From Patriot to Sucker: Is the American Dream Dying Under the Weight of Government Waste and Widespread Fraud?

I grew up in a military family and lived on military bases most of my early life, five years of which were spent on Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.  Honestly, it was the most Americana place I’ve ever lived.  Think Mayberry surrounded by minefields.  Thankfully we didn’t often encounter the minefields, but we knew they were there. 

Fourth of July was always the biggest day of the year.  We had parades with tanks and marching bands and floats and classic convertibles with pretty girls waving from the back. The rest of the day would be filled with motocross races and boxing matches, track and field events and midway games and endless food. And everything was topped off with a concert and fireworks once the sun set. 

Never a great student, I went from one grade to the next holding on by my fingertips, except for history and social studies.  I was fascinated about history and loved reading about the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians, but mostly about America and WW II, which at that time had only been over for about 30 years. We of course studied the Constitution and what led to the Revolution, but we also read about slavery and the Trail of Tears and watched Roots. America was great, even if it was imperfect.

My joining the military after school was never a question. My parents never pushed me, but it was just what you did. And so after college I spent two years in the Army, stationed in what was then West Germany. One of the most interesting things I encountered while there was an old west town the local Germans had built. It looked like something straight out of Bonanza.  Inside each of the buildings was a wide collection of Americana, most of which was oddly anachronistic, like Mickey Mouse clocks and old pinball machines and lava lamps. The interesting thing was, these people loved everything American. Despite the war that was only a generation away, America was a place of dreams, a place of adventure, a place where anything was possible. 

That didn’t surprise me because my entire life I’d known that America was great.  It was imperfect, but I knew that it was fundamentally good, and that most Americans were fundamentally good.

After leaving the Army I went to grad school and earned my MBA and began my life as an entrepreneur, which I’ve done for the last 30 years.  In all honesty, I’m a terrible entrepreneur.  I’ve had some great ideas, but most came to naught. Aside from one minor success early on – a company teaching kids about investing and entrepreneurship, where I interviewed a young Elon Musk – every one of my entrepreneurial endeavors has been a bust.

But here’s the thing, I’ve always known that my life is better because of entrepreneurs and patriots who have come before me.  Our founding fathers gave us a constitution that created the foundation for the freest nation in human history, which in turn created unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to risk doing great things and then earn a reward for success.  For me, America was the land of opportunity, the place where anyone with a good idea and willing to put in the sweat and take some risks could find success. 

But sadly, I’ve started to question that… but not because of my own failings. Those I own. I was either in the wrong place at the wrong time or just didn’t do a good job selling my idea. No, it’s not my failures that have me questioning what America has become… It’s watching the millions and billions and trillions of dollars that get sent to grifters and thieves.    

I’m talking about the billions being funneled through fake or leftist NGOs that DOGE exposed.  I’m talking about the people who took PPP money during Covid and used it to live like rapper kings. I’m talking about the daycare fraud in Minnesota and the homeless grift in California and the home health fraud in Maine and elsewhere.  Not to mention the trillions wasted on countless green energy scams and the billions that go to support people who are here illegally. 

I’m talking about the people we see using EBT cards to buy lobster and steak while working people are living on Ramen noodles and hot dogs.  I’m talking about families who have been in Section 8 housing and on welfare for generations while working people are living like college students, sharing rooms and couch surfing among friends. I’m talking about colleges and companies dropping standards and accepting people not because of their hard work and merit, but because of a diversity thumb stuck on the scale.

The point of all of this is that over the last couple of years I’ve started to ask myself if I’m a sucker… and that maybe I have a lot of company.  I’ve worked hard my whole life and paid my taxes and aside from a college loan (non-forgiven) and a small PPP loan (forgiven) when Covid lockdowns hammered our business, I’ve never taken a penny from the government. Actually, my goal was always the opposite, to become sufficiently successful that I’d actually have to hire accountants to do my taxes.  And I wanted to do that by helping make other people’s lives easier or better.  That’s how fortunes have traditionally been made in America. Whether it was inventing the elevator or flash frozen food or selling Beanie Babies, you create a product or service that others are willing to voluntarily exchange their money for.  That’s America’s magic, a win-win exchange where everyone gets what they value most. 

