a finger to loose weight. What will the results be. You will go nowhere. That is what Congress needs to understand. There has to be two streets. One, cut needless programs. Two, increase taxes, by eliminating the corporate welfare and the needless credits and deductions. This is how a budget is balanced. Now back to my original topic, $4 a gallon for gas. Exxon had a first quarter profit of $10.65 billion dollars, up 69% over last year. Take this for a year and the profits are over $40 billion dollars. This is profit. In theory if gas were $2 a gallon, their profits would be a paultry $20 billion. I am crying for them. I don't know about you, but for me, I say it is time for corporate welfare to be replaced with corporate responsibility.

Ignorance Is Bliss!

The typical American loves to talk about how great this country is and spew out the latest catch phrase, about how exceptional America is. I have late breaking news for all of you. We are barely hanging on in the U.S. Each day that goes by our young people slip further behind the youth in other countries because we do not educate. Our economy, which was the envy of the world, grows weaker because of the greed and lack of leadership in both our corporate boardrooms and the halls of Congress. The unemployed and underemployed are not seeing an increase in job opportunities as more jobs are shipped overseas, by greedy CEO's and inept politicians. Our religious leaders are willing to give up their moral beliefs in the name of growth and money. All of these issues are serious and could lead us down the perilous road of self-destruction. However the most critical issue we face is ignorance. Ignorance ,of the average American, and I am not talking about book education. I am talking about the adults in this country that sit around each day, complaining about problems, like the ones I mentioned, and yet they do nothing about it. This is why I say ignorance is bliss. We would rather sit on our butts and write about how terrible we feel today, instead of writing and talking about issues that affect our families. Keep us ignorant and we are happy, then we don't have to be responsible for what is going wrong. We can always answer, " I didn't know!" That can be the epitaph on our country's headstone. As long as we don't know we can deny. Even, when we are presented with the facts, if we turn away quickly enough, we can continue to say, "I didn't know!" Is that the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?  Years from now when your children look at you and ask what happened to the great American dream, just look at them and say, "Dear, I was too busy, posting pictures on face book to be involved, I was too busy posting lines about how I have a headache, I was too busy talking about other people's faults, I was too busy doing nothing all day to learn about how the politicians were giving everything away to corporations and taking our individual rights away. I was too busy enjoying my state of blissfulness and ignorance to write a letter to my Congressperson to make a difference. Look at all the pictures I posted of you, doesn't this show you how much I cared about you?"  They will  look at you one more time and say, "You could have cared enough to learn and be involved." I am going to end with a quote by George Eliot, "It's never too late to be, what you might have been." Think about it.