Baby, I Got Your Money

Paperboys, garbagemen, hair stylists, waitresses -- they all want their palms greased so that we don't end up with newspapers on our roofs, recycling cans rolling down the street, highlights gone awry, and splooge in our peppercorn parmesan chicken sandwich.

If you don't like earning Bangladeshi taka for wages and depending on tips to make up the difference, find another way to fund your performing arts degree. Nothing you do warrants 15-20 percent of my bill. I don't mind walking 15 feet to the kitchen to pick up my plate. You write down stuff, and you carry things. You deserve $2/hour.

Garbagemen earn more than you. I know. My uncle spends his days with dancing rice. $73,000 for four hours of work and a few extra hours each winter sitting in a plow, waiting for the phantom snow to start. Before going back on the trucks to boost his salary for his remaining years, he sat in a garage and jerked off to stolen pay-per-view. Do you have a job that allows you to masturbate to porn while on the clock? No? Then, keep the twenty at Christmas and buy your kid something nice.

Everywhere I go, people want more money. They want money for doing their jobs. They want money for reproducing. They want money for beating the life expectancy odds. They want money for the privilege of watching them breathe. They want my money, and they'll get it even if means taxing my caffeine fix.

A group of Seattle child-care advocates, realizing that parents would never spend more money than absolutely necessary to fund their children's education and care, want to see a 10-cent city tax placed on the liquid that courses through the veins of many residents: espresso.

The money raised through this tax would be used to increase wages for child-care teachers, assist families in obtaining "quality" child care, slowly acclimate citizens to taxes that have no relevancy to the causes they fund and further parental dependency on the government. They're such good sheep at election time.

There appears to be no logical connection between espresso and child-care issues, but espresso drinkers have higher incomes and are less likely to have children of their own, so they shouldn't mind helping their overextended fellow man pass on parenting duties to people who would rather be doing anything other than wiping the asses of obese four year olds who aren't potty trained.

If espresso drinkers are allowed to shirk their civic duty, parents would be forced to put their children in illegal daycares run by Satanic Mexican pedophiles, and no one wants to see that. This plan benefits everyone because children are the future, and you don't want the future filled with glue-sniffing illiterates, do you? It hasn't worked well for Brazil.

It's no wonder public schools are in the shitter and child-care workers leave as soon as they get a certificate in phlebotomy. People rarely take pride in or are grateful for things they view as entitlements.

Look at the state of housing in any poor area that receives heavy state and federal subsidies. Shingles are falling off the roofs. Paint is peeling. Trash is strewn across the yards. And it's because the residents don't see a huge chunk of monthly income go to the bank.

Poor people aren't poor because an ogreish, enigmatic white man who smells of old money keeps them from attaining the dream of middle-class serfdom. Poor people are poor because they made bad choices in life, and they will continue to make bad choices until someone injects a sense of responsibility or quality DNA into them.

The naοve college student who gets her first taste of the ghetto during Freshman Move Day asks her parents, "How can they let people live like this?" instead of, "Why do people choose to live like this?"

No one sneaks into the projects under the cover of darkness to break windows, scatter garbage, toss paint peeler on exteriors or prop stained couches upright on front porches. It's a choice, and it's a choice that shows why they live in poverty.

Throw billions of dollars toward solving poverty, and all you'll have to show for it are dilapidated rowhomes with pantries full of Ho-Ho's and Hi-C.

But it's okay to criticize the poor. They don't own computers, and the library's Internet filters won't let them access this site. The poor are blatant examples of hand-outs for doing nothing but taking up space, but a $60,000 grant for a community garden pales in comparison to the welfare given to those who need help the least.

When single mothers collect welfare, the middle-class hisses and demands that its hard-earned money not be used to support the poor choices of others. When single mothers on welfare are forced to return to the workforce and warehouse their children for eight hours a day, the middle-class rejoices and proclaims it a success that formerly useless citizens are contributing in a tangible, measurable way.

When middle-class mothers want to drop out of the workforce and stay home with their children during those crucial early years, the middle-class rejoices and proclaims it a success that formerly useful citizens are no longer contributing in a tangible, measurable way. When middle-class mothers feel forced to return to the workforce and warehouse their children for eight hours a day, the middle-class hisses and demands that the hard-earned money of others be used to support its own ill-conceived choices.

If you can't afford to stay home with a child, don't have one until you can. If you just don't want to stay home with your child because you're terrified that your mind will atrophy from the lack of adult contact, that's understandable, but pay for the child care yourself.

You're benefitting from daycare. You get to be a parent minus the eight hours a day when you'd have to do the most work. You have a job, and you have someone else rearing your dependents. Sweet deal for you. What do I get out of it?

Your kids are spending their formative years with low-paid workers who could not care less if their charges sit in a corner and spend the day picking their noses. They have no vested interest in your kids' futures, no concern for their intellectual needs and no 401(k) plan because you're too damn cheap to shell out big bucks for someone to act as a surrogate parent to the offspring you chose to create.

And you want money -- my money -- to fund this choice.

Senior citizens continue to receive increased benefits, as politicians court the demographic with the highest voting turnout and one of the best political action groups. Not all grannies are out playing bingo. Some of them are trying to get their greedy, liver-spotted hands into your pockets because cashing in Atlantic City bus vouchers just isn't paying for the Lanoxin like it used to.

Congress came close to expanding senior dependency on the government through a prescription-drug plan that either would have expanded Medicare even more or offered subsidies to private insurance companies -- anywhere from an additional $340 billion to $600 billion over ten years to keep gramps from keeling over in the middle of whatever heart-warming pablum CBS is serving up.

