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Liberals love to pat themselves on the back for giving away other people’s money. Latter-day Robin Hoods, they love to tax the “rich” and give to the “poor,” but they’re as tight as the bark on a tree with their own money. Do they rationalize that they give away so much of our money that they don’t need to give away much of their own? “It’s more blessed to give than to receive,” goes the proverb, and liberals believe it’s most blessed to give what isn’t theirs.
Most of what federal government takes from me and about about half of all other Americans is used for social programs. The other half of Americans pay no federal income taxes and receive most of the benefits from those programs. All this was designed by those who called themselves “progressives” at intervals of Democrat rule during twentieth century. Whoever might disagree with them were, by implication, regressive. Progressives called themselves “liberals” later on, but now they again wish to be called “progressives” here in the twenty-first century because “liberal” has taken on a negative connotation. Whatever they’re called, their aim is the same: take as much as they can get away with from the most productive and give it all to the least productive. They use big, bloated government for this redistribution because they don’t want to use bows and arrows and live in the forest like Robin Hood.
They want the support Robin Hood received, but also the creature comforts beyond even what the Sheriff of Nottingham’s lifestyle provided. They love performances at the Kennedy Center and lavish parties at the White House paid for by taxpayers.Whenever progressive liberal Democrats are in charge, they ramp up promises beyond what government could possibly afford. FDR’s New Deal promised Social Security pensions for the elderly. That’s been increased since to include disability payments for people of all ages and may soon be extended to millions of illegal aliens as well if they get their way. Al Gore used to talk about a “lock box” for the money FICA takes from our paychecks, but that was a myth. All the money we send to the federal government for our old-age pensions is spent immediately by that bloated government. All Al Gore’s lock box would contain is IOUs. In 2016, there won’t be enough money to back up the millions of checks it sends out every month. Looking further ahead, deficits for Social Security run to $100 trillion over the several decades.
Liberals in LBJ’s Great Society gave us Medicare thirty years later. Projected deficits for that run into the tens of trillions. Also, Barack Obama gave us health care “reform” that will take $500 billion from Medicare that isn’t really there and spend trillions more that we don’t have either. What he’ll do is try to borrow more and add that red ink to the $14 trillion deficit he already run up. All this debt and the prospect of still more is what’s really depressing the economy today.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has been using FDR’s Keynesian defibrillator to apply trillion-dollar jolts to an economy that continues to flatline. While running trillion-and-a-half-dollar annual deficits that alarm our creditors so much they’re balking at lending us more, he wants to use the “progressive” federal income tax to soak even more out of the “rich.” He’s also using the Federal Reserve to buy US Treasury bonds nobody else wants, and pay for them by printing over $3 trillion. It’s not a question anymore about if it’s all going to come unravelled - it’s only a question of when.
Up to now, the half of Americans who pay no federal income tax have been inclined to vote for presidents, senators and congressmen who promise more and more benefits at the expense of the other half who pay for it all. Along with the votes of guilt-ridden, trust-funded liberals, they swept “progressives” into power in 2006 and 2008. Their policies, however, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Cities and states like Detroit and California that progressive liberals have been in charge of longest are the closest to bankruptcy. Enough of the bottom half of Americans are watching their over-extended neighbors default on their mortgages and credit cards and realizing that our federal government is doing the same thing. Uncle Sam won’t be able to backstop it anymore. They’re realizing that if they keep voting for progressive liberals and their socialist policies, it will all come crashing down.
It’s going to be very interesting when votes are counted the evening of November 2nd.
31 comments:
Here is a piece that demolishes the right-wing talking point dating back to the 2008 McCain campaign that over 40% of Americans pay no taxes.
"Of course, virtually all workers pay the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. And the new tax credits signed into law by presidents Bush and Obama, on top of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Ronald Reagan himself proclaimed, "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress," explain how the tax burden is lightened for many working families.
Yet despite record income inequality, stagnant wages and the inescapable conclusion that tax rates for the wealthy "have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades," the Republican echo chamber has resurrected its claim that tax credits for working Americans constitute "welfare."
Now, media as diverse as the Daily Show and the New York Times are pushing back against the latest attack in the Republicans' perpetual class war.
