fast_eddie_72 wrote:
madmallard wrote:
If they are, then they are certainly not alone in this practice as this is the calling card for Democrats during an election cycle.
Well, maybe. Here's what I see as the difference. In keeping with my theme that everything is Reagan's fault (it's a joke, but kinda serious at the same time) the rhetoric the Republicans run on really states their objective as creating crisis. Think about it- "take away the checkbook". What does that mean? It means they know they can't kill the progams by voting them out of existance. They're too popular. So they'll keep cutting funding and taxes again and again. Eventually there will be no money to pay for the programs- a manufactured crisis. Not a real crisis. We have plenty of money in this country to pay for all the programs we want. We did for many years. As recentlly as Clinton, we had a budget surplus with all the big programs in place. Now we hear them say "we're bankrupt". No, we're not bankrupt. We just chose not to pay the bills. They took away the checkbook, but the bills still came. Now they're saying "we don't feel like paying them".
Here's the problem with this analogy. They had the chance to pay for them in their own congress, the Democrats. They chose not to pass a budget, and instead left the responsibility unhandled, meaning the next group that gets elected in that had nothing to do with it in the first place now deals with it on their terms. If not for this issue, i'd probably okay with the picture you paint.
However, you can't talk about manufactured crisis without mentioning Democrats who use buzzwords like poverty, underpriveleged, etc in reference to describe the problem of having a poor population. Especially when the poor in the US usually have more than the middle class do in most other countries. Instead, they trump up sympathy by making out that every poor person is on the doorstep of being homeless, destitute, starving..... When the reality is that most poor people classified such by the government have shelter, phone, car, tv, internet, mobile phone, food, a/c, video game, or college course in some combination. This of course dilutes the plight of those people who -are- severely impoverished, but don't tell a Democrat that. They'd have to get off the cross and see there are others worse-off than they, and that runs contrary to the class-seperation dogma.
You've said similar things yourself. You like to point out that we can't raise taxes enough to dig out of the hole we're in. Yeah, that's true. We'll need to cut spending. But you can't argue that more revenue wouldn't help. And assuming that somehow we do get this under control, more revenue will certainly keep us afloat.
You're free to make the case on wether or not raising taxes should be done. I never said people weren't free to. I just try my best to shred up any postulation that it somehow by proportion will matter in any sense to the bottom line figures. It won't.
I dunno if its your motivation, but I've notice that people cling to the idea of raising taxes being relevant are also highly resistant to the idea that the government should ever be forced to get smaller because of conditions like now. I can't get an explanation why they think this is reasonable, especially if the government didn't save for the rainy day in the first place. (Many states do, after all. Probably because they can't print money.)
Here's the thing. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid aren't going away. They just aren't. We can say all kinds of alarmist things about how they have to, but they aren't. Someone needs to say "okay, then we're going to have to pay for them." That means taxes.
But here's the funny thing. Nobody has a right to social security. Supreme court ruled it, it says so on every report on what you've paid into social security. Congress has the right to withold ALL of those funds.
So until people stop dressing things up like this as some kind of right of the people when it has been SPECIFICALLY and CATEGORICALLY ruled to not be a right, it is not in the least alarmist to advance the position that it is not a permanent institution.
It is equally alarmist, however, for the Democrats to talk about social security as a public contract of any kind that must be protected. Must be protected?? What a joke!! How about an ammendment to the constitution that DOES make it a right? Then their words might carry some weight in my eyes, but they wouldn't do anything that would threaten their revenue stream when they've borrowed against every surplus the SS fund has for decades...