The medical issues of senior citizens are not the same as those who work to support them. The majority of working adults are healthy with serious medical issues arising infrequently and often due to accidents. The majority of senior citizens require serious expenditures to keep their hearts pumping from sunrise to their afternoon naps: an average of 10-12 medications annually.

And our thanks for keeping them around long enough to vote down another year's proposed school budget? More hues and cries for medical subsidies and while you're at it, please get rid of our property taxes because our kids are out of school and we don't want to pay for our grandchildren's education because we need the money to pay that nice young man Willy who came around last week to tell us that we desperately needed to reshingle the roof. He gave us a such a good deal because he said we reminded him of his parents.

Today's senior citizens reap the benefits of my paycheck without providing so much as a few words of wisdom or a steady stream of warm apple pies or even a delightful TV show about an aged mystery writer.

Many of them hardly worked or barely paid into the system, yet they're receiving benefits as if they did. At 72 years of age, my grandmother is supported by you. She's not worked a day in her life, and she can't hide behind the time-honored argument of doing the most valuable job: motherhood. She sucked at that, too. Yet, she collects close to $1000 each month for the mere feat of beating the odds, and her medical costs run well into the tens of thousands each year.

You receive nothing from your investment. You are not benefitting from financially propping up my diabetic, emotionally stunted grandmother. You are being ripped off.

She is not a cute old lady who clips coupons in her spare time and brings untold amounts of joy to her loving extended family. She's a troll who, yes, brings entertainment to the family, but it's not worth the thousands of dollars she gets annually. She's no Debbie Reynolds.

With the entitlement-driven boomers getting closer to Carousel, there are going to be a lot of young people driven to the poorhouse as they work harder and bring home less in order to support the older generations that refuse to die.

But it's not just the elderly who won't go toward the light.

If paying for the medication of senior citizens isn't emptying my wallet enough, the government is using my hard-earned cash to keep the vegetative, retarded and all-around useless rolling in vanilla pudding. And it's not cheap. Have you seen Kozy Shack's GSA schedule?

Doctors can no longer think of the best interest of the patient and society because it's not acceptable that the best interest might be death. Death is a word that invokes whispers, lawsuits and John Edward clones.

It's a relatively recent occurrence that people refuse to accept or hasten the inevitable. When a one-pound baby with underdeveloped organs was born decades ago, it was allowed to die. The medical community lacked the modern tools that now can sustain life indefinitely, but even so, there were few people who looked at that trembling, translucent blob and thought, "Yep, this one's a keeper."

Now, the one-pound baby makes it to the cover of every women's magazine. So what if it's blind, has cerebral palsy and will spend its school days in the balmy resource room two doors down from the boiler? It's a miracle -- hallelujah! -- that medicine can keep the heart going of someone whose remains should be vacu-packed inside a Bob the Builder mini-urn.

We don't want to admit that not everyone is his own special sunbeam. Maybe some people are just piles of shit that everyone has to step over on the way to H&R Block.

Tribes ditch the dead weight because it prevents everyone else from moving forward. Americans might not spend their days hunting and gathering food, but a large chunk of our income goes toward supporting those who serve only as a feebleminded anchor around our necks.

I don't mind paying for the upkeep of roads or teaching Johnny to read, but what am I getting out of a team of special education teachers controlling 16-year-old Johnny's outbursts and changing his XXXXXL diapers?

The cost of special education is rising $3 billion each year, and with states raising the standardized bar and parents trying to give their kid any edge possible -- Asperger's is a real disease, you know -- schools soon will need special programs to educate the handful of kids who aren't retarded, autistic or slow.

In Minnesota's Pioneer Press, a father discussed his 16-year-old son, Joey, who has behavorial problems and an IQ of only 49 due to the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Because of Joey's outbursts, he was sent to a school designed to handle mentally disabled kids, but he couldn't behave there, either. In four months, Joey was restrained 13 times, placed in a seclusion room 14 times and was handcuffed by a sheriff's deputy six times.

This enraged Joey's father. His son is sensitive, and he knows when his son is on "edge," so why can't a teaching staff swamped with the products of defective genes and bad parenting recognize the signs and give him a snuggly-wuggly to calm him down?

Joey's father and school administrators shouldn't be asking how to improve Joey's school experience. They shouldn't even be pondering why Joey is in school at all. They should be asking why Joey isn't chained to a tree in a secluded forest, so that at least the animals can gain some benefit from Joey's existense.

Public schools shouldn't be holding cells for children with severe developmental disabilities. Public schools exist to educate and indoctrinate children of average intelligence, so that they can replenish the aging corporate drones. They don't have to master trigonometry, but they should be able to tie their shoes.

But the alternative -- handing out money so that they can grow lethargic at home and add obesity to their growing list of ailments -- isn't much better.

Ten years ago, my aunt decided that she'd contributed enough to society and no longer wanted to punch a clock. The government found no fault in this logic and has happily supported her ever since she found a quack to diagnose her with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and Multiple Allergy Syndrome, with a side of alcoholism and manic depression. Her illness, praise the Lord, hasn't prevented her from spending hours knocking back beer after beer in smokey dives across the tri-state area.

Now that she's had a decade to sit around her dilapidated house, she really sits around the house. She's put on over 100 pounds -- an underactive thyroid, naturally -- and she spends all day on the Internet giving and receiving {{{hugs}}}.

Her disability is not as pronounced as Joey's. She can count. Surprisingly well at random DWI checkpoints. She is, though, equally incapable of functioning in society. She does nothing more than burn through the money you and I earn by sitting in a chair for eight hours and pretending that we're not playing Free Cell.

As much as parents, the disabled and senior citizens wish it were true, money doesn't grow in fields in Afghanistan. It comes from somewhere closer to home. My pocket.

And you didn't even send a thank you.

Providing jack-off material for white misogynists since 1997.

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