When in Rome, Speak Mandarin

“The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself”– Helmut Shoeck

“Envy is counting the other fellows blessings instead of your own”– Unknown

“Where you see valid achievements or virtue being attacked, it’s by someone viewing them as a mirror of their own inadequacy instead of an inspiring beacon for excellence.”– Vanna Bonta

“If you think spreading money around by force seems like an odd definition of fairness, you’re not alone.”– Arthur C. Brooks 

From the pResident’s taxpayer-funded campaign stop “listening tour” stop in Alpha, Illinois this past Wednesday, comes this convenient exchange with a plant “student” with another question about fairness.

Q My question is about Social Security. I know that one of your ideas to fix the solvency of it is to reevaluate the equation that determines the COLA, the cost-of-living adjustment. But as the law stands right now, we are only taxed on the first $ 107,000 that we make.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q That means every dime that I make is taxed for Social Security.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q I don’t make $ 107,000. (Laughter.) But that means that—

THE PRESIDENT: Somebody said you will—

Q Someday, I hope.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you sound pretty smart. It sounds like you’re going to do just great.

Q Thanks. But that means that people like Mitt Romney only pay into Social Security on the first one-tenth of 1 percent of what they make.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q Can we look forward to you telling the Republicans that it’s time that the wealthy pay their fair share? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first—this is a very well-informed young man here. (Laughter.) You’re exactly right that the way the Social Security system works, there’s what’s called—there’s basically a cap on your Social Security, which there isn’t, by the way, on Medicare. But Social Security, it only goes up to the first $ 107,000; and you’re right, somebody who makes—who has net assets of $ 250 million and are making maybe $ 5 million a year just on interest or capital gains or something, just a fraction of it’s going to Social Security. I think there’s a way for us to make adjustments on the Social Security tax that would be fairer than the system that we use right now.

I do think, in terms of how we calculate inflation, that’s important as well.

Aside from the astonishing assertion that the pResident thinks, there is much that is revealing in both the question, and the answer.  While a FOX reported stated that this “student” was wearing a “Volunteer” tag, it doesn’t make me believe that he doesn’t believe in the essence of his question, that being that anyone who makes more than $107,00.00 a year is no longer “paying their fair share”.  Why do I believe this?  Because he is in the heart of the beast that is the system of higher indoctrination, where he is almost certainly surrounded by other mushy headed young people, most of whom have the luxury of living off of Mom and Dad’s money, as well as student loans, which are all guaranteed by Uncle Sugar.  In other words, they are fat, dumb, and happy on other people’s money.  Of course it would be only “fair” to make some people pay more if for no other reason than they make more.  The only difference between these students and the professors who constantly indoctrinate them is that someday, the students will have to actually start earning an honest living, and finally figure out that all that redistribution means that sooner or later, they have to pay, with little or no say over what is done with the product of their labor.  Add in the payments on those student loans, and a few of them may finally have some moments of clarity that override decades of brainwashing conducted by teachers, by professors, and by a complicit media. 

Further, the question is also believable based on the conflation between a tax for a specific purpose, i.e. FICA taxes, and taxes on income.  To be fair to the mushy head, since it is all taken from him, he may not have given much thought to the fact that there are different amounts deducted for different purposes on his pay advice, so it is understandable that he doesn’t look at a faltering economy, and an entitlement rushing towards insolvency at a breakneck pace and consider whether or not the government has any business providing the entitlement to begin with.  Instead, in a fashion that his professors would most assuredly be proud of, he instead concludes that the entitlement must be saved and that since that can only happen with massive infusions of cash, the rich must pay more, because there is a need.  What the “rich” might need is not a matter for consideration.  Unless today’s recipient receives far more than they ever paid in, this entitlement cannot possibly be “fair”.  And because he , and the OPM addicts in Congress and the White House perceive a need (to get reelected) the only possible solution is that other people must pay more into a system that hasn’t a hope of surviving according to current demographic data to begin with.  This only serves to illustrate that we have allowed entitlements to grow into envy, which has twisted the definition of what is “fair” from what used to be “what I earn is mine” into “what you earn is mine”, and transformed “want” into “need”, which is also determined by other people.  The result is a world where it is celebrated by a large part of the population when a candidate for President says “At some point, you’ve just earned enough money.” and when elected officials take it upon themselves to decide what you need, and scheme to confiscate and redistribute the rest, regardless of how much effort you may have put into earning it, and the fact that such an attitude discourages the kind of diligence that made it possible to earn in the first place all that they would take.

