We can do a better job taking care of people than the government does. It is that simple. I was reading something the other day, and the argument the guy was making is that lots of Christians are Republicans so we should be in favor of health care. “We are helping lots of people by giving them free health care, if you were really a Christian you would be for government health care.”

Well, I am a Christian, but I am not for government health care. You know why? Because I think I can do a better job helping people with my money than the government can. The government waste so much money it is unbelievable. They actually spend more money on the bureaucracy and paperwork of reimbursing travel expenses in a year, than they do on the travel expenses. And the number is in the billions. Efficiency at its finest. That is pathetic.

Every government program is fraught with waste. Each of the entitlement programs we have make people lazier and lazier. If I can get the government to take care of me, what is the point of actually working and being productive myself. These entitlement programs aren’t “helping” anybody. They are just making people wards of the state.

So no, I do not want government health care. I do want to help people though, and so I give money to people who are doing real good in this world. People who are going on mission trips to Haiti to help ease the suffering. My church that feeds homeless people and reaches out to prisoners and drug addicts. These are good uses of my money. They waste far less and do much more good than the government does.

Here’s a little graphic to prove my point. It ranks states by their “generosity index” of each of the states, and next to it who they voted for in the Bush - Kerry election. The generosity index compares average charitable giving to average gross income.

Do you see a trend? That is why Christians can say they don’t want government health care and not be hypocrites. If you are really concerned about helping people, go and help people. Don’t try to make the government do it, because they are really bad at it.

Chuck Grassley submitted an amendment today forcing Congress, the President, Vice-President, political appointees, and congressional staffers to get their federal health insurances through the to be created exchanges. As usual, they excluded themselves from this bill.

“President Obama has publicly advertised that his reforms would give members of the public the same coverage available to Members of Congress,” reads a GOP summary of the Grassley measure. “This amendment would ensure that he, his successors, and all his appointed political officials would also have the same coverage members of the public enrolled in the Exchange receive.”

Beautiful. I really hope the Democrats vote against this amendment, as it would make for some entertainment during the fall campaigns.

This is a guest post from my wife Tiffany. Check out her blogs on training for a half marathon and photography. Consider following her on Twitter @tiffanyclark87. If you are interested in guest posting at Geek Politics, check out the guidelines here.

On March 21, 2010, we welcomed home another plane full of troops coming home from Iraq. We were privileged to actually know someone coming home. 1st Lt. Brian Lennon had been serving in Iraq for 8 months as a Kiawa Warrior pilot. I got to know his wife, Neva, really well over the last 8 months since he’s been away. I’ve never felt so blessed, overwhelmed and proud to be an American than when witnessing Heroes coming home to their families who have missed and longed for them to come home safe and sound.

We are probably going to be dealing with government health care soon, but at least we still have some good people like Paul Ryan fighting for liberty.

Check out this video from the debate tonight.

If your representative is on this list of undecided democrats call or email them before the vote. Let them know how you feel. Then watch this great video from Code Red.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he thinks the Democrats have enough votes to pass it normally, which is unfortunate, but at least they have listened to our outcry against the joke that was deeming a bill passed.

They plan on having a series of votes on Sunday to pass the Senate bill and their “fixes” that would then have to go through the process of reconciliation.

I’m still holding out (slim) hope that this won’t get passed, so take a few minutes break from watching March Madness and give your Congressmen a call to tell them what you think about this bill.

I was reading an interesting post from Seth Godin, author of Linchpin, about TV the other day. He says he doesn’t watch TV at all anymore, and here is why:

Things you can do instead of TV:
* Run a little store on eBay
* Write a daily blog
* Write a novel
* Start an online community about your favorite passion
* Go to meetups in your town
* Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online
* Learn a new language, verbal or programming
* Write hand written thank you notes each evening to people who helped you out or did a good job
* Produce small films and publish them online
* Listen to the one thousand most important operas
* Read a book or two every evening
* Play a game of Scrabble with your family
None of them are perfect. Each of them are better than TV.

I’ve got a few more to add to the list:
Call Congress and tell them not to pass this health care bill.
Write a letter to Congress and tell them not to pass this health care bill.
Tweet to your followers telling them to talk to their Congressman.
Write a blog post telling people to call Congress.
You get the idea.

In Seth’s post, he referenced a talk by Clay Shirky. He gives some pretty amazing stats about how much TV gets watched and the things that are being accomplished by people who have cut back on their TV consumption and created a surplus of “free time”.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Did you catch that? The amount of time spent watching just the ads in one weekend is the amount of time it has taken to create Wikipedia. Pretty amazing. If the world changed it’s TV consumption by just 1%, that would be the equivalent of 100 Wikipedia projects a year. Pretty amazing stuff.

Dream Big Dreams

How about if you want to do something bigger than Wikipedia? What if you want Washington DC to go back to being a Shining City on a Hill instead of the cesspool it is today. Well, the short version is you need to do something about it. Stop watching TV and write a letter to Congress. Participate in a tea party. Write a blog post. Have a conversation with your neighbor. Volunteer for the good candidates we do have running for Congress in November. When you put it into perspective with the amount of TV we waste our time watching, changing Washington almost seems doable.

I’m launching a new blog today called Christian Common Cents. It is going to be a personal finance website focused on giving common sense solutions to financial problems based on biblical principles. As part of the launch I am giving away 3 copies of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. Check out the giveaway here and sign up for a chance to win.