In a segment Tuesday titled, "That's Tariffic," Jon Stewart lamented:
"The media attacks the poor and elderly for not paying federal income taxes, but the U.S. government doesn't see a cent of Exxon's $35 billion profit."
And in Tuesday's New York Times, David Leonhardt urged Americans to "look closer":
With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.
Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number.
Labeling the 47% argument a "distraction" from "who really pays what in taxes," Leonhardt explained:
Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.
The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.
Leonhardt's analysis doesn't end there.
Corporate taxes have plummeted. "State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive" as "the typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes." And while the income gap between the rich and everyone else hit levels not seen since 1929, he concludes:
If anything, the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. "Because higher-income people are understating their income," Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, "We’ve been overstating their average tax rates."
By Jon Perr
Top 1%/tax returns paid 40.4%of all federal individual taxes and earned 22.8%/adjusted gross income. (2005-Top 10% paid 70%/Top 50%paid 97%/ bottom 50% paid 3%!!!).....UNTIL...the progressives get their way..with resulting joblessness and breakdown of the basic family structure in the name of Nirvana! Then we all pay 100% and get our "government allotment" back. Fight communism! Thanks Tom
The numbers leave me confused. Statistics can tell you anything the person using them wants to you to believe. My simple truth is; I am living on a small pension and Social Security and my taxable income is way below level required to pay taxes. I paid into the system for 52 years and am just managing to get by on the return. Please dont blame me for the problems. I voted for the other guys. Please hurry November.
From The Washington Monthly:
September 17, 2010
THE FORGOTTEN DETAIL: THE BUSH TAX POLICY WAS A FAILURE....
President Obama wants to extend lower tax rates for the middle class, while allowing the top rate for the wealthy to expire on schedule. Republicans want to make current rates permanent, adding $4 trillion to the debt over the next decade, and is prepared to kill middle-class breaks unless they get what they want. The public is siding with Obama; a few too many cowardly congressional Democrats are siding with Republicans.
A detail that's doesn't get as much attention as it deserves is that the policy everyone's fighting over -- the one the GOP will do anything to protect -- didn't work. Bush's tax policy was a failure, and didn't deliver on any of its intended goals. Bruce Bartlett offers a timely reminder.
Republicans are heavily invested in permanently extending the tax cuts enacted during the George W. Bush administration, all of which expire at the end of this year exactly as the legislation was written in the first place. To hear Republicans, one would think that the Bush tax cuts were the most powerful stimulus to growth ever enacted and only a madman would even think of allowing any of them to expire.
The truth is that there is virtually no evidence in support of the Bush tax cuts as an economic elixir. To the extent that they had any positive effect on growth, it was very, very modest. Their main effect was simply to reduce the government's revenue, thereby increasing the budget deficit, which all Republicans claim to abhor.
It'd be one thing if the Bush tax policy were a sterling success. Republicans could at least go into this debate arguing, "Look how effective these rates have been! Changing course now would be crazy!"
But the policy the GOP and some terribly foolish Democrats want desperately to keep didn't work. The lower rates didn't create jobs; they didn't generate the predicted boom; they didn't keep a balanced budget; they didn't meet any of the nation's pressing needs.
So why are Republicans fighting so hard to continue with a policy that failed? Because this isn't about the economy or the deficit or jobs -- this is about the fact that Republicans start with the conclusion and work backwards to rationalize their decisions. In this case, that means starting with tax cuts heavily weighted to benefit millionaires and billionaires, not because they work, but because tax cuts heavily weighted to benefit millionaires and billionaires necessarily are worthwhile. Why? Because they're tax cuts heavily weighted to benefit millionaires and billionaires.
That they failed doesn't matter. That they won't improve the economy now doesn't matter, either. The GOP knows what it wants, and merit, evidence, and reason are hopelessly irrevelant.
Forbes:
Tea partiers confused, taxes ‘lower by every measure’ under Obama
Bruce Bartlett, a fiscal conservative and columnist for Forbes who worked in the George W Bush and Reagan administrations is shocked by what he sees happening on the right these days. He became a conservative, he says, because he saw liberalism as driven by lofty unachievable or unreal motives whereas conservativism he believed was pegged primarily to concern with consequences and so based on cold hard reality. He reports that the Tea Parties have turned the world around. Tea Partiers yelling about taxes are delusional, he writes. They know nothing about taxes.
