I'd like to apologize for taking so long to post this. There was a lot to go over for this article, then I got sick. I'm okay now, it was just a little head cold. This article is politic based, so I apologize in advance for any offense I may cause anyone. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this special edition of the Howard College Blog.
Sincerely,
Terrence
The Day A Congressman Came To Class
By Terrence Cain
On Thursday, September 1st, 2011, a congressman came to class. Congressmen Randy Neugebauer, a fifth term Representative for the 19th congressional district of Texas, came to Howard College of Big Spring, Texas to talk with the students in Professor Richard Hamby’s U.S. Government class about what’s going on in Washington D.C. and how things there have come to affect us, the citizens. Also in the room was the Mayor of Big Spring, Tommy Duncan, and the President of Howard College, Dr. Cheryl Sparks. In the middle of the meeting the congressman gave an award to Dr. Sparks for the 65th Anniversary of Howard College’s first day of class.
The room seemed rather cold, and I don’t mean the thermostat was down too low. To me it felt like a lot of people were a bit intimidated having a high powered congressman, the mayor of Big Spring, the president of Howard College, and a local law enforcement official all in the same room they were in. In other words, very few questions were asked by the students in the class room. Most of the questions were asked by Prof. Hamby through questions students from his other classes wanted to know, as well as students from a second classroom across the hall and students from other locations via cameras and monitors.
So what did the congressman have to say to us? Surprisingly a lot, but was it all the same talking points that we hear day in and day out from the Grand Old Party, or was it truly from his own thoughts and concerns for his fellow citizens? Well I believe it was a bit of both.
In the beginning the congressman gave the typical Republican/Tea Party spiel that you and I alike have been hearing from them since 2009 which, by the way, I won’t bore you to death with. The congressman did have some good ideas, but he also had some ideas I think are quite despicable in our most dyer time of need from the government. When asked about his thoughts about spending cuts towards education, this is what the congressman had to say.
“You have to start prioritizing how you spend money. And what a lot of people’s voices equate when you cut something is that you make it worse. There are ways, I believe, that you can trim government down and still deliver the same level of service but do it in a more cost effective way, but we’re going to have to prioritize how we spend the tax payer’s money. What we have to do is that we have to get away from a nation where people all believe that they’re entitled to certain things. The principles of this country were founded on empowerment, not entitlement.”
I, however, have to disagree and disprove the congressman’s statement about our forefathers believing solely in empowerments, not entitlements. In the U.S. Government textbook for Prof. Hamby’s class there is a section in chapter one that states; “In 1776, Americans believed most fundamentally that the purpose of government was to secure rights to which all were entitled by their nature as human beings.”
Now that is not something new. I’m 28 and I’ve been hearing that line in text books and documentaries about our nation since the early 90s when George H.W. Bush was our president, and I’m talking about documentaries from as early as the 1950s. So yes, we as human beings are entitled to certain things to which the government is to secure for us.
So, to me this whole notion that entitlements are bad or unconstitutional is ridiculous. I believe that you are entitled to a good education, to food every day, to a roof over your head, to healthcare benefits, and most importantly I believe you’re entitled to have money available to you for your retirement when you’ve been saving it away in a Social Security or 401k account.
Now do all current entitlements need to be fixed? You bet! Social Security can easily be fixed. This is one thing I think President George W. Bush had the right idea for, but wasn’t able to do. Privatize Social Security by taking the money that you put into the system every pay check and transfer your payments to a private bank of your choosing that will add an annual interest of say three percent to your Social Security account of the total you put in that year. Now along with the three percent from the bank you’d also have another five percent from the federal and two percent from the state. All that incurred interest on top of your original five percent cut from your annual earnings, or however much you can afford to put into the account, would help you build up a very nice nest egg.
If you just put in five percent of your yearly earnings with all other interest incurred, on a $15,080 annual income (based on a steady $7.25 average minimum wage at a full forty hour work week) after about forty-five years of employment you would have approximately $101,790 saved. Now that’s a decent retirement to live on! This would stop the government from borrowing your tax dollars, and would be out of the hands of the stock market as well. Of course the savings would be more with raises to your pay and any promotions you might get. I would also keep it locked up with a special password until I was not able to access until I was ready to retire or if some emergency came along. That way I am not tempted to borrow from it and waste the money I worked so hard for me to retire on.
Now you do, however, have to fix the tax code and flatten all tax rates at around five to eight percent to make it fair and just for you to retire on at the lowest wage earnings. That’s something the congressman is for as well, a flat or fair tax. As the congressmen continued; he went on to say this about Pell Grants.
“Now with the Pell Grants I recently voted against the government takeover of that program. What we actually did with Pell Grants is we didn’t cut the total amount of funding for Pell Grants, but we did reduce the amount of Pell Grants so that we can spread those grants over a larger number of students, but we’ll have to see in the future how we’re going to do that.”
They didn’t really cut much from the Pell Grants, and made it solvent through 2013, but I will have to disagree with the congressman about the government’s takeover of Pell Grants. That’s actually been a good thing because when I tried to go to college in 2001 I was told that my parents made too much money for me to go to school on a Pell Grant. I find that dumb because my father was laid off that year after working at a welding supply company for some twenty-three years. I even tried to go back to college in 2004 and I was told the same thing, and what was dumb about that is that my father was already retired and my mother wasn’t working then either. In 2010 I applied for college, two years after moving here to Big Spring, and now I’m in school because of Pell Grants after President Obama took the Pell Grants and fixed them to make them more available to people. It just seems to me Pell Grants are far better off in the government’s hands than the private sector.
Overall it was great to have Congressman Randy Neugebauer take the time to talk to us. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a high level politician before coming to a college classroom to talk to the students in an unprepared and unscripted Q&A meeting. There were a few things he said that I agree with, but overall I found his ideas to be a bit repressive. The fact that he said that we should tell the government we don’t want Social Security is just preposterous to me. Social Security was created after the stock market crashed in 1929 to help the people start to save money again. I will agree that we do need a smaller federal government, but we do need a more efficient one as well. We do need a flat tax, but at a rate below ten percent. We do need to repeal Obama’s healthcare plan, but keep the parts that stop insurance companies from kicking you off because you have a “pre-existing condition”, the biggest oxymoron I’ve ever heard. We do need to fix all the problems in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, but we don’t need to abolish these “entitlements” as some people like Governor Perry and Congressman Paul have said we should do. I do believe there is a happy medium in making the government smaller while making it more efficient in the things they do run for us. Unfortunately it would take me the length of a novel to tell you about it all. Well that’s it for this week’s blog post. This is Howard College’s blogging machine, over and out!
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