It is easier to drive a stake through the heart of a blood-sucking vampire than to kill off a money-sucking and useless government program.

Politicians have limited power. They can't impose morality on themselves. How can they impose it on the country?

Welfare mostly subsidizes people in poverty, helping few escape from it. In their hearts, most people who are poor would like to be rich, or at least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve that goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. Rather than use successful people as examples for the poor to follow, the president seeks to punish the rich with higher taxes and more regulations on their businesses.

The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'.

If taxpayers want to keep more of the money they earn, they must also work to become less dependent on a government check. We look to government too often and to ourselves not enough.

When the Forbidden Fruit was handed to Adam and Eve, they were allowed the moral choice to accept or decline. I know people who have refused to feast on the money tree. They live simply, within their means, and seem far more content than those who are trying to horde their wealth while clinging to the ladder of 'success,' terrified to let go. That isn't real living. The Puritans rightly saw that as covetousness.

If we want to produce people who share the values of a democratic culture, they must be taught those values and not be left to acquire them by chance.