But today I look around and I see companies laying off Americans while simultaneously bringing in millions of H1B visa workers.  I see grifting NGOs lining their pockets and using taxpayer dollars to keep Democrats in power – who then attack America at every turn.  I look at the fact that more than 50% of the money government spends is redistribution and half the country doesn’t pay income taxes.

And I wonder, why would anyone choose to follow the rules when it would be easier to simply run a scam or suckle at the government teat?  I understand that working hard and being honest is a part of one’s character, but at what point do conscientious people say “I’m done working my ass off just so everyone else can live like kings off my sweat”?

I love America and I always will, and I’m not giving up, but I have to wonder about the future. When someone like me who bleeds red, white & blue starts to question if it makes sense to do the right thing, I can’t imagine what the young people educated in the anti-American forges we call schools think.

From Athens and Rome to the Abbasid Caliphate and Song China, most of history’s greatest empires collapsed because they betrayed the very things that made them great in the first place.  For America that’s freedom and opportunity.  To the degree that grift, government corruption and “largesse” have replaced hard work, risk and merit as the primary avenues for “success” the Republic’s days are numbered. Sadly, I don’t see any signs in Washington that many of the people in charge of the system are much interested in fixing it.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Never Tell A Leftist They Hate America...

Never tell a leftist they hate America.  They will correct you every time.  They don’t hate America they’ll tell you, they just want to improve it.  They just want to help make it better.  They just want America to live up to her ideals.

No, it’s not America per se that they hate, but rather the things that made America so spectacular in the first place.  Free enterprise.  Limited government. Federalism. Separation of Powers.   Individual freedom.

But, while they don’t hate America, it is, according to them, racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant and more. In addition, the Constitution is an outdated document written by old racist white guys and needs to be reimagined.

So, OK, sure, I’ll buy that leftists don’t technically hate America. And apparently they don’t, because even when they have Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street type money and could live anywhere in the world… big surprise, they never actually leave!

When I tell leftists that America is the greatest nation that’s ever existed it seems to send them over some sort of cliff. They often get angry and look at me as if I just told them I the earth is flat.  But the funny thing is, when I ask what nation is better or empire was better… crickets.  They immediately launch into a polemic about how America is racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric etc. It’s ripe with inequality, inequity and is run by rich white men.  And not to be forgotten, its Constitution is an outdated document written by old white racist guys and as such, shouldn’t control our lives today. 

Then I suggest that even if it were the case that America was the hellscape they suggest, where should we go to escape it?  Again, crickets. 

Despite the fact that the leftist snowflakes can’t point to a single place on earth or in history that is or was superior to the United States, that had a more successful combination of prosperity and freedom than the US, they most certainly have an endless supply of ways to improve it:

• Bans on hate speech, which they define as anything that hurts anyone’s feelings.
• Defund the police.
• Pack the Supreme Court.
• Disband the INS.
• $15 minimum wage.
• Demonize the Founding Fathers.
• Eliminate the Electoral College.
• Cancel anyone who ever uttered an opinion that doesn’t comport with the currently favored position on any given subject.
• Eliminate bail requirements & sentencing minimums.
• Participation trophies.
• Eliminate academic requirements and standardized testing for entrance into college.
• Universal healthcare
• Free college tuition
• Green energy mandates and subsidies
• Eliminate fossil fuels
• Repeal the Second Amendment
• Eliminate capitalism.
• Eliminate the binary gender construct
• Make the Pentagon the bleeding edge for social experiments
• Tax the rich
• Forgive student debt
• Mandate vaccinations

And the list goes on, and on, and on. It literally never stops.  Griswold v. Connecticut begat Roe vs. Wade which begat partial birth abortion.  Gay rights turned into civil unions turned into gay marriage.  Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act turned into coerced lax lending standards which turned into the housing crash.  And the Americans with Disabilities Act started out as compassion for the handicapped and mutated into a vehicle for extortion of small businesses by a cabal of pernicious lawyers. Removing the Confederate Battle Flag from state flags led to pulling down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas to cancelling Dr. Seuss & Aunt Jemima. 