Bartlett was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and Deputy Assistant Secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department. In March he wrote: “Federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president…. and last year’s stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year.”
Here is an excerpt from the Forbes piece showing how ignorant these Tea Partiers are:
[N]o matter how one slices the data, the tea party crowd appear to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family.
Tea party goers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.
As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president. And given the economic circumstances, it’s hard to imagine that a tax increase would have been enacted last year. In fact, 40% of Obama’s stimulus package involved tax cuts. These include the Making Work Pay Credit, which reduces federal taxes for all taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 by between $400 and $800.
According to the JCT, last year’s $787 billion stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year. The Tax Policy Center, a private research group, estimates that close to 90% of all taxpayers got a tax cut last year and almost 100% of those in the $50,000 income range. For those making between $40,000 and $50,000, the average tax cut was $472; for those making between $50,000 and $75,000, the tax cut averaged $522. No taxpayer anywhere in the country had his or her taxes increased as a consequence of Obama’s policies.
It’s hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality. Perhaps these people haven’t calculated their tax returns for 2009 yet and simply don’t know what they owe. Or perhaps they just assume that because a Democrat is president that taxes must have gone up, because that’s what Republicans say that Democrats always do. In fact, there hasn’t been a federal tax increase of any significance in this country since 1993.
Another interesting comment from the Fiscal Conservative writing in Forbes:
One of the reasons I became a conservative way back when is because conservatives lived in a world where one’s actions are defined by their consequences, not one’s motives. Conservatives also prided themselves on being reality-based and fact-based in their analyses, while liberals often seemed to live in a dream world disconnected from history, institutions and ideology, among other things.
Today, however, conservatives have largely adopted the liberal operating assumption and now also define themselves by the righteousness of their motives. This fact became very obvious to me this week when I examined the knowledge that tea party demonstrators on Capitol Hill had on the subject of taxation. As I recount in my column below, most of those in the crowd grossly overestimated the level and burden of federal taxes, thinking that they are many times higher than they actually are.
A new New York Times/CBS News poll reports that 62 percent of Americans think the amount of income tax they paid this year was fair. Less than 30 percent think the amount they are paying is unfair. Even among the Tea Party, more than half think they paid a fair amount of taxes. It’s the high active members who are on the non-reality fringe.
The piece in Forbes says "It’s hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality" when it comes to taxes.
Hmmm, could that be because so many integrity-lacking, dishonest hacks keep printing garbage like this piece that tries to intentionally distort the truth/
The top 50% of Americans paid 97% of the personal federal income taxes in 2007. That's a fact:
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
The bottom 50% get more back than they pay, or they pay nothing. That's just the way it is. Yes, those among the bottom 50% who actually work pay FICA and Medicare. Yes, they pay sales taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, etc. I don't dispute that, but the rich pay most of the personal federal income taxes thanks to progressive liberal policies enacted during the 20th century.
Reality is a hard thing for some of you to comprehend, I know, but don't give up.
Under Barack Obama, personal federal income taxes haven't gone up - yet. If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, they will.
Spending under Obama and the Democrats has skyrocketed. We and our children and our grandchildren will have to pay for all that somehow if we don't go bankrupt, which is now a real possibility.
The Federal Reserve is printing trillions of dollars because no one wants to lend Obama money any more. That's another form of taxation because the inflation that will result takes more money out of our pockets. That's why the price of gold is going up. That's why the world is dumping dollars.
Obama and the Democrats are running us off a cliff. The Tea Party is trying to stop it by getting rid of liberals. Good idea.
Let's hope it's not too late.
The Tea Party hasn't got rid of ANY liberals. All they have done is elected wacky candidates in the primaries making it EASIER for liberals to win. They are a conused, ignorant, loud minority.
Sure I want a smaller government and less taxes but the Tea Party people are out of touch with reality.
There are also 18 new taxes in the ObamaCare legislation set to take effect soon. It's estimated that ObamaCare's new taxes will place an additional half trillion dollar burden on tax payers.
http://tinyurl.com/36pdcrb
"The Tea Party hasn't got rid of ANY liberals."
Hmm.
