If we only taxed the rich...
A constant liberal talking point is that the top one percent of American have exploited the rest of the country to acquire their wealth. It’s simply not true. These claims are based on outdated statistics that haven’t adequately changed as the country has changed. James Pethokoukis has an excellent analysis that defines five reason why income inequality is a myth.
“Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?”
No doubt the past few years have been terrible. But the past few decades have been pretty good—for everybody.
My guess is most of these trust fund types haven’t never wanted for anything their entire life. Their faux outrage is based on a rich yet empty life filled by guilt. By almost any measure most Americans are better off now than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. The trust funders should dedicate themselves to helping the poor to ease their guilt instead of asking the state to do it. That’s the point, though; they don’t want to do it.
Obviously rich kids aren’t the only ones protesting. The other people are union members, hipsters and wannabe hippies. The non-union working class has no time for a movement that absolves the government from any blame. These occupiers are woefully led astray by bad statistics and bad leadership. Sadly, so is much of the left.
I haven’t written much about Occupy Wall Street because it’s a non-movement that’s already over-covered. Liberal mainstream journalism is well on its way to not covering all the crazy hipster doofuses who are involved in the media stunt. The progressive movement, after all, is way more important that covering the details.
Instead of defending President Obama’s record over the last three years liberals have spent the last three years smearing everyone who disagrees with the false prophet in the White House. The smears aren’t working anymore. The progressive movement is over. They’re out of ideas and they’re hypocrites.
I have never understood Christianphobia in the United States. Why is there this fear that Christians are trying to create a theocracy? I grew up in the South. I’ve lived in Georgia, North Carolina and in Florida. I have two uncles who are pastors of Assembly of God churches in the Northwest. Never in my short 32-year existence have I heard someone say that Christians should take over government. Not only is this manufactured fear myopic and dumb, it’s not Biblical.
The only reason why some liberal progressives feel this way is because of ignorance. As secularism has increased in the United States so has ignorance about Christianity. In fact, many who claim to be Christian know very little about what they believe or the scriptures behind their faith. In popular culture Christians are depicted as hypocritical, judgmental prudes who don’t practice what they preach. From a Christian perspective this isn’t surprising. This is what happens to every wealthy society. A society that has everything it needs is never satisfied.
We hear all the time about the evils of religion, but it was Christian leaders that stood up against slavery and segregation. It was Christian leaders that led the suffrage movement. It was Christians and churches that helped with the poor and the disadvantaged before the progressive movement pawned it off on the state. Since the New Deal Americans have cared less and less about their fellow man and let someone else do it. Creating a bureaucracy to take care of your neighbor because you don’t want to do it isn’t noble. At some point the nation will find itself both morally and financially bankrupt. It will not be because of Christ.
A few days ago I wrote that conservatives should quit trying to appease liberals. It cowardice not to stand up for you believe. Liberal certainly don’t suffer from it (except when they call themselves progressives). Governor Rick Perry made the same point over the weekend.
Today it's okay to bomb Libya, but a few years ago it wasn't cool to be at war.
Earlier this week I wrote an open letter to Kathryn Scaglione after stumbling unto her deranged tweets on Twitter. Scaglione’s sprawling response to my open letter actually made my point. Nothing she wrote countered anything in my letter. Instead she called me names and and made odd claims. However, there was one particular thing she wrote that has been cracking me up all week:
So son, I advise ONE thing to do, I dare you to show anything I have ever said, in any of my blogs, to be a lie. I dare you. And I mean something that is stated as a fact, not my opinion. My opinions are based on FACTS, I don’t pass them off as facts, like you’ve done here. If there is one thing I take pride in, is that I am extremely factual. Opinionated, but based on facts. Find ONE thing that is not a FACT. Just one.
Now I’m going to break my one rule here. It’s impossible to have a reasonable debate with someone as unreasonable as Scaglione. However, this is a special case. Plus, it only took a couple of minutes to find a nonsensical opinion on her blog.
Back in January, Scaglione was fixated on the whole Sarah Palin target non-controversy. I pick this topic just because The Daily Plunge wrote about it extensively. Here is Scaglione’s non-factual opinion:
I think the point people are missing is that WE know Sarah Palin did not pull the trigger. We meaning, liberals. We know she didn’t actually kill these innocent people in Tucson. WHY we are so angry with her, and lashing out at her, is because Republicans/Conservatives have been spewing all this hate rhetoric since McCain rolled her out in 2008.
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And don’t you DARE say this is on both sides. It most certainly is NOT. No, THAT statement should not be tolerated by any Democrat/Liberal. That type of hate speech does NOT come from the left. It is not the same.IT IS NOT THE SAME.
The hate rhetoric Scaglione is referencing is the target map that was circulated within minutes of the shooting. I first saw the target map posted on Facebook by my progressive leaning friends within an hour of the shooting. Of course, Palin wasn’t the first politician to use a target map. The list of target maps coming from the left is seemingly endless: Harry Mitchell, the Democratic Leadership Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just to name a few. It’s been a standard practice for decades and it was only deemed extreme when progressives saw Palin use it.
