Political Punks

Have you heard about Hollywood’s new reality show, Politically Punk’d?  I just watched an episode in my community and it is hilarious.

The premise is to place Americans in a frenzied mix of government control and good intentions and watch them twist reason and emotion together into a confusing pretzel.

The four most comical episodes are:

In this routine, the statists lure unsuspecting religious institutions into a licensing requirement.  The set up usually takes place right inside a church during religious wedding ceremonies.  The punchline every time is when the minister shocks the congregation by announcing, “By the authority vested in me by the state, I now pronounce you to be married.”  By the authority of the state!  Talk about your separation between church and state violation.  Gets them every time.

The real trick here is that by surrendering the religious institution of marriage to the authority of the state, it can be redefined for political agendas.  Hilarious!

The object of this slight of hand is to convince hard working citizens that they are actually receiving money from Uncle Sam.  The trick takes an entire year to set up, but the payoff is so worth it.  The victim is lured into paying a little too much with every paycheck through a confusing, sixty-thousand-page tax code.

The punchline comes when the citizen receives the return for their overpayment of taxes and declares to friends, “I didn’t have to pay taxes this year.  In fact, I got money from them!”  Hilarious!

This routine is particularly clever.  The premise is to lure conservatives into getting elected to their local school district board of education.  The pranksters count on the ambitious nature of conservative board members to propose a world-class education offering that would be the envy of every community.  But this is a local government entity.  So, instead of setting the tuition rates at a price that the market will bear, the funding necessarily comes in the form of a new tax proposal.

All hell breaks out when conservative citizens get into a pie fight with the conservative board members over, of all things, raising taxes!  The crescendo takes place when everyone suddenly realizes that they have been tricked into managing the 10^th plank of the Communist Manifesto!  Hilarious!

Wait until Great Grandma hears that the balance in her social security account is ZERO!  In fact, it has always been zero.  The naughty ploy for this stunt is that retirement savings deposits had been required from Granny at every paycheck during her working years and was immediately spent by Congress before it ever had a chance to see a bank.  What a riot!

And talk about your delayed gratification!  This mathematical time bomb was set to blow up generations before Harry Ried delivered Alfred E. Newman’s famous laugh line, “What, me worry?”  The funding of Social Security is indeed the impractical joke of the century.  Hilarious!

And if you think that’s funny, wait until you hear what they have planned for the next Social Security episode: means testing!  People will only receive their retirement savings if they really need it.  What will Washington think of next? 

Hilarious!