At exactly what point will America cease to be the racist sexist hellhole that the left tells us it is?   Must the military perfectly reflect the hue and sex of America itself?  Must corporate executives be promoted based on their socioeconomic heritage?  What else needs to be reflective of the demographics of the American populace?  How about the NBA & the NFL? Black men make up 74% of the NBA and 70% of the NFL.  Do we fire 90% of them to hire more white men and women of every race?  Would that make the games more competitive, more exciting?  Probably not.  Or how about nurses? 93% of nurses are women.  Should 40% of them be fired in order to hire men to make the industry reflective of the rest of the country? Would that make healthcare better or patients happier and safer? Unlikely.  And this could go on endlessly for every area of the economy: Ditch diggers.  Sanitation workers.  Teachers.  Barbers.  Rap artists. Surgeons. Lawyers.   

The bottom line is the left knows how to do one thing well, and that is destroy what someone else built.  We’ve seen that play out across America time and again.  From the burnt husks of Detroit and Washington that rotted for decades following the riots of the 1960’s to turning once great American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into giant homeless camps strewn with needles and feces to the economic devastation wrought in cities like Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle from a year of “mostly peaceful protests”.  When the left comes to power in successful cities the march to a real hellscape begins.  And it’s not just cities.  The left broke the Boy Scouts, they destroyed the NFL as a truly national form of entertainment, they’ve ruined Disney and Marvel and they are in the process of destroying women’s sports. Dennis Prager often says “The Left destroys everything it touches” and he’s right.  The left has never built a nation millions of people risk their lives to enter.  The left has never built a society where freedom of thought, speech and the press have thrived.  The left has never built an economic juggernaut founded on free markets or anything else. 

The left can do nothing more than take advantage of the freedom and prosperity that others have created and throw stones at it for its imperfections.  Voltaire was prescient when he observed “Perfect is the enemy of the good”.  America is no doubt imperfect.  It is flawed and sometimes unfair and often inequitable… but mankind is all of his creations are.  The reality is, the United States is by far the greatest nation God has seen fit to grace man with and while it will continue to be imperfect until the end of days, it is nothing like the racist, fascist hellscape the left makes it out to be.  But of course none of that matters because for the left, building something great is never a necessity, in fact, it’s never even a consideration.  Why bother trying to build anything when it’s so much easier to throw stones at those who are too busy actually building things to notice they’re being targeted for their imperfections by those who don’t have the courage to try.  

I’m not sure what the textbook definition of hate of county might be, but everything the left does and says most certainly looks like it.  There’s an old saying: “If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” Replace duck with hate and you have America’s left:  too cowardly risk doing anything but more than willing to demonize those who aren’t.     

Donald Trump: Not Exactly A Presidential President

American Presidents are supposed to be well spoken, articulate, magnanimous and carry themselves with a grace that makes them look natural on the cover of TIME magazine or standing next to the Queen of England.  They’re supposed to get along with the Washington press corps, titans of industry and play their role in the Kabuki theater of Washington DC power where Congress, the Executive Branch and the bureaucracy play their assigned roles and business continues largely unchanged from one administration to the next.

None of that applies to Donald Trump. He’s brash.  He’s arrogant.  He’s a narcissist.  He’s petty.  He’s vindictive.  He makes rash decisions and somehow is never responsible for stumbles that land at his doorstep, even when he’s the guy in charge… Donald Trump is practically no one’s idea of what Americans would traditionally call “Presidential”. 

Barack Obama on the other hand was the consummate “Presidential” president.  He was well spoken, genial, and got along well with the media, bureaucrats and foreign leaders.  Barack Obama, by all accounts carried the imprimatur “Presidential” quite well.  It was the actual presidenting that he was so bad at, which demonstrates with crystal clarity that the perception of one’s abilities and one’s actual abilities are not the same thing…

Donald Trump was a bull in a china shop of a President.  Or at least that’s the way the media, Democrats, academia, Hollywood and establishment Republicans painted him.  And that’s the key to understanding Donald Trump... knowing him through his enemies.  Voltaire said:  “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." That prayer very much applies to Donald Trump.  His enemies are ridiculous.  They are failures at virtually everything they touch.  From destroying American schools and cities and the military, Democrats have made themselves beyond ridiculous in the eyes of anyone other than their fellow travelers.  Journalists have destroyed journalism as the majority of the media in the United States today is nothing more than a mouthpiece for Democrat talking points.  And higher education has become a cartoon into itself, with its focus on safe spaces for sparing the feelings of little snowflake rather than preparing young adults for the real world that exists beyond their ivory towers.  

