It's a Beautiful Life

Okay, you have to admit, these are beautiful people.
Well, mostly.
And they tell such a beautiful story, you could read your kids to sleep with it: There once was this wonderful, beautiful country, where even the poorest child could grow up to be a princess or a prince.
And all that child had to do was to work hard and play by the rules and think clean thoughts and it would all happen: You will be rich some day, and live in a beautiful house and drive a beautiful car and have a beautiful mate and have beautiful children.

But there's this bad monster called The Government, which tries to give away everything you earn to the undeserving thugs who won't work for a living, the welfare queens and immigrants and godless communists, socialists and atheists and other unwholesome types. And the bad Government, which has black helicopters and bad taxes, tries to take everything from the hard working boys and girls and give it to the lazy, shiftless, unworthy, undeserving poor.

And you can tell these people who tell such stories are good people who would never tell a lie because they are so pretty and believable and they sound so nice.

And they say Social Security is just a big Ponzi scheme and they will kill it with their wonderful clean swift swords of righteousness. And they will kill Medicare too, already tried and voted for the law which would have done it, but the bad Democrats in the Senate stopped them.

And they say the most important job in the world right now is not to provide health care, or to get people jobs, or to help people who are poor and want to work to catch a break, or to protect the rivers and lakes from pollution.

No. The most important job is to prevent the re election of President Barack Obama, who has a nasty foreign sounding name. His middle name is Hussein, you know. And he wasn't even born in America. And he didn't want to wear the American flag lapel pin because he really doesn't love this great country the way you and I do.

But just remember, and keep believing this: You're not going to be poor for long. The Republican Party will see to that.

Why over the eight years they had the White House and the Congress, they made the rich so rich that the top 1% of the richest people in the country now own 40% of all the wealth of this country and they are never going to give that up as long as the good Republicans have any thing to say about it.

It's just so beautiful.

And when you die, you might be reborn into a rich family and then you'll be glad you voted for these nice, pretty people.

Disloyal Opposition: Rick Perry, Mitch McConnell and the GOP

It is true that people often accuse others of what they are most guilty of themselves. So, when Rick Perry accuses Ben Bernanke of "Treason" he knows of what he speaks. He has suggested, more than once, he would like Texas to secede from the union if the federal government does not change its tax policy.

Perry is not an anomaly in the Republican party on this line--Mitch McConnell announced, forthrightly his top priority in the just finished Congressional session was to ensure the defeat of Barack Obama. Eric Cantor and John Boehner chimed in.

The remarkable thing is nobody in the press or even in the Democratic Party batted an eye, or expressed any outrage that the Republican leader of the Senate would say that his main purpose, his main job was preventing President Obama's re election. Nobody said, "Wait a minute, is that why the voters of Kentucky sent you to the Senate? Did they not want you to create jobs, improve the national economy, improve the security of the nation, prevent terrorist attacks, make the country stronger, the people healthier and create opportunities for the nation to flourish?"

The whole concept of a loyal opposition is what makes a government of a democracy work: You can disagree with the approach of the majority party, but you put the nation first, and you work to make things better for the four years between elections, not work to make things worse so you can blame the ruling party for the mess you helped create.

Of course, the Republicans have a problem in that their tax code has resulted in the staggering statistics which keep coming out about wealth distribution in America: The top 1 percent of the population now receive 1/4 of all income every year; that top 1 percent controls 40% of all the wealth--an even greater percentage than the income they control. This is the result of GOP tax policy, pure and simple. They whine about "Death taxes" but that is only because they are bought and paid for by people with estates.

Of course, you can't blame the Republicans for trying. If they can sell this notion that you are poor now but there's pie in the sky--one day you'll be rich and then you'll be happy we have made things so good for you, well, then more power to them. If the American public is so tied to that delusion, well they get what they deserve.

And the deficit, which the GOP wails and gnashes teeth over--it's just the hammer of our national undoing, until you start talking about reducing that deficit with taxes on millionaires, then you hear the worse thing you can do would be to alienate the "job creators," who have held on to their huge profits and not hired any body much.