There's Arlen Specter, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Castle, Charlie Crist (almost), Robert Bennett - just among Republicans. Some call them RINOs. Some call them "moderates." I and other conservatives call them liberals. We got rid of them.
Then, among Democrat liberals, there's Jon Corzine. There's Tim Kaine.
I'd say that's quite an impressive list of liberal scalps the Tea Party has hung on its wall. The rest of the liberals who are up this year are shaking - and they should.
You sound nervous too.
For your list of "liberals" you have mostly a bunch of Republicans?!?
For your "Tea Partier" you list the moderate Chris Christie (from newjerseynewsroom.com: Christie is a moderate who does not believe in the same things that most Tea Party supported candidates believe in.)
And for the life of me I can't figure out why you include Tim Kaine's name.
Yeah, I'm shaking - with laughter!
A few pearls of wisdom from the Tea Partiers!
Christine O'Donnell:
"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains."
''You know what, evolution is a myth. Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?''
_____________________________
''We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn't that ironic?''
—Sarah Palin, admitting that her family used to get treatment in Canada's single-payer health care system, despite having demonized such government-run programs as socialized medicine that will lead to death-panel-like rationing, March 6, 2010
___________________________
''What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP. I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen.''
—Kentucky GOP Senate candidate and Tea Party hero Rand Paul, May 21, 2010
_______________________________
''I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown -- in this case a $20 billion shakedown ... I'm only speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize. I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.''
—Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) member of the Tea Party Caucus, during a congressional hearing with BP CEO Tony Hayward, referring to a $20 billion fund for damages that President Obama pressured BP to set up to pay for the Gulf oil spill. Barton, the biggest recipient of oil and gas industry campaign contributions in the House of Representatives, was forced by Republican leaders to apologize for his BP apology.
______________________________
''I dabbled into witchcraft -- I never joined a coven. But I did, I did... I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do... One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that. We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.''
—Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, in a 1999 appearance on Bill Maher's 'Politically Incorrect'
______________________________
''We needed to have the press be our friend ... We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported.''
—Nevada GOP Senate nominee and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle, during an interview with Fox News Channel's Carl Cameron, Aug. 2, 2010
______________________________
Tom, maybe you are right and I shouldn't be laughing about the Tea Partiers....
This is from the Gainseville Sun forum about the Tea Partiers:
I laugh at their absurd, ignorant blather and think they're jokes. Here's a different take on it.
By Ron Rosenbaum
" ... Listen to Tea Partiers on cable news—or read the signs they hoist or their Internet comments—and you frequently encounter the flagrant abuse, the historically ignorant misuse, of words such as tyranny, communist, Marxist, fascist, and socialist.
You hear them say, for instance, that we live under "tyranny" because one side lost a health care vote in an elected legislative body. And that, in all seriousness, the president is a communist.
Unless of course Obama is really a "fascist," as some T.P.ers have it, because he's a liberal, and liberals are fascists (as we all know from that magisterial work of history, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg)
Of course Obama is also probably an evil "socialist" which is apparently, in the Tea Party worldview, pretty much the same as a fascist or a communist. (One gets the impression that some T.P.ers have had major, life-changing, "aha!" moments when they first learned that Hitler's party was the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party. Slam dunk!)*
And if Obama's not a socialist fascist communist, he may be—ooh, scary, kids!—a "progressive," which, as Victoria Jackson learned from the erudite Glenn Beck, is really a secret "code word" for communist.
And they believe him! That's the thing.....they—or at least a significant, influential portion of them—are utterly uneducated in history.
Most people with a basic grounding in history find Tea Party ignorance something to laugh about, certainly not something to take seriously. But I would argue that history demonstrates that historical ignorance is dangerous and that it can have tragic consequences, however laughable it may initially seem. And thus the media, liberals, and others are misguided in laughing it off. And educated conservatives are irresponsible in staying silent in the face of these distortions.
That's because ignorance of this sort isn't inconsequential. Historical fraudulence is like a disease, a contagious psychosis which can lead to mob hysteria and worse. Consider the role that fraudulent history played in Weimar Germany, where the "stab in the back" myth that the German Army had been cheated of victory in World War I by Jews and Socialists on the home front was used by the Nazis to justify their hatreds.