What about hate rhetoric? Joseph Welch has a nice round-up of various statements by Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, and Markos Moulitsas. Plus, let’s not forget the President of the United States…
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said in Philadelphia last night. “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.” – Barack Obama
Liberals who pretend hate rhetoric doesn’t exist on the left are crazy. It’s like the Bush administration didn’t happen. We had eight years of insane rhetoric, protests, and kill Bush video games. Obviously, Scaglione’s opinion isn’t fact; however, she believes it’s true. It all goes back to President Reagan’s fantastic quote about liberals.
“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” – Ronald Reagan
Kathryn Scaglione isn’t a liar. She’s just willfully ignorant.
The U.S. has spent trillions on the War on Poverty since 1964 and poverty still remains.
Socialized health care has been a progressive dream for over 70 years in the United States after FDR progressives spent decades trying to pass it, but the American people rejected it. However, liberals came up with a different plan. In the 1960′s the American left gave us Medicare, a ponzi scheme that makes Social Security look like the picture of solvency.
Liberals believed (and they’ve been proven correct) that if they incrementally introduced socialized health care it would eventually take hold. Medicare has never been solvent. It never will be solvent. No nation in the world has come up with a socialized heath care system that works in the long run. Every system spends too much, wastes too much, and delivers too little care. Health care eventually has to be rationed and the quality of the health decreases.
Those aren’t spurious claims or wild predictions. They’re the indisputable facts. The citizens in the United States who are collecting Medicare benefits today are collecting way more than they put in 30 years ago. The world pushes towards bankruptcy. Europe is already ahead of the United States. That continent’s lust for entitlements coupled with slow economic growth is a recipe for the return of the dark ages.
The United States follows slowly behind. In the United States no one even considers the thought that Medicare should be abolished. Politically, it’s worse to be labeled anti-Medicare than to act like there’s not a problem. Plenty of Democrats insist there’s nothing to worry about. Heck, plenty of Democrats believe we should be spending more and that ObamaCare doesn’t go far enough. One could chuckle if this kind of willful ignorance was a vocal minority, but indeed the great majority of the left lives in fiscal denial. It’s a safe haven of fiscal dissidence.
The most extreme budget presented by Republicans is Paul Ryan’s own version of Utopia called the Path to Prosperity. The Daily Plunge hopes Ryan runs for president, not because he has the answers, but because his answers are the least moronic. Ryan is naive that Medicare can be saved. Oh, it can be saved for tomorrow, or next week, next year, or the next 50 years, but eventually it ends. Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review has more on the subject.
Reformers such as Representative Ryan always ignore this inevitable trajectory of entitlement politics. They rationalize that they can make a government-sanctioned bribery system run better, or at least preempt Democrats from making it run worse. Hoping to stave off Medicare, congressional moderates in 1960 passed a bill to provide means-tested medical assistance to the elderly. It only greased the wheels for not only Medicare but Medicaid. In Massachusetts, Romneycare was another well-meaning attempt to install a compulsory statewide health-insurance system that would be less autocratic and costly than the one the Left would have imposed. It is, predictably, a disaster that tends toward ever-more-suffocating government control.
The mountain of evidence against entitlements is staggering. No reasonably educated person who looks at this objectively can come any other conclusion. If well-intentioned programs to help a few people ultimately end up harming everyone why insist that it’s a good intention any longer?
The challenge of our society isn’t to create the perfect government program to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves. The challenge of our society is to take responsibility for the disadvantaged ourselves. It is the individual who should be responsible for their loved ones, their neighbors, and the poor. A cynical person may insist that that isn’t enough. They would be correct; however, the government isn’t the solution either and it’s pushing us toward economic calamity. Both solutions are imperfect. We live in an imperfect world. Faced with two choices the answer is clear.
Sadly, too many people already feel entitled. They are our friends and family. They are Republicans and Democrats of all ages. We have educated generations of people who are unable to see the forest for the trees. Entitlements are the closest thing eternal life on Earth. I can only hope that I don’t live long enough to witness where this economic road to ruin ends.
CNN has published an op-ed by Michael Wolraich entitled “Republicans’ Medicare blunder.” Wolraich doesn’t really make any new points. It’s just another juvenile analysis of the political risks associated with reforming Medicare. I call it juvenile because I’m tired of hearing about tax breaks for the rich as if the problem would be solved by raising taxes. Only an uninformed moron would keep using that talking point, yet here is CNN giving an idiot a platform to spread ignorance.
But Medicare belongs to all Americans. Most of us who do not have it now are counting on its support in our old age. When Republicans proposed to cut Medicare while reducing taxes for the rich, they expressed intent to take something away from us and give it to the other guy. And so, the Republican budget proposal is already a dead plan walking.
I’m not counting on Medicare. It’s fiscally impossible for that program to exist when I’m 64. When will “progressives” realize that we can’t tax our way out of this? Half the nation doesn’t pay taxes already. No amount of tax increase on the rich is going to cover our entitlements.
