I rang in the New Year as I always do. My wife and I had a nice early dinner with a good friend. We then came home and had a drink until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I went to bed and my wife and our friend stayed up a little more but none of us made it to midnight anymore. 2023 will be my 70^th year on this planet and most years I always wake up on January 1^st thinking that with the New Year we can make a new and better start. This year I am hoping that we just don’t go backwards too much.

Because of global climate change our crumbling infrastructure is just not going to cut it. You have places like Jackson Mississippi that has not had drinking water for a week. The freezing temperatures have brought their old infrastructure to its knees. We are past the point of saying we can’t afford to do these things and have reached the point that we have no choice. We are in this mess because all those years we were told we couldn’t afford it. Since we have been telling people we can’t afford it, we have been giving tax breaks to the people that can afford it at the expense of real people that can’t afford it. In plain language we gave tax breaks to the wealthiest one percent where their worth has gone sky high and have ignored the needs of the nation. If we hadn’t given all those tax cuts we probably could have afforded it all along. Another way to put it is that the nation suffered while a few got very rich, very rich. The wealth gap has never been greater. I do not begrudge people that have worked hard for their wealth as long as it isn’t at the expensive of the rest of us.

Kevin McCarthy has stated the first thing he wants to go after is the 87,000 new IRS agents that Biden wants to hire over the next 10 years. That is a misleading figure because some of those new hires will be taking the place of people that will be retiring, but needless to say Biden felt the need to increase the number of IRS agents to deal with the backlog of returns and audits. Now when crime increases on our streets we always hear from the Republican Party what is needed is an increase in police presence. I am a believer in keeping our streets safe and I have always been a believer in if you do the crime be prepared to do the time. Breaking the law is breaking the law whether it is shop lifting or cheating on your taxes.

Where I grew up they had what was called Bike Court where if you were given a ticket while riding your bike you had to go to court. It was a great learning experience for us kids and taught us a little respect for the law. It helped teach us accountability. Cheating on your taxes is not a victimless crime like some of our bike violations were. It is committing a crime against the entire nation. Military spending, infrastructure spending, or any other type of spending like disaster recovery is dependent on taxes. The Republicans want to defund the “tax police” whose job is to make sure that our tax laws are obeyed. The Republicans have cut taxes which created a deficit and then want the tax cheats to be able to cheat which just makes the deficit worse. When a retiree like myself on a fixed income is paying more taxes than the billionaire ex-President our nation has a real problem. A problem that the Republican Party does not want to solve.

You can protest but if you riot you should expect to be punished. Over 10,000 Black Lives protestors were arrested even though it was made to sound that no one was held accountable. The insurrection was not only a crime but in my opinion it was treason. To compare the two is just trying to justify the attempt to burn our Constitution. The New Republican House will go after the January 6^th committee and everything that is connected to it. Here again they will be trying to make it so the criminals go unpunished. It is one thing to go after some stooge that believed all the lies that were being told about the big steal but it is another thing to let the people that sent them, the real people that caused it off the hook. We all saw what happened and a lot of us like myself saw it live on TV. It was televised all over the World and to deny the severity of the situation just makes us look foolish. Not just the Republican Party looks foolish but the nation at a whole because there may be two political parties but the world only sees one nation, the United States. The Republicans are already saying that they will go after the FBI because of the raid a Mar a Lago. A raid where they did find thousands of documents that should have been turned over by law to the National Archives but also classified documents that did put our security at risk. Trump lied when he stated that he returned all the documents and he is probably still lying. Here again they think that law and order doesn’t matter if it affects them politically. I would have looked up to the Republicans if they would had taken the opposite approach. If they would have stood up for our Republic and took on the ones that wanted to destroy our Constitution. That would have been the right thing to do. They all knew who was to blame. They all knew who the supporters were. They just didn’t care enough about our Republic to want to do anything about it. That does not just go for the Republicans that are holding office but for the people that voted for them sending them to Washington. The “Needs of the Party” should not be the battle cry of any political party that wants to control our government because the good of the people will be ignored for the good of the party.

Law and order should be what is important. Our laws must make sense and be administered fairly no matter what a person’s race, color, religion, sexual orientation, social status, financial status, or political party is. A shop lifter stealing from a merchant should not be treated worse than at rich tax cheat stealing from our nation. Accountability has to be one of the things that we should be striving for yet, are not when it comes to insurrectionists and tax cheats that the Republican Party supports.