It's a historical lie, but it caught on, and Hitler rose to power on it, asking Germans to avenge the (nonexistent) stab in the back! It may be true that the Tea Party will disintegrate before it acquires any real power, as more and more of its leaders are revealed to be fanciers of racist jokes and ********** videos. But one can't be assured of it. It's important to expose the lies for what they are before they further debase the language with their false use of words.
Maybe he's right. If Newtie or Rove were the leaders, I might worry more, but with Flailin' Palin as the current figurehead, I can't take them seriously and just keep laughing.
Maybe that's the idea.
Tom, have you ever had your IQ checked?
Just curious.
Here is a good, unbiased article on the Tea Party from Psychology Today:
Politics: Fear and Why the Tea Party Will Fade Away
What is really driving the Tea Party?
Published on June 13, 2010
The Tea Party is on a hot streak lately what with the Republican primary victories of Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada. And the talk among many is that the Tea Party will have a transformative impact on the upcoming midterm elections and be an enduring force in American politics for years to come.
The Tea Party movement is typically viewed as a populist uprising fueled by ideological anger against a federal government that many believe no longer represents needs and wishes of the American people. It protests the policies of our government that, according to their doctrines, restrict individual liberty, violate the Constitution, illegally regulate the economy, and unfairly tax citizens. The Tea Party believes that America has been taken away from it, thus its de facto motto is "Take back America."
The stereotype of Tea Partiers, reinforced by the many misspelled placards seen at the protests, is uneducated, of low income, and Southern. Yet polls show that the typical Tea Party supporter is, yes, white, but also older, educated, and of above-average income. This surprising demographic has led me to a decidedly contrarian analysis of the source of the Tea Party's energy and its future role in American politics.
will have a diminishing impact on our political scene in the coming years. In fact, I believe that the Tea Party will have a only a minor influence on the midterm elections (and that influence will benefit the Democrats) and a lingering presence on the political scene for a few years. But I predict that the Tea Party will slowly but steadily fade into nonexistence over the next decade. (Disclaimer: Predictions are admittedly easy to make because, as we know from the National Enquirer and professional sports drafts, no one ever follows up to see if the predictions come true).
I offer this prediction because I believe that the birth and popularity of the Tea Party is based more in psychology than in political beliefs.
Most people think of anger when they describe the Tea Party. But it's not, in my view, what drives the movement. Anger is actually a defensive and protective response triggered by the fight-or-flight reaction which has evolved since we rose out of the primordial muck so many eons ago. Its purpose? To ensure our survival when threatened. And, with so much cultural uncertainty, economic instability, and political conflict in the world, many Americans feel profoundly threatened. So what underlies the anger expressed so strongly by Tea Partiers is fear.
What then is that fear?
Let's return to the demographic of the Tea Party: white, older, educated, and of higher income. Think about the world in which they were raised and had lived most of their lives. It was safe, secure, familiar, and, yes, homogeneous. They collectively held the power and had the loudest voice. They were in charge.
Now look at what is happening to their world; it is changing dramatically in so many ways. Tea Party members are confronted with a new world order that is understandably unsettling to them. 9/11 created a world that is now, at least in the eyes of many, more dangerous and unpredictable than ever before. Immigration and increased diversity that had not been that evident in the stratum in which they lived for most of their lives is now in their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. The serial economic crises of the past decade have caused a degree of financial insecurity that threatens their futures. And this changing world is no more obvious than in the new resident of the White House.
Tea Party supporters no longer have exclusive power. Their voices carry less sway than they once did. They have less control over their own lives and the world in which they have been living for so many years.
PART 2
Now let's return to the Tea Party motto, "Take back America." Many people interpret it to mean take it back from those who have taken it from them, most obviously immigrants and people of color (thus the cries of racism). But I believe what lies at the heart of their message is their nostalgic wish to take America back to that previous time when life was simpler and more familiar, secure, and controllable, when they had no need to be fearful.