The period of scoring political points is over. The real blunder is that people like Michael Wolraich are more concerned with saving the idea of Medicare than dealing with fiscal reality. The days of debating with deranged entitlement drones is over. Liberal Democrats simply don’t get it. Until they come up with a logical plan for reigning in these entitlements the American public should ignore them. If the press wasn’t full of Democrats they would challenge shallow people like Wolraich. Unfunded liabilities per American taxpayer is now over 1 million dollars. This is a real crisis and no one on the left seems to be taking it seriously.
I think this will be my last post about this issue, but here we are four days from the tragedy in Arizona and there’s nothing really left to know about Jared Loughner. His motives have been endlessly dissected and there are zero ties to any right-wing ideology. That doesn’t stop Newsweek from running this:
The Missed Warning Signs
A 2009 study warned that the rise of right-wing extremism could spur violent attacks. But the report was attacked by Republicans, including now-Speaker John Boehner.
Two years before the Tucson massacre, the Department of Homeland Security warned in a report that right-wing extremism was on the rise and could prompt “lone wolves” to launch attacks. But the agency backed away from the report amid intense criticism from Republicans, including future House Speaker John Boehner.
Huh? Does Newsweek exist in some parallel universe where Jared Loughner is Sarah Palin’s husband? Hot Air is all over this 20 paragraph article, but don’t be too upset. The author gets to the part about there being no connection to the right in paragraph 19. Newsweek took the train to Crazytown a long time about, but it’s still unbelievable to see it. Allahpundit has more:
This story was written not by a Newsweek staffer but by a reporter from the “nonpartisan” Center for Public Integrity, which has been criticized for years for taking money from, among others, Soros’s Open Society Institute. I mention that fact reluctantly, only because at this point the Soros angle is a red herring. After all, there’s nothing in this piece that isn’t perfectly in keeping with the disinformation about Loughner being spread by various other media outlets over the past few days.
Political opportunism isn’t anything new and thankfully most Americans are smart enough to see through this attempt by the media to smear the right. 57% of Americans believe that political rhetoric and the shooting are unrelated; however, 42% of Democrats believe the rhetoric is related to the shooting. We hear a lot about Birthers and some of the stupid things people on the right believe, but 42% believe in something with no basis in reality. 42% of Democrats are either too stupid, too lazy, or too brainwashed to get to the truth on this issue. Unfortunately when Newsweek publishes articles like this it makes it so much easier for people to remain uninformed.
The current political climate isn’t extreme. I touched on what would be the liberal blueprint for the Obama administration back in October 2008.
Can anyone see where this is going? If Obama is elected in a month is this going to be the standard defense for Obama? The opposition is just racist?
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It’s amazing to me that the press continues to hang charges of racism and divisiveness on McCain when Obama talks about “typical white people” and refers to rural Americans as bitter, clinging to guns, and religion or antipathy. I’m not sure how Obama expects to bring people together, but it’s obvious the press is doing all they can to tear people apart.
The left is automatically programmed to believe that any opposition to Obama cannot be rational. It can only be explained by ignorance and racism. It’s easy to look down at your opposition if you think they’re stupid. They ridiculed Reagan and Bush for being dumb. Now that the left is obsessed about the President’s race they can project their faux moral superiority over the phantom racists who exist solely on the right. Despite what the left believes they simply can’t wish away what happened during the Bush administration.
In the US, as in Canada, as in Belgium, they are not interested in winning the argument but in denying you the opportunity to have one.
Mark Steyn
Progressives are proving to be nothing more than baby-talking whiny ninnies. It’s somehow become a federal offense to offend, and so-called progressives more easily offended than ever. Watching progressives cry about hateful, racist speech (that really isn’t) has effectively transported me back to junior high school.
How dare you work as an analyst for evil Fox News and be black and liberal at the same time, Juan Williams! Tolerance is not a two-way street, so stop with the candid, rational comments already!
Juan Williams is one of the latest victims of leftist boo-hooing who made the mistake of telling the truth, and is a prime example of the fact that the progressive ideology can’t handle the truth. Juan admitted that seeing Muslims on an airplane makes him nervous. When I heard his confession I was shocked.
How dare Juan Williams associate terrorism with Islam! It’s not as if 99 percent of all terrorism the world over is perpetrated by Muslims. Who were those guys who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11? Probably evangelical Christians or CIA operatives on a secret mission for that American Hitler, George W. Bush.
Therein lies the hypocrisy of the progressive angst over words. It’s okay to say vile and ugly things about Christians, conservatives, and especially Sarah Palin. What’s not okay is honesty. What a bunch of wussies.
Put a crucifix in urine and progressives call it “edgy” and “artistic,” but put Mohammed in a bear suit and it’s beyond the pale. Question the veracity of the Carbon Footprint Global Warming Climate Change religion and you’re akin to a Holocaust denier. However, if you actually are a Holocaust denier and you’re a Muslim, you should be treated with respect bordering on insane reverence.
Being progressive means never having to say you’re sorry or engage in meaningful debate about anything that makes you uncomfortable. It’s totalitarian group think wrapped up in the proverbial unicorns and rainbows. In this magical land “tolerance” is code for “you better think exactly like us, or else.” P.J. O’Rourke gets to the heart of the matter:
They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class. Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
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