Sunday, July 29, 2012

Who are the takers?

A fundamental belief of today's wealthy corporate Republicans is that they are deserving and no one else is.

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

[Mitt] Romney, ignoring the fact that he has echoed this same sentiment on multiple occasions, organized 24 “We Did Build This” events in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada. At each event, local business owners are speaking about their self-sufficiency in running a business and how government is hindering their growth.
But, like the New Hampshire business owner showcased in Romney’s attack ad on the issue, many of these business owners have received significant support from the government, a ThinkProgress analysis finds.
But no one else deserves this sort of help. They're all slackers who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

These Republicans can't even grasp their own selfish double-standard. They invented the Internet, dammit, not the government, not that fat Al Gore guy who tried to steal credit.
It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.
Hard to imagine anyone more thoroughly missing the point without trying to, but then he was editorializing for the Wall Street Journal. Until it's monetized, it doesn't exist. What a strange epistemological idea!

Republicans believe that whoever exploits a resource, infrastructure, an externality, or the gullibility of the public should get all the rewards and the credit.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R-whatever you need Mitch) shows the problem in more plebeian terms. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his father, and his mother spend time on welfare, which Scott made her eligible for. Now, however, Brown has money, success, and the gift of forgetfulness. He wants to deny any such help to people like him. I guess they're just not handsome enough to deserve it.

Where I grew up, we called this gittin' above your raisin', and it was a mortal sin for a politician.

Nowadays, though, merely driving a gimmicky pick-up truck and wearing a barn coat every election season is enough to remain a regular guy, never mind that you spend you entire career ardently defending the self-proclaimed right of the wealthy to be taxed and regulated at very low historical rates.

Who feels entitled? Who takes without giving back? Who votes out of selfishness?

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

Update: The wealthy not only don't want to pay, they want to get refunds that make their tax rate negative.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah yes..here we go again with the class warfare. Of course it's always the fault of those ultra rich Republicans that there are so many starving democrat voters...right? The truth is that the three richest people in America are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Larry Ellison....Democrats all. Combined they are worth over $120,000,000,000.00. Add in George Soros and Michael Bloomberg and that total goes to $160,000.000.000.00. That sure is a grand amount of money for just five men. Why aren't THESE men criticized for having too much..humm? I wonder how many starving democrat voters these men could feed with all their billions? Oops...I almost forgot, these guys only talk a big plan and donate money to democrat politicians that will feed the starving democrat voters with money taken from those that can afford it least...THE MIDDLE CLASS.

lovable liberal said...

Because, you pestilence on the world, it's the Republican who defend our plutocracy. Wealthy Democrats want to move back from our extreme tax policies to something that favors the rich a little bit less - even if that comes at their expense.

Your list is bullshit. Bloomberg tacks back and forth between being an independent and a Republican. He was elected mayor of NYC as a Republican.

Bill Gates is not a Democrat. His father advocated the Buffett rule, but he's not a Dem either.

Buffett is a Democrat of sorts, but a very centrist one and not at all committed to one party or the other.

Ellison, I don't know about. And you probably don't either.

But yes, they all have tax rates that are waaay too low.

Anonymous said...

If there is any bullshit in here, it's this passage from you;

"Wealthy Democrats want to move back from our extreme tax policies to something that favors the rich a little bit less - even if that comes at their expense."

I don't think bullshit is a good enough description for the above droppings.

lovable liberal said...

So why do you think wealthy Democrats favor the Buffett Rule and other attempts to increase tax fairness?

You seem to be an expert on shit. Are you using your head as a colonoscope again?