Senator John Cornyn

All human actions have the common goal of comprehending or shaping our understanding and man has developed numerous subjective and objective branches of learning: economics, morality, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so on.

Enormous amounts of time and money are invested in data collection and analysis in the attempt to predict human trends. Implicit in this frenzied search is the expectation of finding some ultimate "answer," which will allow us to solve the problems of the economy, crime, national health, or politics. Nevertheless so far, we have not solved any of these problems at all.

It is not that we lack information; in fact, we are virtually drowning in it. The obstacle is that we do not have the proper tools to understand the meaning of our data. Understanding does not proceed simply from examining data; it comes from examining data in a particular context. Information is useless until we know what it means.

Society constantly expends its efforts to correct "effects" instead of "causes," which is one reason why the development of human consciousness proceeds so slowly. While this random search for solutions has resulted in a maze of bewildering complexity, true answers always have the characteristic of simplicity. The basic law of our world is economy and we must not waste a single piece of knowledge; everything serves a purpose and fits into a balance there are no unconnected events.

Man will always be trapped until he can learn to look beyond apparent causes. From history, we may note that answers never come from identifying "causes" in the world. Instead, it's necessary to identify the conditions that underlie the perceived causes; No definitive answer to any problem can be found by isolating sequences of events and projecting upon them a mental notion of "causality." There are no causes within our society today, only effects.

The difference in finding effective means reduces itself, on examination, to our inability to discriminate the essential from the nonessential. As a result, there has been no system affording a method by which to distinguish powerful and effective solutions from vulnerable, fruitless ones. Our means of evaluation themselves have been inherently incapable of performing a realistic assessment.

Societal choices, more often than not, are the result of expediency, statistical fallacy, sentiment, political or media pressure, or personal prejudice and vested interest. Crucial decisions affecting the lives of everyone on the planet are made under conditions that virtually guarantee failure, because societies lack the necessary reality base for formulation of effective problem resolutions, they fall back, over and over, on war, law, taxation, rules, and regulations which is extremely costly, instead of employing ability, which is very economical.

That is why John Cornyn, I will say it again and again, if we educate our human capital, the economy will correct itself; we must get back to the basics of education, "The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us."

Like all great oaks, this understanding begins with a small acorn.

As Republicans, we are not naïve when it comes to government spending. We know that Social Security and Medicare must be reformed for future generations. We know that some federal bureaucracies have grown out of control. I know that earmarks comprise on a fraction of our federal budget - although I hope I am never in Washington so long that I consider $25-30 billion just a "little bit of money" - but my point is that to change Washington, we must change the culture of spending.

--what more needs to be said, Cornyn 08

Earmarks ARE gateway drug on the road to spending addiction, thank you for wanting to get rid of wasteful spending.