Our first rail of politics is that Real Americans do not want to pay taxes that would benefit anyone less White than they
I waded through this very long and extremely boring five page cover story in Newsweek today. One need not travel very far into this essay of dire economic statistics to find Niall Ferguson does not like the words "Keynesian" and "Krugman", AT ALL!
Ferguson is a very British conservative economist who is most famous for defending Western Colonialism and Imperialism. An Empire at Risk – We won the cold war and weathered 9/11. But now economic weakness is endangering our global power.
"This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America’s debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term should be the administration’s most important task—significantly more than the 24 percent who see health-care reform as the No. 1 priority. But cutting the deficit in half is simply not enough. If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power."
All in all the piece defends our recent Tea Bagger movement which blames President Obama for destroying our Nation by increasing the debt. It mostly rails against social programs; primarily, Social Security, Medicare and Health Care reform which reduces the funding of our military to wage wars throughout the world. Which is not only the gist of the article, but the gist of what the author is ALL about.
A while after I had finished reading and moved on to the more important articles concerning some billionaire golfer being THREE ironed by his wife and a blond bombshell party crasher – it suddenly occurred to me that in that long article the way to fix the coming apocalypse was not mentioned. I went back and read it all again to find that indeed no mention was made of the simple fix which would be just to raise taxes, nominally to about what the rest of the civilized world pays and it would be a new day dawning for our city on the hill.
This issue of paying taxes is sometimes called the third rail of American politics (if true I can’t imagine what the first and second rail would be) and is so entrenched in our national psyche as bad, wrong, evil and unAmerican that it is no longer even discussed as an option. Well unless they manage to semantically hide it under their beds
You know, those screeching the loudest these days never once rose their voices a decibel to the 1 trillion dollars spent on our wars over the last 8 years. Unfunded and borrowed on the backs of our Children no less. With ZERO BENEFITS other than 6000 dead American kids and some small buzz of feeling somehow safer.
While real health care reform will cost LESS and also save the lives of millions of people.
And what about the $100 billion more per year President Obama just un-dithered on us last night. No squawking about that, it slides right into the ideology; taxes are for war, prisons, executions and bass boat ramps.
Sometimes I am even more embarrassed being an American than a Texan…