In which I ramble on about politics and never get to the point.

My country has a seriously fucked up budget. China, Japan, and the UK hold over 2315 billion dollars in US treasury securities. We’re currently $127k in debt per tax payer. And we’re still cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy because it’s supposed to increase tax revenue, even though I can’t figure out how such an approach is supposed to work. (Probably because I’m not an economist and I don’t really care enough to do any deep research.) (What. It’s an opinion piece. Shuddup.)

“As of January 31, 2011, the Total Public Debt Outstanding of the United States of America was $14.13 trillion and was 96.4% of calendar year 2010’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.7 trillion. Using 2010 figures, the total debt (96.3% of GDP) ranked 12th highest against other nations.”

Congress is trying to balance the budget. Since they’re GOP-heavy, they’re threatening to kill stuff the GOP traditionally doesn’t like, little things like Planned Parenthood and PBS and NPR. I’m upset about these threats because I find these agencies to be both important and useful, and as a citizen I want some of my tax money to go to fund these things.

I’ve been a patient of Planned Parenthood’s on and off my entire adult life because I’m chronically broke, and both PBS and NPR support the arts in ways that no commercial media can (or will). Oh, not to mention that commercial American news is downright useless, and NPR is the closest thing we have to actual grown-up international news coverage. (That the GOP chooses not to listen to it and finds it ‘slanted’ because no one’s screaming or thumping scripture doesn’t make it any less valuable.) Should the government be funding news and healthcare and arts? I don’t know, but they have been for my entire life.

Ultimately, who cares? These items are but tiny slices of the overall budget, and threatening to cut them seems bizarre to me because it won’t help. What I don’t understand is why no one is talking about cutting the things that are hugely expensive and which could actually be more than a drop in a huge echoing budget bucket: the military. Medicare. Social security (on which we’ve already spent $194 billion this year, and it’s not even March).

Perhaps cutting Medicare and social security would end up being more expensive in the long run, but the United States spends, annually, almost twice as much as the entire rest of the world on its military. Please, how can this make any kind of sense? We haven’t been at war since WWII! The GOP thinks that funding war is a good and proper thing for a government to do, and ultimately a good thing for the economy. Okay, perhaps it is; I approve of a defense force at the very least, and mobile troops for certain international operations. But holy Christ, the current military budget is entirely too much money… and no one’s talking about it. Obama’s budget proposal cut certain areas of military spending, sure, but increased others, for an overall increase in military spending. Is the military industrial complex really that fucking powerful? And why aren’t we talking about it? It’s a giant elephant; where’s all that money going? Certainly not anywhere useful: while enemy combatants might not be killing our soldiers, our soldiers are killing themselves, and that’s a big fucking problem. The whole thing is terribly, hideously broken, and we’re just throwing money at it. Um, hello? Anybody? Really?

Then there’s the GOP’s fundamentalist bullshit. You want to cut Planned Parenthood and have private charities fund reproductive health care for the poor? Okay, fine. I might even agree with it. But do you really need to be doing the rest of this shit? A bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life? Are you kidding me? That’s weird fundie crap, not politics. Knock it off. Your ancestors came here to separate church and state, you morons. Quit trying to pretend it’s still the forties and that we’re all banding together against a common enemy, because you hate half of us – those of us who aren’t Christian, white, educated like you were, Republican, and straight – and wouldn’t even blink when you threw us off the raft to drown.

If you want a big nasty war machine, if you want gross misdistribution of wealth, and if you want evil loose in the world in the form of greed, then you can’t have idyllic Christian family lives because you’re not Christian.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there it is. Have a nice day!