United White Welfare States of America.

If you’re looking at percentages, the percentage of white folks in the great state of Kentucky (89.6%), stands about equal to that which they receive in federal support over what they earn. It’s not clear whether the good, white people of Kentucky actually understand to what degree their lives are dependent on federal dollars – you know, the same federal dollars they are fighting against? If they do “get it”, they have got to be the most selfless, patriotic people in The Union, God bless ’em. It’s probable that they actually don’t realize that they are living off the fat of other people’s money, that most of their daily needs and comforts are coming at the expense of the rest of the country. If they did, they would most certainly be appalled to learn what a bunch of welfare witches they were!

I’ve often said that these people ought to cut out the middle man and just shoot themselves in the face. Then, we wouldn’t have lawmakers and politicians shrieking at us about how “government” and “entitlements” are ruining everything. The faster these entitlement recipients commit suicide – directly or indirectly – by refusing subsidies from the ‘govmint or by shotgun, the sooner the Nation can get back to the fun news coverage and adorable human interest stories like that grizzly bear that went from hot tub to hut tub every evening in Laguna. You know, the stuff that made us feel good about life, before the news was all junked up with those depressing coots in costumes and all that shit. If you are going to commit suicide anyway, why wait? Every day that goes by is another day that us working stiffs have our paychecks depleted and another day the federal coffers are being raided. Be a true patriot! If you really care about the national debt, DO IT!! I know you have the guns!

Another fat, white, tax sinkhole is the great state of Alaska, 79% white, a frozen welfare state wrapped in a thick, wolf-pelt fur coat of federal subsidies. Their license-plates may claim them “The Last Frontier, but the areas in which four-fifths of Alaskans live are more Nellie Olson than Laura Ingalls. Alaskans enjoy a well stocked larder of espresso bars, micro breweries and high speed internet connections. On average, Alaskans are richer than those of us in the lower 48, yet historically, Alaska is American taxpayer’s burden, deemed “more dependent on Congress than any other part of the United States outside of the District of Columbia” way back in 1912. Despite oil well production that allows the state to function without levying an income tax, the interest from a $34 billion Permanent Fund in which past oil receipts are stashed, and the inexplicable annual handout given every man, woman and child, the US government spends $1.88 on Alaska for every dollar it collects in Alaskan taxes. Federal spending supports one third of all Alaskan jobs. Alaska’s representatives in Washington have a hard-earned reputation for shoveling federal dollars back home. The $229m “Bridge to Nowhere is only one boondoggle in a state as much coated in pork as ice. Empty high-speed ferries, the half a million dollars the (federally-funded) Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board gave to Alaska Airlines to paint those king salmons on the side of its planes. Why the hell are we so fucking generous to the state that spawned Sarah Palin? Washington should levy a tax on Alaskans, not pipe our tax dollars to them. Talk about a bridge to nowhere!

Back in the Bluegrass state, Obama’s Big Government is subsidizing Kentucky by paying more in taxes than they get in return. Way more. For every dollar Kentucky sends to Washington in federal taxes, it gets back between $1.82 in federal spending. To put it in perspective, California gets 81 cents back on the dollar, New York, 79 cents. Economists say the imbalance is due largely to Kentucky’s poor, aging population as well as its thieving, spend-crazed, senior lawmakers on congressional spending committees, such as House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, who pipes money from the U.S. Treasury to pet projects back home, and Earmark’s Grand Poobah, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell. Kentucky’s congressional delegation earmarks funds in the federal budget to be given to public and private entities like campaign donors with no outside review, typically to the tune of $250 million cold, hard, American dollars.

For all the self-loathing shrieking against insurance reform and a government health plan, close to 800,000 Kentuckians are on Medicaid, with its public funding and price controls, with thousands new enrollees every month. Kentucky’s Medicaid program provides health care to one in five Kentuckians, at 80 percent federal funding. If these folks have their way and are stripped of their own federally funded Medicaid, when they get sick, they will have to start praying really, really hard. Go, Jesus.

Among the monthly entitlement checks that go directly to Kentuckians are $5 billion a year for Social Security retirement benefits, $2.5 billion a year for Social Security worker-disability benefits and $1 billion a year for something called Supplemental Security Income (disability aid for folks with zero work history. Go, Kentucky). In parts of the state with the poorest, oldest populations, the percentage of people drawing at least one of these checks is a staggering 40%, creating a “mailbox economy” – where tens of billions of federal dollars every year prop up its state government and fill its mailboxes with entitlement checks and Publishers Clearing House junk.

The federal government also helps Kentuckians with an annual $2.1 billion in flood insurance, $877 million in mortgage insurance, $667 million in crop insurance, $674 million in food stamps, $478 million in veterans disability benefits, $182 in Pell Grants for college students (ironically), and $181 million in welfare for families. As an added bonus, the Bluegrass State is home to federal facilities ranging from Ft. Knox  to the Department of Energy’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant (a uranium enrichment plant that provides some 2,000 to the community of Paducah).

For the current fiscal year, Mitch McConnell (aside: can you believe someone married this man?) , added $60 million in individual earmarks, not counting those he shared with other lawmakers, and topped the list of US senators of good old American swine shleppers. Homeboy Hal Rogers added $68 million in individual earmarks, topping the charts of 435 House members. Yet, when this hypocritical assclown endorsed Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the Republican U.S. Senate primary, Rogers inexplicably praised him for being “a strong fiscal conservative.”

