Bottom

7849

Gay Marriage rights were overturned in California yet the dems took over the nation. In Kansas City, more dems were elected but the Light Rail failed to pass. So weird. What happened in your areas?

So politics lately have been pissing me off. I agree with Kevin… but I think I am still a little bit in the anger mode. In fact politics has pissed me off enough that it makes me want to run for local office. I get the feeling that as long as I am honest, stand for what I truly believe, listen to others, and freely tell others what I stand for, what I plan on doing, when I fail, and when I have no clue what I am talking about…. I wouldn’t have to know a single thing about politics, and I could still do better then the majority of politicians. So what if I did run for office in Elko? Say county commissioner, or a councilman… do any of you know what that would entail? I obviously don’t want to give up engineering so it would have to be part time. and some friends pointed out that I might actually do good…. I would have the mining base, I would have quite a bit of the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) base for I’m friends with quite a few of them… I would have the hippie/climber’s base… and I would have the church base….

As George Bush wraps up his time in office, I find myself amazed all over again at both the sheer volume of hate that has been spewed at him over the last eight years, and his unrelenting, stubborn commitment never to let his detractors drag him down to their level. He didn’t bring a new tone to Washington, but he did bring one to the Whitehouse. Bush probably owes a lot of his success to his ability to tune out the noise.

I feel deeply alone in writing this, but I cannot deny it: I admire George W Bush as a human being and as a President. He has guided the nation through some pretty tough times, and I think he has consistently chosen to be a good President instead of a popular one.

Long before Bush did any of the things that people say they hate him for, the media and the left were hard at work building a narrative of Bush as a detestable and stupid man. They knew that if they repeated it enough, it would stick. They decided before he was sworn in that he was a dunce. They decided before the troops hit the ground that our missions in Afghanistan and Iraq were the next Vietnam. The interest the media has shown in talking about the wars at every stage has been in direct proportion to how well they thought they could paint them as failures.

I really think that Bush’s low popularity at this point represents a lot of people that are simply exhausted, tired of being brow-beaten day in and day out with the message that the guy they voted for is a failure and a hateful thing. It is hard work for an honest person to be informed enough to be comfortable holding an opinion that contradicts what “everybody knows”. If you stop digging deep, and just hear little snatches of news from here and there, it is easy to begin to absorb the narrative and wonder if you were wrong all along.

I have moved beyond anger about bias in the media. These days I am just saddened by the meanness and the pettiness of it. I am sad that journalists have lost sight of the greater good that is served when they pursue objectivity, even when it grates against their politics. I’m saddened by the viciousness outside of journalism, in the world of commentary and opinion on the internet and elsewhere. I get the impression that our political discussion is about 75% populated by people who truly don’t care what is best for America as long as they can get in some rhetorical shots at the other side. Maybe I’m wrong about that, and they are just not as articulate as they could be. In any case there seem to be very few people around who are pulling punches the way George Bush does.

As the possibility of Barack Obama being elected looms large, I will make this pledge: I will give a President Obama a fair shake. I will listen to his supporters and give their sincerity and intelligence the benefit of the doubt. I will judge his actions as fairly as I know how, and I will not participate in personal attacks. I will not name-call. I will call out my fellow conservatives who are unfair in their criticism and personal in their attacks. You will not find me asking how anybody could be so stupid as to disagree with my position on some issue or another.

This applies to my blog, emails, my participation in internet forums, and to my conversations in real life. And if I find I cannot be civil, I will say nothing at all.

America is still the greatest country in human history, but we need to stop taking it for granted or we will lose it. I will do my tiny part to make our country worthy of the great inheritance of cultural and political values that we have received.

Preach it, Sarah!

 http://www.thegreatschlep.com/

Our friend Stephen “Karl Marx” Crutchfield has suggested a game. Let’s predict the electoral votes. Here’s a website that may or may not be helpful:

http://www.electoral-vote.com

But anyway, what do ya’ll think?