Another fear that I believe underlies the anger that the Tea Party movement expresses toward our government is that no one can protect them from the significant and ongoing upheavals that we have been experiencing during the last decade. Ordinary people have and continue to suffer mightily from multiple financial crises, and, most recently, the West Virginia mine tragedy and the BP disaster. Americans have always trusted their government to protect them from such harm (and it did a pretty good job for a long time), yet it has failed repeatedly in recent times. Never mind that Big Business, not our government, was responsible for these catastrophic events. The Tea Partiers don't expect Big Business to care about them, much less act in their best interests, so they don't hold them accountable. But our government is supposed to care about us and act in our best interests, yet it has let us down. So that fear turned to anger toward our government because it is better to feel rage and fight than to feel fear and flight.
These observations bring me back to my original thesis that the Tea Party will slowly fade away. Why? Because the generation of these Tea Partiers is aging and will be infirm or dead within 20 years. And the next generations will not be gripped with such fear of the changing world because they know no other world. They have been raised in this diverse, uncertain, and pretty crazy world. All of the changes are simply life as they know it, so there is nothing to fear. And with that absence of fear, the Tea Party will lose its purpose and energy and become simply an interesting yet short-lived footnote in American political history.
At least that's my prediction. Some will agree with me and others will disagree. But no one will know for sure until history tells us.
"Here is a good, unbiased article on the Tea Party"
Unbiased? Are you kidding?
What seems slanted in the article? Of course you must admit how horribly biased YOUR pieces are - this one was nothing that.
The article's premise is that Tea Partiers are racists driven by fear.
Sounds like Obama saying: "So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Reads like boilerplate liberal Democrat to me.
I don't claim to be unbiased. I'm a conservative columnist, not a reporter. I like to annoy liberals. How am I doing?
Hahaha based on the sheer volume of copying and pasting done by the Tom hater today I'd say you're doing a fantastic job annoying him.
I'm having fun.
You guys did well, so far, actually making sense of a sort without hurling insults every other sentence.
I'm having a blast, too! It is GREAT fun watching Tom's goofiness get blasted to smithereens week after week with facts and common sense. Usually he gives up with his tail between his legs. It would be nice to see him actually try and defend himself for a change.
"I like to annoy liberals. How am I doing?"
It is so blatently obvious that your sole goal in writing your columns is to annoy. As you are unable to do so by using facts you resort to obvious lies and mistruths because liars are always annoying, right?
Wrong. Sometimes they are hilarious, intentionally (the Lovitz "that's the ticket" guy on SNL) or unintentionally (you).
You probably picture liberals reading your column, getting red-faced and screaming "he doesn't really believe that malarky, he's just trying to get our goats!" and fuming about how anybody can be so stupid. But in actualality we laugh and say "look, he claims there were 5 billion people at the Tea Party march".
To be honest you probably do annoy some people when you decide to get really nasty and call people who believe in equal rights for women "fat feminists" and such, but for the most part they probably laugh it off.
Personally, I honestly enjoy your column as much as I enjoy the Colbert show. Both of you are accomplishing the same thing - showing radical right wingers as the nutty fools they are.
So to get back to your question of how you are doing - well, not so well. I know a man has got to have goals, but your lofty ambition of improving the world through annoyance seems to be failing. On another level though you are a smashing success.
Laughter, after all, is the best medicine.
btw, do you wear one of those big red clown noses when you type your column to get into the mood?
There is no doubt that society is riddled with people whose purpose is to revitalize Socialism and if that means bringing down the country so much the better. A concerted effort to collapse Capitalism, erode Democracy and eliminate the middle class is rampant today.
And how do we answer it, why we argue party politics; Democrat versus Republican; in other words we play right into their hands
As a country, we have major problems, but if we shed the old party cliches and habits and combine our efforts there is nothing we cannot acomplish. Trust the common sense of the people, ignore the extremists from both sides.
There is little doubt that most middle class folk know that big business needs to be more closely controlled; the current attitude of business to squeeze every last dollar they can out of every sale regardless of its effect on society has to be softened and the extreme left wingers also need controlling before they take us down a path from which there is no returning. Gordo
Well said Gordo. I consider myself a liberal but there are many on the extreme left who I do not agree with. These extremists on the left, along with extremists on the right such as Tom and the Tea Party, all need to be ignored in order to get this country back to it's senses.
I agree with Gordo's assessment that the extreme right wants to eliminate the middle class. The extreme left obviously wants ONLY a middle class. There needs to be some rational balance.
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