Under pressure from the Obama Administration, General Motors CEO resigned.  Obama stated today that he wants troubled GM and Chrysler to come out of the current crisis "much more lean, mean and competitive than it currently is."   Government can't even run Government, and there are actually idiots among us who believe Government can run two car manufacturers better than the private sector could.  In short, it's insanity.  We're not going to explain it to you here, if you can't see it, then you are already beyond our help.

By the way "lean" means fewer employees, not terribly impressive for a President who has already put forth pie-eyed job creation projections.  But, this topic alone is another post. 

Meanwhile, on Wednesday April 1, the largest Federal cigarette tax increase in the history of the nation goes into effect.  Fittingly on April Fools day, because all the woe begotten addicted smokers out there are being played not just for fools, but for suckers.  Supposedly the revenue generated by this tax increase is going to fund a "major expansion of health insurance for children" according to Fox News.  We guess this is the same, or similar, expansion plan that President Bush opposed, arguing that it would encourage people currently paying for private kiddie health insurance to dump their coverage in favor of the Federal plan.  The key differentiator here, of course, is that Obama is all for nationalizing healthcare, and Bush, correctly so, opposed it.  Bush also correctly predicted enactment would trigger an enormous tax increase to pay for it.  Who knew it would be on the backs of addicts?

We have a problem with tax increases targeting a specific segment of the population to fund programs, unless those programs have to do with the target population.  In this case, smokers have no direct responsibility for juvenile health care.   In this case, tobacco addicts are just a convenient minority to saddle with a punitive tax.  The United States Supreme Court has been traditionally reluctant to get into these sorts of taxation issues.  However, we feel that taxing a sub-group of Americans to fund a national program violates the equal protection clause.  A national program requiring national funding should be paid for by all tax payers, not just a targeted subgroup.  This is inherently unfair, if not outright tyrannical. 

And, of course, this huge tax increase, signed into law by President Obama, is just another broken promise by a professional politician who lied his way into office.  Obama promised he would only increase taxes on the top 5% of earners.  He lied.  This punitive tobacco tax crosses all economic lines.  Since more people in the lower income brackets smoke than those in the highest income brackets, Obama's tobacco tax hurts the lower classes most.   Obama doesn't give a damn.  This is only the beginning.  Anyone out there in the 95% earners bracket, who actually believed Obama wouldn't raise their taxes, were smoking something other than tobacco.

Which leads to our point.  When we look at the landscape of current American politics, we are struck by how monumentally dysfunctional our government has become.  Dysfunctional to the point of embarrassment.  Dysfunctional to the point were our very existence as the United States of America is jeopardized.  As we mentioned in another post, many Americans are convinced that the poisonous influence of special interest groups, lobbyists, and big money Corporations are the root cause of why were are in the situation we are in.  We believe that this is merely a convenient cop-out.  Democracy, just as messy if not more so than Capitalism, is a participatory sport.    We the people, at the end of the day, have only ourselves to blame for this gigantic mess we find ourselves in.  Year after year, candidate after candidate, we listen to politicians lie to us, and we vote them into office anyway, despite that fact that we know they are lying.  

If American voters don't have the will to demand fundamental change in the way this nation conducts it's business, then Congress doesn't have the will to change it.  We will maintain an unacceptable status quo right into our collective national grave.   We the people created this mess by voting professional liars into office time and again, and it is up to us to get us out. 

The status quo is unacceptable, we have no one to blame but ourselves.