It isn’t just that the pResident and his envious groupies don’t have any real grasp on how capitalism works; it’s that we aren’t even speaking the same language as them anymore. 

The utopia they want to impose would fail.  History teaches us that there can be no other ending.  But rather than lingering on through the destruction and misery that their doomed-from-the-start experiment would bring, it would just be better if we decided to keep freedom, rather than surrendering it for whatever scraps the state would let us have.

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Quote of the Week

Who said conservatives aren’t willing to give the pResident credit?

From MJ, commenting at Car in’s Voice of the Resistance Blog:

What no one seems to be picking up, is that it is very hard to be handed an economy at a massive low, and keep it there. By default, its almost impossible to have things get worse, and he’s managed it.

He deserves a break. Fucking up this badly is hard!

That is a sentiment that I can second.  And he can’t say no one is giving him credit.

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Another Demise

THREE DAYS OF RIOTING AND LOOTING???

THREE DAYS???

You can drop the “Great”, Britain.  

You once brought order to the world.  Now you can’t even keep it at home.

 

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An Open Letter to The American Left (Government Shutdown Edition)

I wrote this post the on the evening of April 8, 2011, and was getting ready to publish it when the deal that was going to cut trillions billions millions not much at all was announced.  I shelved it because despite all the hyperbole and hue and cry about what was a totally foreseeable and avoidable crisis, it was avoided in the eleventh hour by a Congress that still wasn’t responsible enough to write a budget, but was afraid of the consequences of its deliberately dilatory behavior.

Since then, we faced a similarly foreseeable and avoidable crisis with the Debt Ceiling, and an intransigent Democratic Party that both refused to present a plan of its own, and then refused to “compromise” by any normal definition of the word, and which STILL refuses to see that the problem is with government spending and not revenue.  Instead, they offered platitudes about “balanced approaches” and “the rich paying their “fair” share”, despite the stark reality that every penny “the rich” make could be taken taxed and it still wouldn’t make up the deficit between what government takes in and what it spends.

This would have been infuriating enough, without the tacit agreement between “mavericky” establishment Republicans like Juan McCain and the Democratic Party to jump into the new post-Tucson civility and use every violent description their talking points writers could scribble about the one group of elected officials in Washington who had the gumption to refuse to go along with any plan that could be passed by the pResident’s artificial deadline because what was being proposed didn’t address the real problem in a meaningful way.  People who actually did what they said they were going to do and not nod admiringly at the Emperor’s new clothes were likened to “hostage takers” and “terrorists”, and breathlessly accused of putting the country at risk while their counterparts stomped on the gas pedal and flew past the sign warning of the close cliff’s edge, and without regard for the fact that by leveling these accusations at these elected officials was also leveling them at the people who elected them, or who wish they could have. 

And those who mistakenly believe that government’s purpose is to give them stuff paid for by other people are emboldened, meaning we get to hear how wanting to limit the size of government and stop the insane spending are threatening the future (while ironically, running up a ginormous bill today giving stuff away that my kids will have to pay somehow doesn’t) and how big government is somehow a laudable and desirable goal, like this insufferable tool’s verbal diarrhea:

Right now, Dr. King is slowly shaking his bowed head, and saying “I NEVER knew you.”

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Dear Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, Communists and other assorted moochers:

I’m going to start this correspondence with a hard fact that you either haven’t heard, or haven’t given sufficient thought to:  As of March, 2011, the federal government has spent $927.3 billion while taking in $184.2 billion in revenue.

This is not a revenue problem; this is a spending problem.

You have worked hard to confuse the basic issues and conflate a loss of power over the dependent class that you have worked so hard to cultivate with a cataclysmic event of Biblical proportions.  Oh, I’m sorry.  Did I say Biblical?  I forgot how much the mere mention of the word in any form sends you in an almost tourette’s-like response about shoving religion down your throat, and the way that it interferes with your constant kowtowing and deference to Islam.  Maybe the next time you and that noted Constitutional Scholar, Lindsey Graham have lunch at a fundraiser, you can slip him the draft legislation to limit all that nasty free speech that you don’t like.  It isn’t like he’s got any real objections to such a concept.  For the right pri…campaign donation, I’m sure he’ll be eager to be your pupp…I mean, an eager advocate for such a bill.

