Like other cockroaches, Ted Stevens fears the light

He's worried that a corruption probe might hurt his chances for re-election. Read that article and tell me that Stevens isn't a damn little piece of trash. He said, "I'm working to get this concept out of my mind that someone is trying to make something illegal out of all this." So Stevens isn't even denying that he did anything wrong. He's merely wants to stop thinking about the accusations, hoping they'll all go away.

We could only be so lucky that his re-election bid will be hurt. There are so many idiots in Alaska, being so fond of other people's money, that keep sending that bastard to Washington to bring them more. But I have no hope that they'll wake up, because like with other pork barrel kings like Robert Byrd, and the plainly corrupt like Dan Rostenkowski, Stevens' constituents care principally that he's in a powerful position of seniority to bring back funding, courtesy of everybody else, for their bridges to nowhere and what-not.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ignoring that people all across the country are greedy for their neighbor's coerced money. I've written before that it's all about getting as large a share as possible of the federal budget pie, at the expense of other states. However, Alaskans receive far more money via the D.C. wealth redistribution conduit than they send in. Such is the problem with our federalized tax system. It didn't take long for the federal government to start ignoring the 10th Amendment, when in the early 19th century it began spending on "internal improvements" like canals and railroads. However, until the 16th Amendment, the federal government was limited in size by the nature of the tax system.

After the 16th Amendment, Congress started taxing individuals. Originally, Congress received money from the states: each state paid a percentage of the federal budget according to its percentage of the population. This is the second, forgotten reason that the Constitution mandates a census every 10 years. Under that old system, Alaska with 0.2% of the population must use its own internal tax structure to pay 0.2% of the federal budget, and California with 12% of the population is similarly responsible for 12% of the federal budget. This is the most important reason that the Constitution mandates that "No state shall...coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts," lest a state merely print worthless paper to pay its federal budget obligations.

Under that system of proportional burden, Alaskans would therefore not want a lot of federal spending, since they must share a percentage of the budget no matter what the federal government spends on. How strange that people don't want to spend a lot on things when it's their own money.