Now what?

We Americans have a king complex. We love to make fun of the British and their monarchy, but every four years, we get all excited and worked up when it comes time to elect a king of our country (we call him the president). Then, we hit the snooze button and go back to sleep, politically, only to awaken before the next election and wonder – even when our guy won – why things are a little worse than they were before.

We just elected a president and we expect him to solve all our problems. However, in four years our schools will still be turning out students who can barely read their diplomas. The borders will still be porous. Illegal aliens or “temporary” guest workers (who are we kidding) will still receive the best medical treatment in the world here, leaving hospitals to pick up the tab and driving up costs for average citizens. More and more power will have been ceded to the out-of-control United Nations. Judges will still be making laws from the bench. Social Security will be headed for a train wreck and the national debt will be going up, up, up!

For all this talk about a divided country, these are basic problems that people of all political stripes want solved. Then why, oh why, doesn’t the man we elect as our president ever get them solved?

The answer is quite simple: He is a president and not a king. He is simply the guy in charge of the military and executive agencies. His job, basically, is to make the trains run on time, but he doesn’t have the power to put more trains on the tracks or redirect them or tell them where to go. All the important decisions (laws) are made by Congress – and he can’t spend a dime without the permission of Congress.

Do away with all the pomp and circumstance and the president’s job really is quite boring. What can he do on his own? Very little.

• He can receive (entertain) dignitaries from foreign countries. Big deal!

• He gives a State of the Union address to Congress each year. It’s just a speech!

• He can grant reprieves and pardons. That and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee unless he is doing something illegal and selling pardons.

• He can fill vacancies on the courts and for the various executive positions within the government when the Senate is not in session, but those vacancies expire. This, too, is no big deal since our citizen legislators now stay in session most of the year. We can’t get them to go home anymore and live in the real world.

Many people have the mistaken impression that a president can make war, but only Congress has the power to declare war. It is true that presidents have engaged this country in wars, but Congress has the power to rein in a president and pull the plug on any war if it chooses to use that power.

Yes, the real power lies with Congress – our 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 senators. Unfortunately, most people will not even bother to learn the names of their representatives, much less look at their records or – more importantly – their spending habits.

The only way to truly give this country a fresh start is to throw out all those entrenched representatives who have forgotten why they were sent to Washington. We didn’t do that because most of us do not know enough about our representatives to make an informed decision on these folks.

Statistics tell us that the longer congressmen have their jobs, the more of our hard-earned money they are likely to spend. Why? We don’t watch them, so they begin catering to the special interests that reward representatives who vote to give them largess from the public treasury.

At one time, the Office of Management and Budget produced an annual estimate of what taxes would be on the next generation in order to simply sustain the size of our present government. President Clinton abandoned the practice after his 1995 budget put the lifetime tax rate (the present value of future taxes paid vs.. benefits received) for the generation born after 1992 at a whopping 82 percent.

Why? It was just too scary.

When we lose the ability to control a fair portion of what we earn, freedom is just an illusion.

Wake up, Americans! Stop looking toward White House to solve these problems. Put your attention on your representatives in Congress before it is too late to turn this country around!