Let it burn: Why not let taxes rise on the middle class?

Let It Burn doesn’t work if GOP gets blamed for letting it burn

commodore on December 29, 2012 at 11:05 AM

Luv, allow me to impart American Political Life Lesson #1:

“If it goes well, it is because of Democrats. If it goes poorly, it’s the Republican’s fault.”

It has been and shall forevermore be so.

Want a few examples?

1. Vietnam: Liberals will ALWAYS treat a war started by Kennedy, lost by Johnson, ended by Nixon, with last troop removed by Ford as a “Republican” war.

2. Racism:

Predictable History:

From DNC website:

“For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights…..Democrats have a long and proud history of defending Civil Rights and expanding opportunity for all Americans.”

Unpredictable Past:

Let the record show, as the Congressional Record reflects the vote tallies:

Progressivism, Propaganda & Pretending

3. Arming the Afghan rebels, including al Qaeda & Osama bin Laden, against the Soviets.

Predictable History:

“Reagan created the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.”

- Think Progress

Unpredictable Past:

The CIA’s role in laying the foundations of Al Qaeda is confirmed in an 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who at the time was National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter:

Brzezinski: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, [on] 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Question: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

( “The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan, Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser”, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998

4. Iraq

Predictable History:

Iraq was a war of choice by Bush. It was a “bad war” and “waged for oil & to make Darth Cheney’s buddies at Halliburton rich.”

“The United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.”

- Senator Barack Obama, 2007

Unpredictable Past:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

- Vice-President Joe Biden, Larry King Live, 10 February 2010

a) Obama had opposed the war from the beginning.

b) both Obama and Biden opposed the U.S. troop surge of 2007 by President George W. Bush widely credited with producing the relative peace and stability to enable a U.S. exit,

c) both Obama and Biden predicted incorrectly that the troop surge would actually worsen sectarian strife there,

d) Biden even proposed partitioning the country into separate areas, and

e) the status of forces agreement with Iraq that established the ongoing U.S. troop withdrawal was negotiated by the preceding Republican administration long before Obama took the oath of office twice.

Resist We Much on December 29, 2012 at 12:00 PM

Thanks, Panther.

so our choices are tax and spend or borrow and spend. those are the only two choices? We are so screwed.

unseen on December 29, 2012 at 12:47 PM

You forgot PRINTING, PRINTING, PRINTING!

Weimar, here we come!

Resist We Much on December 29, 2012 at 1:03 PM

The only way this will change, is when we simply run out of money.

Rebar on December 29, 2012 at 1:00 PM

And people.

Baroness Thatcher was only partially correct. She overlooked a couple of things about socialism.

The first: Homogeneous societies are more apt to share with one another than heterogeneous ones. Marx and Engels wrote about this. I think it probably explains why Scandinavian-style welfare states have succeeded so far while the Soviet Union failed. (There are, of course, other issues, too. The Scandinavian countries have small populations and are wealthy due to natural resources that they have wisely exploited. On the other hand, they are now beginning to face problems because of decades of lax immigration that has allowed alien cultures and religions to make demands on them that are taxing the society and the welfare state).

As European countries became more “multi-kulti,” the native populations became more conservative, in the European sense, and less socialist. In other words, they supported denationalisation, freer markets, less government regulation, etc, because they realised that more socialism meant they would have to share with people with whom they had little in common. Call it bigotry, racism, xenophobia or whatever. Go to China, either Korea, Japan, Cuba or kindergarten and you will likely see the same phenomenon.

For this reason, I doubt that a European-style socialist state would last for very long in the US. It would have to be more totalitarian and even that failed in the USSR because math and economics do not bend to the diktats of dicKtators or politburos. The Chinese Communist Party has been smart enough to realise this. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been wise enough to understand that people will not settle for economic freedom.

Second, and this is a biggie: Socialism doesn’t just require other people’s money. It requires OTHER PEOPLE. The welfare hammock in Europe became so luxurious that people stopped having children. There isn’t a country in the 27 members of the EU that has a fertility rate of 2.2, which is considered the replacement rate or the number of children per woman necessary to keep the population steady. NOT ONE. In Spain and Greece, the FR is so low that each successive generation will halve the population. Croatia is down to 1.1 and the Slavian countries are nearly as bad.

So, what do you do when you can’t be bothered to give birth to the children to pay the taxes to keep you in the style to which you’ve grown accustomed? Why, you import your children, silly! Of course, you are SOOL when your “children” arrive and find out that they actually don’t feel like working to pay the exorbitant taxes to keep old, white people in the styles to which they think they are accustomed. Besides, that luxury, welfare hammock looks pretty good. Let the rich eat the bill!

In the US, not only has our FR fallen below the replacement rate for the first time in modern history, we don’t have enough people pulling the cart. Look at the worker:recipient ratio for Social Security:

Fact: There were 159.4 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1940.

Fact: There were 16.5 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1950.

Fact: There were 5.1 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1960.

Fact: There were 3.7 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1970.

Fact: There were 3.2 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1980.

Fact: There were 3.4 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1990.

Fact: There were 3.4 workers for each Social Security recipient in 2000.

Fact: There were 3.3 workers for each Social Security recipient in 2005.

Fact: There were only 1.75 workers for each Social Security recipient in 2010.

Resist We Much on December 29, 2012 at 1:31 PM