What is the Obama Administration and the progressive left really telling us?
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
There are institutions which serve as a bulwark to culture. These include traditional marriage, the right of self defense, the right to self determination, the freedom of speech (including politically incorrect speech). They are all under concerted attack from within the Washington DC beltway.
The slogans seem to be contradictory, but are they really? The government offers protection: a guaranteed wage, guaranteed food stamps, guaranteed free education, guaranteed medical coverage and thus slavery is freedom, because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” – 1984
I drove to Home Depot yesterday to buy blades for my Sawsall (reciprocating electrically powered saw). Minding my own business on my stroll between the front door and the tools, stood a booth with two solar power salesmen standing in it. Yes, their pay is federally subsidized (by us).
One of them said hello and I said hi back. I continued to walk and they kept calling out to me. I turned and asked (not like DeNiro) are you talking to me? They wanted to talk about the drought in California and how Southern California Edison caused it. They quoted facts (fallacious facts). One was white, one negro. The negro began a rant against conservatives and rich people who were the cause of the drought, that could be solved by using federally subsidized solar collectors. You can guess how well his logic was received.
I patiently explained to the man with blue gums that California is a desert and the San Joaquin Valley that runs from the Oregon border to the Mexican border where we grow everything, has been a desert for the past 20,000 years at least. We haven’t added a reservoir to the State for fifty years because the green lobby and the Democratic Party blocks them. During that time the population has grown by twenty million people. It’s like not widening a freeway and pushing another million people a day down it (a failing familiar to people who live in Southern California). The dumb solar salesman pointed out the error of my ways, asserting that running water through a turbine was “not green” and was a bad way to generate electricity. Yes he’s dumb as a box of rocks. Somebody has been filling that (hat size 5) skull with complete bullshit and he’s passing it on.
The larger problem is not the stupid solar salesman, it’s society, that seems to swallow these slogans and all that goes with them, completely.
Witness Senator Rand Paul, running for a Republican nomination for the office of President. The REPUBLICANS began running attack ads against him the day he announced his candidacy. Ask yourself why.
- He pledged to reduce the size of government, eliminating entire bureaucracies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Commerce.
- He pledged to push a flat 17% tax.
- He pledged to increase the size of the US Military while at the same time not giving foreign aid to countries who hate the US.
All those things are good, right? Not for the power elite…who could no longer work out a way to “tax the weather” if somebody like Rand Paul made it to the White House.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Thus the Hillary Clinton e-mails (we still need to get those from the Russians), now absent, can be said to be completely benign because she loves her subjects and wouldn’t do anything to harm them. Do you love Big Mother?”
And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.” – 1984
We as a nation voted Barack Obama into office – twice. Most voters couldn’t find Canada or Mexico on a map. How can we collectively fight against a concerted attack on our values or the principles that made the nation exceptional?
Those poor people have no idea about California's past and water, and wait, if water pushing a turbine is not green, but giant ugly windmills with wires in the ground is – what side are these people on?
I'm against a 17% flat tax! I'm thinking 12 to start, and then down to 9. I actually think I would prefer a consumption tax, but either way, it will take a while to adjust the numbers. I think the Government will easily stay bloated at 17%, and people will still look for ways to avoid it (my employer will make sure I pay…even though SOMEHOW there are hundreds of thousands who haven't??).
I think that 17% is still WAY too high, but it is a step in the right direction. If you said a 10% flat tax, the liberals (and the RINOs) will panic.
10% would be fine, if there were NO exceptions. No "Special Deals." Nobody coming in with tears in their alligator eyes and moaning about the "Poor." 10% for EVERYBODY. I do think that would work. I also think that the "Special Interest" ass kissers of several varieties won't let it happen.
10% without exemption is the only way it can work.
But the power elite wouldn't be able to wield the same sort of "vote buying" schemes that have become so popular. The Roman dictators kept power with bread and circus. Same here. There's nothing new under the sun.
When I was a relatively young skull full of mush attending a University of Oregon economics 101 class headed up by Comrade Dr. Ed Whitelaw, a suggestion from one of my fellow skulls full of mush to Comrade Whitelaw that perhaps a 17% flat tax would be fair, and spread the tax burden across the proletariates equally.