And the mortar that keeps all of that ridiculousness and more together is the regulatory state.  The regulatory state is the font from which most power in the United States flows.  The power to regulate gives politicians the power to print money… both for themselves and their friends.  There’s a reason 7 of the 10 richest counties in America – out of over 3,100 counties – are located in the DC metro area.  From cushy government jobs to high paying lobbying gigs to flashy TV news hosting positions to bylines at self important newspapers, wielding power or influencing it or reporting on it is what makes Washington so desirable.  A perfect example of that was on display when hundreds of USDA employees decided to quit their jobs in DC rather than move out into the heartland when the Trump administration decided to place offices where regulators and researchers would be closer to the farms and farmers within their purview. They quit because they knew that Washington is where the power is, where the money is, where the influence is and where the prestige is. 

President Trump knew that that regulatory state was a rope around the neck of freedom, prosperity and America.  That’s why he needed to be vilified, attacked and eventually stopped.  Many people ask how some Republicans could stand by and watch as the president from their own party was attacked and disparaged as Donald Trump was. The answer is simple, establishment Republicans don’t really care about party, don’t care about effective government, and don’t care about their constituent's rights.  No, they care about only one thing:  Power.  If they could be out of office and watch government spending and influence slashed vs. be in office and watch government power grow, they would choose the latter every single time.  Go along with Democrats and they get to keep their invitations to Georgetown parties, their sponsored junkets to exotic and sophisticated locales, their regular Sunday morning talk show slots, cushy jobs for their families and of course the promise of a lucrative parachute if they ever find themselves defeated. Rein in government?  "No chance!"

It was into this well oiled machine of money, power and favors that Donald Trump sought to throw a wrench.  It was this “You scratch my back I scratch yours” Rube Goldberg government contraption that Donald Trump sought to overturn.  It was this "Go along to get along" understanding where Washington thrives by stealing citizen’s money and freedom that Donald Trump sought to expose.  And that is why he had to go.

Donald Trump opened up a schism in the United States unlike anything we’ve seen in 150 years.  He didn't do it by demonizing black people or brown people or Muslims or gays or soldiers or any of the other things the cabal of Democrats, media, and Never Trumper Republicans said.  In reality, Donald created a schism by reminding Americans that the nation is indeed blessed, that while flawed, America is the greatest nation in history and that fundamentally, Americans and America are good.  Donald Trump put the spotlight on working Americans… on factory workers and entrepreneurs and problem solvers rather than on the self important politicians and media personalities. This schism is based on power, not race.  

In four years Donald Trump did for America what he did forWollman Rink 30 years before.  After years of failure and millions of dollars wasted by the city government on the Central Park skating rink, Donald Trump renovated and opened the rink in a matter of months and under budget. In a similar way, after years of disparagement, Donald Trump made America great again. He showed that Americans that they could get back to work. That they could grow jobs and drive prosperity.  That they could lead on the world stage by embracing, not apologizing for, American values.  In other words, Donald Trump showed America that Americans can still accomplish great things, drove home the idea that it was the American people that made the country great, it was the ideas the Founding Fathers left us that made America great and it was our freedom and opportunity that made America great.  But most dangerously of all, Donald Trump reminded Americans that America’s greatness and prosperity do not come from government, they exist despite government.  And that could simply not be tolerated by the swamp, hence the four years of roadblocks, vilification and eventually a stolen election.  

Is Donald Trump a politically dead canary at the bottom of the American mineshaft of freedom or is he a phoenix ready to soar once again and lead the nation to even further greatness?  Who knows? Even today, after Trump emerged from his second impeachment victory his ridiculous enemies are seeking to bar him from Arlington, ban his name from schools and post offices and demonize, stigmatize and marginalize his supporters.  

Whatever Donald Trump’s future, one thing is for certain, his legacy is alive and well in the hearts of the 75 million American voters who remember a time when patriotism was a virtue, who understand that it’s possible for a nation to be flawed but fundamentally good, and perhaps most of all, recognize that America is the land of opportunity for every single person.  He may not be what the elite consider a very Presidential President, but he reminded us that it’s our people who make America great, our Constitution that makes her great and our freedoms that make her great despite the swamp's assertion to the contrary. He stood up and unabashedly proclaimed that America was and is a good nation, a great nation, and a force for good... and we believed him.  Whatever he chooses to do, we proudly carry the American flag and enthusiastically support his MAGA agenda... and we're not going anywhere.