Anyway, I’m writing this to call you out on your latest round of stupidity and hyperbole on the budget and the looming Federal government shutdown.  Do you have any idea how stupid you all look, pissing and whining about the Republicans not wanting to borrow money to pay for things the Federal government shouldn’t be doing?  I mean, even if this wasn’t idiotic as a concept, there is the matter of your stupid execution.  After all, if killing babies, broadcasting pro-left propaganda, and empowering a federal regulatory agency to promulgate its own regulations on what we exhale is absolutely vital to the continued health and well-being of the Republic, you had all of 2010 to make it a reality.   12 long months.  365 days.   And no budget.  Time enough to take over health insurance, thus taking over the health care industry, but not time to sit down and write a budget that would have funded Planned Parenthood, an organization that took in 363 Million Dollars in taxpayer money last year, and then spent 170.4 Million Dollars on management and fundraising, and another 6.2 Million Dollars in International Family Planning.  While the 2008-2009 annual report had the organization losing money for the year, it netted a cool 85 Million Dollars in the previous year.  A look a the tax return for 2008 shows that the paid staff for the national organization averages in excess of $250,o00 a year…beyond pResident Obama’s ever lowering threshold for what is considered rich, and yet we haven’t heard a peep from you class envy pimps about this outrageous salaries.  Especially when other people who murder for money are considered criminals and immoral, even by you.  Your silence does not become you on this matter.

And for those of you who want to say that it is about providing health care to women, such as mammograms and screening for other cancers, I have one very simple question.

Where in the Constitution is Congress authorized to spend money on providing health care to some people of a specific gender?

Go ahead.  I’ll wait.  And if you are actually going to try “the good and plenty clause” argument with me, make it detailed.  Really.  Convince me.  Make your case.  Because I really want you to think about it, so you devote the same attention to the explanation why you are wrong.

And more funding for the EPA?  Seriously?  You want to give more money to people who have decided that every time you exhale, you’re releasing a pollutant?  While I’m all in favor of fining the living crap out of the Democratic Caucus every time they breathe, certainly you must see how stupid this is.  You want to further empower a federal agency that has already been told by Congress that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions (and thus destroy energy production and manufacturing) with a half-assed exchange scheme that limits these emissions when the developing world, which keeps expanding their own far more polluting capacities for production at an exponential rate does not follow or subscribe to this economic suicide pact at all? 

I have a better idea.  If you feel so very strongly about it, why don’t you go live in a lean-to in the middle of the desert, with none of those pesky trees and plants around you to emit all that oxygen at night.  Or if you are so willing to give up your well-being because you can’t afford to buy some of the Church of Gaia’s indulgences, you can always just kill yourself.  That will reduce your carbon footprint to zero, and the rest of us can go on living our lives without some addle-brained idiot screaming in our ears about our carbon footprint every time we get in our Ford Mustangs and do our damnedest to blow half the gas tank out the tail pipe as we smoke the tires.

And funding for NPR.  C’mon.  Its bad enough that these people and their audience stubbornly cling to the insulting fiction that they are unbiased.  That much anti-Israel hatred and condescension to Americans who don’t care for being dictated to is really tough to love, but making us borrow money that my kids will have to pay back so we can foot part of their bill?  No.  At some point, the madness has to end.   Let them get a few more minutes of underwriters’ advertising and pay their own way. 

This childish insistence that we have to keep borrowing money to pay for things that the federal government has no business doing needs to stop.  And holding actual enumerated functions hostage because you insist that we have to keep funding such things is inexcusable.

You wanna run out and have a tantrum in to the nearest microphone?  Knock yourself out.  You want to scream and howl because of a mere 60 Billion Dollars in cuts when what needs to be done is TRILLIONS in cuts?  Be my guest.  You want to howl about government being cut to the bone?  Then you need to understand that the only thing that will save this country is amputating the cash-hungry heads from the federal hydra that has been sucking the life out of prosperity for decades with a “War on Poverty” that has been a stunning and abject failure.

It’s time for serious people with serious solutions and your five minutes are up.  You can leave, or you can get the bums rush, but we’re sick of your nonsense.  Its time for you to go.

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