Tired of unemployment? Find a congressional seat, and take a load off
Clearly we have a problem in this country, and I don't mean the economy. We have the worst Congress we've had in my lifetime! And I'm old. What are we going to do? I have some ideas.
Here's a simple one. We have a Congress that can't decide anything as a whole. In particular our congresspersons can't decide how to spend the money the government has left. Should they spend it on another war? Should they spend it giving Americans the Social Security they were promised? Should they build giant monuments to themselves on the slopes of mountains?
My simple idea is to take the money that's left and apportion it equally among all the senators. So the Democrats would get 53 percent, the Republicans would get 47 percent, and the people would get none. Congress would stop bickering then, wouldn't they?
Oops, no, that would only placate the Senate. The House would want some of the action, and that'd just reopen that old "big state/little state; populous state/sparse state" quarrel from the 1780s. So much for the simple idea.
Something has to be done. When the white middle class finds out that the debt ceiling solution screws them, too, all hell is going to break loose.
Meanwhile, the word on the street is that billionaires are nearly united in feeling betrayed by the debt ceiling accord, because they didn't get the payouts they thought they would. After all, they paid Congress for the crisis, fully expecting that half the government money saved on services would be delivered to them. Where's their negative income tax? So they're planning to riot in the streets. Look for that on Twitter.
So let's try outsourcing.
We outsource everything else. Let's outsource Congress. American members of Congress don't have the work ethic, the social cohesion, or enough Tiger Moms behind them to work like their counterparts in foreign congresses. They have (shudder) American educations.
Even English congresspersons (they're called "parliamentarians," British for "residents of the blab-pit") work harder than American ones. They do their homework, they come to work knowing things, and they argue intelligently about them even when they are insulting each other in that clever, subtle way only the English can understand. (I was once insulted to my face by an Englishman and didn't learn about it for two years.)
We can do even better than send our Congressional jobs to England. We could send them to India or China, where it wouldn't even matter if they did a good job, for what we could get away with paying them. We're paying the fools we have $174,000 per year. If one person had that much money in India she/he could buy up the entire annual elephant harvest. They would in fact settle for far less, having no desire for that much elephant meat, because the are mostly vegetarians.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Wes! How could our complex system of government be run remotely from India or China or any other distant foreign country? Wouldn't we have to outsource closer, say to Mexico or Canada?" The answer is, "The government can be run from India the same way it's run now, by pony express."
Ha! I tricked you, it isn't run now.
India has phones and computers and a space program and people who know how to use technology willing to call themselves Billy Bob if that's what takes to get hired. They could run the United States with a multitude of Skype conference calls.
But, fine. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you naysayers are right and there's some reason Congress has to stay in the United States. Some reason that completely escapes all us geniuses. We can still do better than what we have. We can give our congresspersons' jobs to any random 535 Americans who have been out of work for more than three years, and they'd do a better job than the clowns we've been stuck with.
We could replace most of them as early as next year.