These are the real traitors. They are loyal to only their class--the country, that is the other 99% or the other 80%, however you want to slice it, well, they are not really deserving. The nation ought to belong to those who own it. That's the capitalist way.

And if our fellow Americans are stupid enough to vote for Kelly Ayotte and Guinta and Rick Perry and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and yes, even Scott Brown and Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, for any Republican, then they have embraced the Cyborgs and all those who care more for the riches of the few than for their country or their countrymen.

And in a democracy, or actually in a plutocracy, a nation governed by the privilege few, well all's fair.

The Undeserving

How do you explain the "What's the Matter With Kansas?" phenomenon? This question, the title of the famous and insightful book, asked how it could be so many people vote against their own self interest, vote Republican, when the Republican party, clearly, is dedicated to keeping the rich rich and the poor in their place.

The two most likely explanations are: One, Joe Sixpack, who works hard to make $40,000 a year believes, has to believe, someday he will be rich. He believes he is only temporarily poor.. That is his pipe dream and he gets nasty and hostile when you try to disabuse him of this delusion.

The second explanation is the Republicans simply fool enough of the people enough of the time. They tell you you are not making it because the Democrats are spending your money, and it's not your fault: It's the Democrats robbing you blind.

Of course, the truth is just the opposite: it is the Republicans who are robbing you blind, who always have, who have stacked the tax code to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is the Republicans who want to destroy public education because they don't want to pay to educate the poor, especially if the poor might learn to be critical thinkers, in which case the Republican party is really cooked.

If the poor realized the Republican tax code means Warren Buffet pays less income tax than his own secretary, they might get pretty angry at the Republicans. But all the Republicans have to do is say, "No, it's the Democrats who have screwed you with taxes.

It's the old truth that a person often accuses others of the sin of which he himself is most guilty.

The Republicans can propose killing Medicare by turning it into Coupon Care, where you get a fixed amount, say $6,000 a year, to cover your medical expenses and then you find out your coronary by pass surgery will cost $250,000.

Tough luck, sucker.

But the real hard core of Joe Sixpack's resentment against the Democrats is his bitterness about how hard he works and how the Democrats are willing, and have always been willing, to give away money to slackers who simply will not work and who live on welfare, or depend on Medicare or Social Security.

Somehow, the message that Democrats, under President Clinton, and guided by Daniel Patrick Moynahan, changed welfare. There are no more welfare queens, driving Cadillacs, dripping in diamonds, sitting at home collecting welfare checks.

Actually, there never were such queens--the Welfare Queen was the most potent fictional character ever invented by the Republican party.

But there was, once, a very toxic welfare culture, a culture of dependency.

I saw it first hand in a clinic I did in Washington, DC, when a fourteen year old girl came in pregnant and I asked her how she intended to support this baby.

She shrugged her shoulders, looking at the floor and said, "Welfare."

It was a pattern I saw all the time in that clinic: Have the baby, hand it off to grandma, who was herself on welfare, sitting at home at age 40, taking care of her grand daughter's baby and taking care of her daughter's baby, and the daughter was working as a part time clerk and as a part time prostitute. The grand daughter went back to school,l where she got pregnant by three different boys, three more times before she finally left school. And all this depended on the arrival of the welfare checks.

That toxicity poisoned those it supported, but more important, it poisoned a generation of Joe Sixpacks who hated the Democrats for being so soft hearted as to give away the dollars Joe paid in payroll taxes and income taxes and gas taxes to these free loaders.

Democrats have to face this legacy of bitterness head on. We have to say, "We are against taking your money and giving it to people who don't deserve it."

On the other hand, when I asked people, "Suppose you had only two choices: Number One, you get all the healthcare and retirement money you need, but some people who are not working, who refuse to work will also get the same or, Number Two, you do not get any of that healthcare or retirement money, but the people who refuse to work get nothing."

Amazingly, there are people who chose number two.

That is a truth Democrats have to face.

