Obama saying I should be happy about a $1.85 trillion deficit because of a $100 billion tax cut reminds me of a line from The Princess Bride: "My brains, his steel, and your strength against sixty men, and you think a little head jiggle is supposed to make me happy?"
So now I call Obama's tax cuts the "head jiggle" cuts. You don't have to, but I do.
Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.
UPDATE: this has turned into anti-Horsey discussion.
Posted by pudge at April 16, 2009 12:04 AM | Email ThisIN FACT, in Olympia, we didn't talk about tax cuts at all, that I recall: we talked about spending, and not raising taxes. Not about cutting them.
They are looking for simple answers and somebody to blame.
No one is looking for simple answers. We already know the answers, and we know that transitioning to those answers is not easy. And we are not looking for someone to blame, as we know who to blame: the people -- in both parties -- who have pushed us the opposite direction from where we should be going by drastically increasing the size and scope of the government.
Who would benefit most from a tax cut? Not the tea party protesters.
Speaking of illogical ... as we are often told by the left, a $5,000 tax increase for the middle class means a lot more than a $50,000 tax increase for the wealthy. This is how they justify ever-increasing tax burdens for the rich. So does it not often stand to reason that a $5,000 tax CUT for the middle class means a lot more than a $50,000 tax cut for the wealthy? Not if you're on the left, I guess.
They may be struggling to pay taxes right now, but that is likely because they are struggling to pay for everything, thanks to an economic system that, over the last couple of decades, has been skewed in favor of the wealthy.
Oh right, it has nothing to do with the fact that the government is taking a huge portion of our income! No, that couldn't be it at all!
And of course, the real point is the SPENDING, not the taxes. The taxes, as many people have pointed out, are going to go down ever-so-slightly, but that pales in comparison to the size of the deficit.
And who would like to offer up some government programs to be eliminated to pay for those tax cuts?
Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! </Horshack>
But, if you really want to cut government spending, you'll have to get into the big stuff like the military budget, Social Security and Medicare.
Yes. WHICH IS THE POINT. One of the main cries yesterday, across the country, was STOP TAKING FROM ME TO TAKE CARE OF THEM. This is our entitlement system in a nutshell.
And I think everyone agrees our military wastes a ton of money.
Do I hear howls of "support our troops?" Do I see a legion of senior citizens forming to defend their Social Security checks and health care? Well, alright, leave those alone.
He is confusing politicians with the protestors. Stupid mistake to make. The protestors have no problem saying those things, it's the politicians who won't.
Instead, let's just skip the Wall Street bailout that our children and grandchildren will be paying off. But wait, most of the economists in the country insist that, distasteful as it may be, only the government can prop up our teetering financial system, the collapse of which would bring consequence far more dire than a big deficit. Is anyone willing to risk a depression?
Sigh. Such illogic. He conflates the bailouts we have done with government action in general, and he says "most economists" as though this is fact. In fact, we don't know what most economists think; in fact, the bailouts we've done included many companies that COULD and maybe SHOULD have been left to die; in fact, we could have gone about this government action stuff in various different ways.
For example, we could have let GM die. Period. Even if you could say most economists believe we had to prop up AIG, you won't find the same for propping up GM.
Second, we could have, instead of just funnelling money to these financial institutions, simply just bought their bad assets. Or we could have forced them into a specialized bankruptcy and chopped them up and sold off their good bits. We also could have cut off some of AIG's clients that would be less likely to cause damage to the rest of our economy.
We aren't the confused ones, Horsey. We know it's complicated. You're the one who is literally making the inane and illogical claim that what we did was justified because we had to do something.
The truth is, there are very few government services we would happily give up because they have made our country a more civilized place.
And now we come full circle: Horsey just DOES NOT UNDERSTAND the people he is criticizing. In fact, the protestors WOULD happily give up many if not all of those services, and we don't believe they are making us a more civilized society at all.
Oh, right: since we can't leave old people dying in the streets, we had to do SOMETHING. Except, of course, that old people weren't dying in the streets before FDR came along.
(As to state universities, the cost of education is WAY more than it is actually WORTH to ANYONE, and I don't want to subsidize it, period.)
Hey, we all want our country back. But I just don't think it was taken away by Barack Obama or any secret socialists.
It's no secret that they are socialists. And while Obama and his cohorts didn't create the problem, they are massively exacerbating it.
Horsey and other liberal/(socialists) think the Tea Parties are illogical because they believe the government's social responsibility should be much greater than it currently is. To them, the balance between social and fiscal responsibility is way off. They disregard all calls for fiscal responsibility as efforts to prevent them from "righting the wrong" of insufficient government social programs. They completely ignore the red ink because they want to show us all that having these expanded social programs really benefit us and that we just don't know what we're missing. It is a typical elitists attitude.
The mistake they make when dismissing tax protesters is that they frame the protest in the same elitist context that they see the country through. Namely, they see it as people trying to push tax cuts through to show all of us dupes that we would be better off with lower taxes and that we just don't know what we're missing. I don't think tax protesters share the elitist attitudes of people like Horsey.
I think that your every day person observes with disgust the continual creep of government into everything that was previously private and free from political meddling. The additional red tape from the government incursion drives up costs and the PITA factor. I can't blame them, they just want to be left alone for the most part.
They know that government is behind the endless cycle of monetary and regulator inflation of prices followed by increased in taxes to "help" them maintain their standard of living. They want it to stop.
The only two possible outcomes are the central bank collapses or we have a dictatorship. If the central bank and our currency doesn't collapse, the government will have to take over more and more control to keep the centrally planned economy going. That's where we're going...a centrally planned economy. It's the *only* means to the end where outcomes are controlled rather than opportunities.
Posted by: blindman on April 16, 2009 09:10 AMPudge, they couldn't let GM die because that would have be a near fatal blow to the UAW and probably cost Democrats the crucial electoral votes from the upper mid-west. They can't afford to lose that many electoral votes because they'd be out of the whitehouse for a very long time.
Posted by: blindman on April 16, 2009 09:43 AMHorsey is no different from most lefties. They have no clue about who conservatives really are. They don't know any.
Posted by: Bill Cruchon on April 16, 2009 03:19 PMHorray for our side. The otherside is 100% wrong and stupid so why bother trying to understand where they are coming from.
The very foundation of all the logic they base their extreme arguments on is insane.
Actually both sides are absolutely wrong as they are absolutely right
Posted by: doggiedaddy on April 22, 2009 05:39 AM