Humor: Introducing "The Affordable Boat Act"

[Old No7]

Hobie: This is too funny to move over to the Politics section... More folks will see it here!

From the local Rod & Gun Club...

Old No7

The ABA: The Affordable Boat Act

The U.S. government has just passed a new law called: "The Affordable Boat Act" declaring that every citizen MUST purchase a new boat by April 2014. These "affordable boats” will cost an average of $54,000 - $155,000 each. This does not include taxes, trailers, towing fees, licensing and registration fees, fuel, docking and storage fees, maintenance or repair costs.

This law has been passed, because until now, typically only wealthy and financially responsible people have been able to purchase boats. This new law ensures that every American can now have a "affordable boat” of their own, because everyone is "entitled" to a new boat.

If you purchase your boat before the end of the year, you will receive 4 "free" life jackets; not including monthly rental fees.

In order to make sure everyone purchases an affordable boat, the costs of owning a boat will increase on average of 250 - 400% per year. This way, wealthy people will pay more for something that other people don't want or can't afford to maintain. But to be fair, people who can't afford to maintain their boat will be regularly fined and children (under the age of 26) can use their parents boats to party on until they turn 27; then must purchase their own boat.

If you already have a boat, you can keep yours... (Just kidding; no you can't!!!) If you don't want or don't need a boat, you are required to buy one anyhow. If you refuse to buy one or can't afford one, you will be regularly fined $800 until you purchase one or face imprisonment – on a prison boat most likely.

Failure to use the boat will also result in fines. People living in the desert, ghettos, inner cities or areas with no access to lakes or ponds are not exempt. Age, motion sickness, experience, knowledge nor lack of desire are not acceptable excuses for not buying a boat.

A Government Review Board (that probably doesn't know the difference between the port, starboard or stern of a boat) will decide everything, including; when, where, how often and for what purposes you can use your boat, along with how many people can ride your boat, and determine if one is too old or healthy enough to be able to use their boat. They will also decide if your boat has outlived its usefulness or if you must purchase specific accessories, (like a $500 compass) or a newer and more expensive boat.

Those that can afford more expensive yachts will be required to do so... Hey, it’s only fair. The government will also decide the name for each boat. Failure to comply with these rules will result in fines and possible imprisonment, again on a prison boat.

Government Officials are, of course, exempt from this new law.

But if they want a boat, they and their families can obtain boats for “free” - at the expense of the tax payers, that is. Unions, bankers and mega companies with large political affiliations ($$$) are also exempt.

Anyone else have a sinking feeling about this?

[Mescalero]

sure that memo did not come from the company I retired from.

[AJMD429]

Sometimes analogies make the best humor, and the best teaching tools, as well...

[pwl44m]

The sad thing is , there are People that cannot make the connection. I told My Wife a few years ago that if I ever start talking about getting a Boat for Her to put Her foot down. I have had exactly one Boat and it cured Me.
Perry

[El Chivo]

Nothing perks up a back yard like a big fiberglass boat with tall grass growing around it.

One thing, I didn't know fiberglass could rust.

[Old Savage]

El Chivo - you must visit Maine and meet some "Mainiacs". But, you have to be brought in by a local. You are either a Resident or "From Away". I asked Carroll Witham - If a couple move to Milo and had a baby. would the baby be a Resident or "From Away". He replied, "If a cat had kittens in an oven you wouldn't call them biscuits now would you?".

[CowboyTutt]

This was emailed to me by my best friend. Its pretty darn funny (in a black humor type of way) and I think honors the spirit of the original post and poster. I hope so. Here it is:

-Tutt

Thus Spake Obama
The incompetence of our neo-monarchy*#-o d'oh!
By Mark Steyn


It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you’d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one’s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko. Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to “pass” a “law” allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The reason for the benign Sovereign’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects — or “folks,” as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference — have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That’s the point. When it doesn’t work, he’ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . .

The most telling line, the one that encapsulates the gulf between the boundless fantasies of the faculty-lounge utopian and the messiness of reality, was this: “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Gee, thanks for sharing, genius. Maybe you should have thought of that before you governmentalized one-sixth of the economy. By “we,” the president means “I.” Out here in the ruder provinces of his decrepit realm, we “folks” are well aware of how complicated insurance is. What isn’t complicated in the Sultanate of Sclerosis? But, as with so many other things, Obama always gives the vague impression that routine features of humdrum human existence are entirely alien to him. Marie Antoinette, informed that the peasantry could no longer afford bread, is alleged to have responded, “Let them eat cake.” There is no evidence these words ever passed her lips, but certainly no one ever accused her of saying, “If you like your cake, you can keep your cake,” and then having to walk it back with “What we’re also discovering is that cake is complicated to buy.” That contribution to the annals of monarchical unworldliness had to await the reign of Queen Barry Antoinette, whose powdered wig seems to have slipped over his eyes.

Still, as historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after his election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health-care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this:


Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, “This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,” a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.

Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Michael Beschloss is right: This is what it means to be smart in a neo-monarchical America. Obama spake, and it shall be so. And, if it turns out not to be so, why pick on him? He talks a good Royal Proclamation; why get hung up on details?

Until October 1, Obama had never done anything — not run a gas station, or a doughnut stand — other than let himself be wafted onward and upward to the next do-nothing gig. Even in his first term, he didn’t really do: Starting with the 2009 trillion-dollar stimulus, he ran a money-no-object government that was all money and no objects; he spent and spent, and left no trace. Some things he massively expanded (food stamps, Social Security disability) and other things he massively diminished (effective foreign policy), but all were, so to speak, preexisting conditions. Obamacare is the first thing Obama has actually done, and, if you’re the person it’s being done to, it’s not pretty.

The president promised to “fundamentally transform” America. Certainly, other men have succeeded in transforming settled, free societies: Pierre Trudeau did in Canada four decades ago, and so, in post-war Britain, did the less charismatic Clement Attlee. And, if you subscribe to their particular philosophy, their transformations were effected very efficiently. But Obama is an incompetent, so “fundamentally transformed” is a euphemism for “wrecked beyond repair.” As a socialist, he makes a good socialite.

But on he staggers, with a wave of his scepter, delaying this, staying that, exempting the other, according to his regal whim and internal polling. The omniscient beneficent Sovereign will now graciously “allow” us “folks” to keep all those junk plans from bad-apple insurers. Yet even the wisest King cannot reign forever, and what will happen decades down the road were someone less benign — perhaps even (shudder) a Republican — to ascend the throne and wield these mighty powers?

Hey, relax: If you like your constitution, you can keep your constitution. Period. And your existing amendments. Well, most of them — except for the junk ones . . .

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

[Old No7]

El Chivo - you must visit Maine and meet some "Mainiacs". But, you have to be brought in by a local. You are either a Resident or "From Away". I asked Carroll Witham - If a couple move to Milo and had a baby. would the baby be a Resident or "From Away". He replied, "If a cat had kittens in an oven you wouldn't call them biscuits now would you?".

That is true...

I'm told it takes three generations before you're considered a "real Maine-ah", ayuh.

Me??? I was born a Mass-hole! But I don't remember having a choice...

(Been here 22 years -- as I had a choice in that. Thank God!)

Old No7

[stretch]

Sometimes analogies make the best humor, and the best teaching tools, as well...

Too true. A boat has also been referred to as, "A hole in the water into which one pours money....."
I think the analogy to Obamacare is obvious.....

Old No. 7, that's my all-time favorite Maine joke! Tim samples used to tell it well. I'm originally
from the great state of Pennsylvania. My grandkids might be Mainiacs....

-Stretch

[piller]

I love that analogy. Now, I live in Texas and was born in Kansas. I have had a bunch of the City Slickers from Dallas call me a Yankee. I remind them that they are from a good distance east of where I am from, so they are Easterners. After a few minutes of growling and going red in the face, they stop calling me a Yankee. Nothing against Yankees, but I am a descendant of Wagon Train Dropouts. Kind of funny how people can be so clannish about where you were born.

[CowboyTutt]

Pillar, I was born in Lawrence, KS myself. As I grew into my hobbies and "manhood" I did not regret it at all as Kansas was the birth place of so many cowboy legends. Regards, -Tutt

[92&94]

My dad was born in Skowhegan, Maine.

The old joke was that two old guys sitting on a porch were arguing about who was "native." One says "Now Harold, you always claimed to be a native, but I happen to know you was 3 or 4 days old before you ever set foot in the state!"