Pool Boy

Your family makes $140,000. You pay your pool boy $24,000 but he spends $38,000. He is $130,000 in debt and he tells lenders you are good for it. Now do you get the Tea Party?

If you remember who works for whom and where the money comes from in the first place, it is pretty easy to see why people are hacked off. Add eight zeros to the pool boy’s numbers and you have the budget of the federal government.

The government works for us; the pool boy is not family. We pay him $2.4 trillion in taxes to keep up the house and grounds so we can go to work. His job description is the Constitution; it tells him what he can and can’t to do out in the yard and it warns him to stay out of the house in about 10 different places.

We Americans produce about $14 trillion of goods and services each year - that is our national GDP. Wealth is like food, somebody has to make the stuff so the rest of us can eat. That is what the private sector does – we make all the money that everybody spends. It’s our money; it does not belong to the pool boy.

The pool boy tries to hide his desperate financial straits by stating his deficits and debt as a percentage of our GDP. When he says he is running a deficit of 9% of our GDP it doesn’t sound as asinine as overspending his own revenues by 78%. The pool boy’s debt is 541% of his own income; he would prefer to say 90% of our GDP. That sounds asinine no matter how you say it.

Most of us would cut back on our spending; not the pool boy. He formed his own union many years ago, so now he negotiates with himself. No surprise he has secured better wages, benefits, pensions, and tenure. The average federal government worker now makes $119,000 - more than twice the private sector average – and they get to watch porn all day without getting fired.

Why are people angry? Our pool boy costs too much, he steals our kid’s money, he lies to us, and he doesn’t do squat. That's why.

This is not about race, religion, party affiliation, or repealing 50 year-old laws. It is about the looting of America by public unions, special interests, corporate welfare queens, warmongers, socialists, tax cheats, banksters, and every other species of ungrateful civic parasite who thinks self-government means they get to write checks to themselves.

I frankly don’t understand people who are not angry. And I feel sorry for well-meaning liberals who put their faith in the pool boy; they are forced to choose each day between denial and heartbreak as a government too big NOT to fail puts its reliable incompetence on full display. Even James Carville has had enough.

Want to know why people are terrified watching the oil spew out of the ocean floor for the 42<sup>nd day in a row? Because we know that someday that will be a blown heart valve or an ulcerated colon, and it won’t be pelicans dying while the government dithers.

Want to know why people are having second thoughts about giving our entire health care system over to an advisory commission appointed by the President? Because we just learned that the only qualification for this sort of job is to not run against some fossilized incumbent hack in a primary.

Libertarians have never trusted the pool boy. We don’t care if he’s holding the skimming net in his left hand or his right; the only difference between a leftie and rightie is what he would take away first after he breaks into the house. People used to think we were nuts to worry; not so much anymore.

Anger need not turn to panic. We elect a new bunch of pool boys every two years, and we can send folks to Washington who will scoop out the turds, skim off the scum, change the filters, and restart the circulating pumps.

It won’t take long and the pool will be clean and clear again, but only if we stay angry all the way to November.


"Moment Of Clarity" is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.</sup>