A Revelation

DOUBLE CLICK ON THE GREEN PIE CHART TO ENLARGE

You can always learn something new.

I was so stunned by the pie graphs Paul Solman showed on the PBS News Hour (shown in pretty poor reproduction to the left)

I showed them around the office.

The top pie shows how wealth is distributed in Sweden, and the bottom pie shows the United States, with the yellow slice showing the proportion of all national wealth owned by the top 20% in the nation, the wealthiest 1/5 of the country; the blue slice is what the next most wealthy 20% owns; the magenta slice shows the next 20%'s slice of the pie and so on, down to the lowest 40%, which owns less than 1% of all the wealth in the USA, but in Sweden the poorest 40% owns roughly 25% of all the weath.

So I did what Paul Solman did on the News Hour: I asked people in my office which country they would rather live in, Sweden where the wealth is distributed more evenly or the USA where they wealth is so uneven, where 84% of all the wealth is owned by just 20% of the people.

Of the three coworkers I asked, two said, immediately, they like the Swedish distribution, although not speaking Swedish they would not want to live there.

But one of my coworkers looked at it and said, "Well, to get that distribution, the Swedes had to tax their wealthy. It's a socialist system. I'd rather live here."

When I pressed her she said, she did not make enough money to pay taxes and she had a lot of relatives who don't want to work for a living and she doesn't want to pay taxes to support them.

Floored me.

But it does finally reveal why some people support the Tea Party, and the Republican Party.

There really are people who are offended by the idea of supporting their neighbors, even their relatives. They'd rather have less themselves, just to be sure the undeserving do not get a bigger share. The idea that the richest 1/5 of Americans own over 80% of all the wealth does not disturb these people. Even if the rich do not deserve their wealth, in the sense of not having earned it, that does not disturb my co worker.. What bothered her was not that the rich may not deserve their wealth; what bothered this lady is that someone who does not deserve a hand out may get that support.

One interesting thing about this woman: She is a devout Christian.

Wowser!

Where do you begin with this?

Wealth Re Distribution, Republican Style

This is a pretty dim photograph of a very vivid pie chart from Paul Solman's Public Broadcasting System website, (Google Paul Solman, PBS, Wealth Distribution).

But it's clear enough. The Yellow part of the pie is the wealth owned by the top 20% of Americans. The Blue slice is the wealth owned by the next most wealthy 20% and the Red and Orange slices show the wealth owned by the next three quintiels, i.e. the lower 60% of the country.

Even with the dim graphics, the effects of the Bush Tax Cuts which the Tea Party and the rest of the Republicans are so eager to preserve and defend are starkly visible.

See that tiny little wedge of the pie owned by 60% of our population? Not easy.

This is what the rich get richer plan of Republican voracity has got us.

Is there a more brutally honest way of seeing what these sanctimonious Americans have wrought?

Common Sense

President Barack Obama spoke to the good folks of Cannon Falls, Minnesota about the Republican opposition to raising taxes on billionaires, "Think about that. I mean, that's just not common sense."

Gee whiz, actually, it makes perfect sense.

As usual, President Obama did not name names, so the greedy and the guilty remain faceless, nameless abstractions. They are the guys at Wall Street firms and at banks who played with everyone's money but their own, took no personal risks but reaped huge personal benefits on security back mortgages and things called derivatives and on other financial arcanea and they walked off with millions in their bank accounts, while the rest of the country lost their homes, their jobs and their self respect. Obama said he did not want to go after these guys. He's just too polite to speak ill of anyone. He may be too polite to lead, for that matter.

The Republican party is bought and paid for by billionaires and millionaires and people who are deluded enough to think one day they may become billionaires and they do not want to pay taxes when that happens. These are the poor, deluded souls who in another age would have cried out lustily, "God save the King!" as if the welfare of the king had anything to do with their best interests.

As one great Republican President once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time."

And the Republicans have taken that to heart.

