Other Ways To Cut The National Debt

If you look at the House Republican Study Group's proposals to cut $2.5 trillion from the national budget over 10 years, this looks puny. If you review their proposals, it's basically a cultural war against everything the Right hates. PBS gets defunded because they fired Juan Williams and Roger Ailes called them Nazis. National Endowment for the Arts has been a target since the days of Jesse Helms. This gang likes Thomas Kincaide and he doesn't receive government grants. The National Endowment for the Humanities underwrote the research in Mark Twain's autobiography and the designated conservative reader found offensive passages. Then of course we need to go after every social program for poor people that exists because only colored people are poor. Other than looking vindictive the proposals don't look like much.

And more importantly they aren't using that free market know-how that made the Right such geniuses. Perhaps they need some help from Rebecca Rimel of the Pew Trusts, who brilliantly stole the entire Barnes Collection of impressionaist and modernist art worth hundreds of billions for the City of Pennsylvania.

The House Study Group does say sell off properties not being used by the Government. This is modelled after Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer selling parts of the state's capital because they ran out of money.

No, we should rejoice in our debt slashing ways. First over a ten-year period, sell off the paintings in the National Gallery of Art, none of them are liked by conservatives anyway except for the Koch Brothers who can pick them up at auction. Here we can match the total value of the Barnes Collection and maybe surpass it by throwing in the National Portrait Gallery. When we're done, then we can sell the real estate for condos on the Mall, an attractive offer for corporate lobbyists.

Then we need to commercialize the Washington monuments. Picture a holographic display put over Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial. Company names would slide by over the names of the fallen, casting an eerie shadow. Companies would have to bid for the time of day and how often the commercial ran.

The same applies for the Lincoln Memorial. The Koch Brothers could buy the rights to the Lincoln memorial for Glenn Beck in honor of his work for the teaparty. Big Shepard Farey Posters of Glenn Beck could greet visitors along the reflecting pool.

For the Washington Monument, we adopt the Empire State Building treatment of different color lights for different holidays auctioned off to all comers and naming rights up the obelisk. We would have four sides to sell on this property.

We would offer the Jefferson Memorial first to the Japanese companies because they could use the shots of the Memorial shaded by cherry trees in Honda and Toyota Ads.

We're probably cruising to about $400 billion so far. Now we sell the Smithsonian's jewel collection. They have the Hope Diamond after all. If the whole Hope Diamond doesn't sell, we can cut it into smaller diamonds and mass market it. There is alot of great pop culture trivia in the American history museum that could be sold to the public on e-Bay.

We can also sell all the fossils owned by the Smithsonian so fundamentalist Christians can hide evidence of evolution.

This should take us close to $1 trillion. We can match this by selling the crown jewels of the Library of Congress to rare book collectors and market the contents of the library to the 1% richest Americans first and then to the Arab sheiks.

Since our national park system was created by progressives, it should be auctioned off gradually. The Obama Administration over-ruled Cheney's ruling for oil drilling near the Arches in Utah. I say we sell them the land and give them all the rights for free. The Arches are doomed to fall sometime anyway.

Since we don't recognize our own crimes against native Americans, we should sell all the land they have left remaining. Blackwater can provide the security to the private interests seizing the land. Some of the Southwest pueblos could make beautiful second homes for the rich.

This effort needs creative marketing. For instance we know the Christian Right wants to say we were created as a Christian nation. Let's sell them Monticello and then they can decorate the interior with crucifixes they will claim Thomas Jefferson collected over the years.

Then we can add some overseas military bases to privatize. Gitmo could become a Club Med and Diego Gracia could become an Indian Ocean resort. The military could then earn funds transporting tourists to these places.

With these modest sales, we have far surpassed the House Republican Study Group, affirmed free-market principles,and thrown some bones (literally) to the Christian Right and opened the rest of America up to commercial exploration. A new manifest destiny.

See Dick Cheney was right, "Deficits don't matter."