A few nights ago I was watching television late at night, when I saw the worst commercial I have ever seen. The commercial was advertising a product called “Free Money to Pay Your Bills,” What it is, is a product that shows people how to use government programs, grants, etc., that you wouldn’t otherwise know about, to help pay your bills.After hearing about this program, I first thought that it has to be some sort of scam, so I went to the advertised website to find out more. What I found was a picture of the spokesman/author of the book wearing a suit covered in question marks (?), and above his picture was the caption “Get Uncle Sam to Pay Your Bills.” I thought to myself “not only is this guy nuts, the last time I checked, it wasn’t the government’s role to pay our bills, but maybe I’m missing something.” So I kept reading.
The next thing I found was that the book contained “10,000 little-known government money programs” and that “Each year the U.S. Congress appropriates over $1 Trillion in government grants for people to use to help themselves and help their country.” Their country??? How does giving people money for nothing help the country? How about letting the rightful owners of that money keep it, wouldn’t that help our country even more?
Next, the site itemizes how much money you can get for paying off certain things, such as $2,000 to pay your mortgage, $627 to pay your phone bill, $450 to pay your heating bill, $7,650 to pay for legal bills, $5,000 to pay for acting, dancing, or singing lessons, and $200,000 to work on your invention. Now, maybe someone a little more intelligent than I am could explain to me how a government program that pays for acting lessons and phone bills helps the country. To me it just seems like a waste of money that could be spent on something more practical, like national defense maybe?
Finally I found a quote, which stated: “The world is full of free money…and in our democratic society these free resources are for everyone and not just the lucky few. If you get the money and help you need…you not only help yourself, you help America.” There are several major flaws in that quote. First, we don’t live in a democratic society, we live in a representative constitutional republic, there is a huge difference between the two. Second, if you ask any economist to analyze this quote, they will tell you “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Basically what this means, is that just because you get something for nothing, doesn’t mean that someone else didn’t pay for it, and in this case unwilling taxpayers are footing the bill. And third, you will never help yourself by relying on someone else to walk you through life. People who constantly rely on the government to fund their heating bills or other expenses, aren’t helping themselves, rather they are training themselves (and their children) to think that they shouldn’t have to pay for these expenses, because the government will do it for them. Now how is that supposed to help our country?
I hope this whole thing is a big scam. I hope that all the people who buy this guy’s book find out the hard way that nothing is for free. I want all of them to feel like they have been cheated, so that they will know exactly how the people funding these programs feel about the government handing out their hard earned money. If this is not a scam, and someone is getting rich off of showing other people how to take other people’s money then this is truly capitalism at its worst.
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