So they create these phony Reischtag fires and they ride to power on them. You remember the Reischtag fire. Well, maybe not, but the Reischtag was the Capitol building of the German Parliament and the Nazis set it ablaze and blamed the Communists and Hitler, newly elected, used this attack on the parliament as an excuse to pass The Enabling Act which gave him a lock on power. The Nazis created a phony "emergency" to justify seizing power, to "save" the country.

Sound familiar?

And now, the Republicans (Mitch, John, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and all those who sail with them) are, as they always do, singing a song in chorus and it goes like this:

Oh, we are the saviors of the Republic,
We are the ones on whom the nation's life does depend.
We will save the country from the Deficit and from Bankruptcy,
From those nasty Democrats who want only to tax and spend!

Millions are unemployed, uninsured, and at their wits' end,
But we will save the billionaires first,
By slipping the knife into Medicare, and making the Democrats bend
And cutting Social Security at the jugular
So we can finally put the New Deal to an end!

And our pitiful President goes to the heart land and says, "It's jut not common sense."
Golly gee, fellas, act nice.

It makes perfectly good sense, to cut taxes for the millionaires, if they are the people who put you in office. We have the best Congress money can buy.

As a great Democratic President once said, "A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk forward."

The same man observed, "Over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present and future wars."

And, if he were alive today, that President would observe that our deficit today was caused by Republicans who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan and by the tax breaks they gave their rich patrons.

And it was this same Democratic President (not President Obama) who said, "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to the ability to pay. That is the only American principle."

So here's hoping our present day President will man up and give 'em hell, President Obama. It's only common sense.

Just the Simple Truth, Please

What I'm wondering is: Who really knows?

Mitt Romney says he knows, and he is a Presidential candidate.

Paul Krugman says he knows, and he is an economist, a Nobel prize winning economist at that.

Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rand and Ron Paul all know, and they sound very sure.

Rush Limbaugh, has always known, and he has been telling us about it ad nauseum for years.

Glenn Beck knows and he has been drawing it on his blackboard, but there really is something loony about his frenetic style, so even if he knows, I'm not sure I can believe him.

So, are we spending too much in Washington?

Are we spending too much in New Hampshire?

I mean, is government spending too much?

Actually, I haven't seen the numbers, and I'm pretty sure if I did see them, they'd be too big and in too many categories and contained in too many graphs for me to actually understand. So I just have to believe other people. But who to believe?

Mitt, Mitch, John, Paul, Rush, Glenn all say we are and they thunder it, like the word of God coming down from the mountain, so they must know.

But little Paul Krugman sits at his computer at Princeton University and looks at numbers and he says, actually, we the government is spending too little, says government spending is actually a smaller part of the overall economy than it has been in decades, says we should have spent way more in that stimulus package and if we had we would've actually pulled out of the recession, rather than just wallowing toward the shore.

Money, economy, deficits, debt payments, really Social Security and Medicare are all about the numbers, aren't they? Until they become about the people affected by the numbers, or the candidates trying to get elected by the numbers.

So we are told to look at numbers and apply them to the complex government numbers they are fighting over down in Washington.

We got more going out than coming in.

Maybe, maybe not. But, for the sake of argument let's say, yes, more going out than coming in.

So what should we do about that?

If I have too little to cover expenses, especially fixed expenses, I typically look for another job, a contract, some more income.

But for the government, that means taxes, fees, "income enhancement."

And for Mitt, Rand, Ron, Rush, Mitch and John, that "Tax" word is a four letter word they dare not speak.

Even closing "tax loop holes" is an anathema for these boys. Loop holes which allow you to deduct a corporate jet (because, as Mitt tells us corporations are people) or allows you to buy a Ford Expedition and deduct it as a business expense if you are a doctor--but you could not deduct your Honda Civic (go figure.)

So the Republicans are like those people who are starving but their religion forbids them to eat sacred cows, so they cannot take action to save themselves or their people. Except for the Republicans, it's sacred cows, chickens, hogs, corn, wheat, soy and fish. You just cannot touch anything to help save yourself if that anything is "Taxes."