"Not a chance" spat the leftist professor as if he had swallowed a bug. "There would be blood in the streets," with that low of a tax. This was in 1987.
And you think the left would accept a 17% flat tax 28 years later? Dream on. I think there will be blood in the streets when the existing progressive US tax system inevitably collapses at some point in the future (the John Galt factor). Then once the blood has been rinsed out of the streets in due course, maybe then a flat tax of 17% might be considered. And Race Bannon thinks that 9% will fly?
Again, Race, there will be conflict prior to 9% being accepted as the law of the land. I agree, 9% would be just fine, but the 150,000,000 mooching layabouts in the US right now would have to have their Come to Jesus meeting prior to this point. And even after their Come to Jesus meeting ends, they wouldn't accept their entitlements getting whacked (as would be necessary to accommodate a lower flat tax of any rate). They would pick up their torches and pitchforks, and make a bee line towards any concern of means, and demand that their entitlement checks resume, chop chop.
Mark my words.
The welfare state, in what ever form, has been bred into too many.
A lot of Repub's have become as bad as Dem's about who they front, and why wasn't Rand Paul invited to the big NRA meet?
The gov solar salesmen were limping when they left here… and I didn't even touch'm.
Yeah. Take that Race, you conservative tax baiter!!!
It's ok to set Willie on the Solar Salesmen…
Doesn't Russia, of all places, have a 13% flat tax? But what a good post; England, back in the benighted days before Marxism became a force, expanded suffrage to include non property owners — with the proviso that education followed in its wake. So, everyman could have a say in governance.
How that's backfired. Drastically.
I say that with Churchill's democracy words in mind, "if you find a better system, I'll vote for it."
Fred says that the zombies (inner city people) won't take it no-mo if you cut their food stamps, their obamaphones, their housing allowance, their obamacare, their aid for dependent children, their welfare allotment, etc. They will loot the nearest stores selling Air Jordans and televisions to prove the point and will set a po-lice car on fire.
Yes, Russia has a 13% flat tax. How unenlightened of them not to tax one group and use income redistribution to give it to the other half.
I know some folks I wouldn't mind seeing in an arena with a few lions.
We need to start with leading politicians and work our way through to community organizers. If they are both things, they are at the head of the line.
It's kind of weird, the way they gave up Communism. We know better now, in America.
The "free American" states/red states believe that the move toward collectivism isn't in our best interests. The slave states/blue states are made up of enough takers who feel that "free stuff" is their right, that they elect Democrats who will use other people's money to satiate their greed.
Those few of us who DO study history and know geography are in the miniscule minority now days… sigh
Having finally done my taxes for 2014 (NOT a procrastinator! I finished two days early thankyouverymuch), I'm willing to say that I hate the ridiculous nature of our tax system. But why would I want a flat 10-17% tax rate, when, knowing the code, I can itemize my way down to 6%, and have regularly hit that ballpark for many years?
Of course, my situation's about to change pretty dramatically, so maybe I'll be singing a different song next year.
Or maybe I'm just not as rich as y'all and I'm the one getting the perks? In which case, that will likely only increase next year, and then I'll BE the very enemy you all hate. oh MY.
now I'm terrified. Really must learn to shoot.
Yes, we are the 1% of American society. Or at least that's how it seems.
All Americans have been raised on a tax system that has social engineering at its heart. We live our lives and make buying decisions on what is deductible as we survive within the voluminous code that has spawned a vast army of government workers and private people who "help us prepare" what takes most people (including you) many hours.
Imagine a world where everyone pays something and we simply eliminate the overhead industry of government drones, tax accountants and lawyers by 95%.
Did you leave their booth in tacked?
I was not tacked…and just walked away because the braying of a distant ass really means nothing to me. You should never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
But it would have been better if you had said it like DeNiro.
Out of interest, Larry, who would you vote for in our upcoming election?
Jules, I would have but I'm simply not that quick on the uptake at times. I was at the store to buy saw blades and my head wasn't in the game.
In the UK, it's not who wins the most seats but who can form a government. I think that the Conservative party will win the most seats in Parliament but I don't know if they will be able to muster sufficient support to get over the 326 seat line. In that scenario, Miliband might edge out Cameron.
To answer you more directly, I'd vote for Cameron.
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