Comrade Buchanan
By John Médaille

Pat Buchanan has an article in TakiMag today entitled Comrade Barack. Mr. Buchanan opines:

If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.
Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage-earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage-earners, who pay no income tax, are sent federal checks.
If this is not the socialist redistribution of wealth, what is it?

This is certainly a fair question. There can be no doubt that taking money from some and giving it to others constitutes redistribution of incomes, which many consider to be the essence of socialism. One problem, however, is that the program already exists. It is called the “Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC),” or “Negative Income Tax.” And if it is socialist, it has a rather strange pedigree. It was proposed by Milton Friedman, supported by President Nixon, signed into law by President Ford, and vastly expanded by President Reagan. This is certainly the oddest collection of socialists I have even encountered.

Comrade Pat has been a life-long Republican partisan and a former speech-writer for Ronald Reagan, whom, I suppose, we will now have to refer to as Comrade Ron. But the obvious question is why did Comrade Pat all of a sudden discover the latent socialism in the Democratic candidate, while missing it, for so many years, in his Republican heroes? Okay. Maybe that’s not even an interesting question; maybe it is self-evident that a partisan would apply different standards to members of his own party. Nevertheless, Comrade Pat is an intelligent man, and there is a question that an intelligent man, as opposed to a mere partisan, ought to have asked. And the question is this: “Why, in this day of pervasive income taxes, do 40% of all wage-earners earn so little that not only do they pay no tax, but need a supplement from the government?” The answer is a bit more interesting than mere charges of socialism.

The first answer is that they do pay taxes, and at a high rate. They pay the payroll taxes, which amount to more than 15% of their income. Indeed, without the EITC, these workers would pay a larger proportionate share of their income in taxes than does Warren Buffet, as Mr. Buffet himself acknowledges. In truth, we have two systems of income tax, one for the rich and one for everybody else. The rich, whose incomes often derive mainly from capital gains, are taxed at a preferential rates. Long-term capital gains are taxed at 15%, or less than payroll taxes that the poorest workers pay. McCain thinks that even this is too much of a burden for the rich, and wants to cut the rate in half. Of course, both McCain and Buchanan are victims of a flawed economic theory which believes that only capital creates wealth, while labor is, at best, a mere nuisance that should be gotten rid of whenever possible by outsourcing. I won’t here go into the flaws in this theory; those who want to examine it more critically can buy my book, The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace. Here we can merely note that if one adds up the costs of tax preferences, the advantage goes to the rich, not the poor.

But there is another reason for the negative income tax, a reason that impressed the Nobel economist and the Republican presidents alike: It helps to stave off economic collapse. The hard, economic truth is that when incomes accumulate at the top to an unreasonable degree, there is a failure of demand. A CEO may make 500 times what the line worker makes, but he cannot eat 500 times the amount of food, wear 500 times the shirts, shoes, and socks, live in a home 500 times larger, etc. This means that purchasing power is lost to the economy, and must be restored. Nor can the rich man find profitable investments for his excess wealth, since the mere excess itself causes the market to be restricted. Instead, he ends up “investing” it in speculative instruments like CDS’s, which add nothing to the productive capacity of the economy. They are mere bets, where one man’s winnings are measured precisely by another man’s losses.

Now, I don’t think Reagan was a socialist; we don’t have to call him Comrade Ronnie. And one can make a judgment about whether he really cared one way or another about the poor. But he certainly did care about keeping the economy together through the next election. And if that involved running up huge deficits, or transferring a bit of wealth to the poor, then so be it. As Belloc pointed out, capitalism will always result in collectivism and statism, because it has no other way of stabilizing itself.

In truth, the federal budget is mainly about transferring wealth. However, it is largely a transfer of wealth from the bottom and the middle to the top. Farm subsidies penalize the city at the expense of the country, the military budget is less about defense and more about enriching people like Cheney, the road subsidies give an advantage to suburban homeowners over city dwellers, etc. So if in all of these upward redistributions of income, we find a small space for movements in the opposite direction, than people like Comrade Pat should not be scandalized.

Or at least, that’s what Reagan thought.