“That’s the kind of leadership we need to cut out-of-control spending, pay down the debt and balance the budget,”  – Rogers  (a few days after announcing $100,000 in federal funds for sewer improvements in his own county, giving new meaning to “down the toilet”).

Residents of Rogers southeastern Kentucky districts take his procured taxpayer dollars for granted, money that has opened federal prisons, built new highways, launched anti-drug programs and steered homeland security contracts to local companies. Rogers lauded a $100,000 grant from the SDA—the giant federal agriculture bureaucracy in Obama’s” Big Government”— to buy Letcher County a $100,000 fire truck. Yet, weirdly, a whopping 65% of Letcher Countians voted for the white guy in the 2008 presidential election and in 2010, supported creep Rand Paul  – with all his his sub-literate crusading against federal spending. Because, they don’t know what they are doing. These people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. They want things “cut”, but not their things! They hate “pork”, having no idea what it even is other than something they cram into their faces on Sundays after church. They’ll decry any senator or representative as a “socialist” when they bring home the bacon, but will vote theirs the hell out if he doesn’t bring in theirs. At least the Democrats are honest about spending the money, while lying Republicans hammer away at them for it, all the while hiding their own in rider bills or just attaching them to anything that’s not a “budget”.

Suddenly, converts to Sen. Paul’s anti-government gospel – like jowly piece of shit Mitch McDonnell –  proclaim President Obama’s new budget “unserious”, “irresponsible” and a “punt” because it merely cuts projected deficits by $1.1 trillion. Never a rigorous ideological thinker, McConnell’s had to come up with devilishly clever ways of opposing Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. It’s easy to say all that malarky after you have ingested a glut of pork into your jowls for the past 20 years,”time to change, poor folks! Black guy in the White House, now”.

While Kentucky remains Cancer State USA, toppling all other states in colorectal, skin and lung cancer, Mitch McConnell receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Peabody Energy, one of the world’s biggest coal companies that provides 10% of the nation’s coal used in electrical generation and most of Kentucky’s cancer deaths. He fights every clean energy initiative that comes his way as if HIS life depended on it and even voted to remove Corporate Fuel Economy standards. And most evilly, despite all those federal cash infusions for his state, Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky ranks 40th out of the 50 states in child homelessness, and is home to four of the Nation’s poorest counties. His personal net worth: $33 million.

Another glitch in the Kentucky welfare model lies in the penalizing of stronger economies in favor of weaker economies. This insanely inefficient use of resources perpetuates outcomes 100% dependent on subsidies and ruins the rest of the country to boot. Using federal money to pave spanking new, four-lane highways through rural Kentucky towns in the middle of nowhere, rather than on the desperate transportation needs of cities where traffic congestion is crippling and, incidentally, where the wealth is created, is just an endless, self-fulfilling boondoggle. While Kentuckians and all their infrastructure improvement sit – only standing up when they hear the sound of the mailbox slam shut – us idiots boil over in traffic jams and have our tires ripped off by pot holes that are left unattended for 7 years to get-to-the-job-that-withholds-the-money-that-pays-for-their good roads

Alaskans and Kentuckian, take heed to what smarmy Rand Paul says  – he who has pledged to shrink the government down to its essential functions (i.e. the army), as mandated by the Constitution:

“Do we want a government that coddles us from cradle to grave? Or do we want a government that does the least that it can do?”

Alaska, Kentucky: He’s talking to YOU.

Question: Even Republicans love their grandchildren, right? That is the question I always come back to. They are intrinsically like us, genetically, even (some might say), and capable of experiencing feelings of love, concern, empathy, right? Republican mothers don’t not care if their sons can’t get jobs at Walmart and are forced to enlist, right? Republican grandfathers don’t not care that, when their granddaughter gets leukemia, she is denied insurance benefits based on Aetna’s loopholes and left to die, right? Do they say, in private, that they really do not mind waiting for an ambulance to arrive until after the heart attack they just had had killed them? Or for the police to arrive when they are being stabbed to death by their better half? Do they really want medical research to cease while their sister quietly dies of breast cancer? Do they really expect their sons and granddaughters and sisters to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and deal with getting blown up in Iraq for oil companies or dying of a treatable disease when they are denied treatment because of a fucking insurance company??????

Until I see these folks at a Tea Party rally burning their Medicare or social security cards, I want nothing to do them. Me and my tax money want nothing to do with them. Just take Alaska and Kentucky, please. The only things in Kentucky I can say we can’t live without are its children, Churchill Downs, all of its horses, and the Kentucky Derby. Oh and Fort Knox. Move that shit to a place where we actually like federal spending and holding the gold won’t offend our moral standards – preferably to Eagle Rock,CA. Let our liberal hearts bleed all over those precious little kids who didn’t vote for the lunatics who are intentionally ruining their lives and depriving them of futures, just give me the adoption papers. As for everyone else, let’s boot them all the way to the poverty line that they voted for. Let’s listen to the people of Kentucky and Alaska. They don’t want any more federal spending in their state. Give them their fucking state’s rights, the right to die a slow and painful death, let them be the laboratory of Democracy, of fiscal responsibility, the “grand experiment”. I am sure they won’t choke on it.