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Thread: We Love Free Stuff ... As Long As Someone Else Is Paying For It - Bernie Goldberg

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    We Love Free Stuff ... As Long As Someone Else Is Paying For It - Bernie Goldberg

    It's become Democratic Party orthodoxy, at least if you're a progressive running for president: First, you righteously demand that the richest Americans pay their "fair share" which is a top tax rate of at least 70 percent. Then you promise "free" college at public universities for everyone. After that, you say that health care is a right and demand "Medicare for all." For good measure you throw in that everyone who wants a job will be guaranteed a job, maybe even a guaranteed annual income, and of course, in the short run, an increase in the minimum wage.

    This is why Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO, says he won't run for president as a Democrat and is contemplating a run as an independent — because the party has moved so far to the left that he doesn't recognize it anymore. In today's Democratic Party, a centrist like Schultz is considered out of the mainstream; in their eyes, he's the radical. Hello?

    "I've been a Democrat, but I am no longer," he said. "I don't affiliate myself with the Democratic Party, who's so far left, who basically wants the government to take over health care, which we cannot afford, the government to give free college to everybody, and the government to give everyone a job. ... We can't afford it."

    This is blasphemy in progressive America, where they love diversity except diversity of political opinion. But if Shultz thinks the American people are too smart to be suckered in by pie in the sky socialism, he might want to think again. A recent Hill-HarrisX poll found that 59 percent of registered voters support a 70 percent tax bracket for the wealthiest Americans — and that includes 45 percent of Republicans! And a Fox poll shows an even higher percentage, 70 percent of registered voters, support the idea.

    And then there's the new progressive congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who thinks a 70 percent tax rate may be too low. "We could increase the taxes that people are paying who are the extremely wealthy in our communities. So 70 percent, 80 percent, we've had it as high as 90 percent," Omar said before adding the mandatory mantra of the progressive left: "The one percent must pay their fair share."

    Elizabeth Warren, another progressive who wants to be president, isn't happy with merely raising taxes on income. She wants a two percent annual wealth tax on Americans with a net worth of more than $50 billion.

    So let's review some familiar statistics: Households in the top 20 percent of income pay 87 percent of all federal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent pays about three percent. So who's not paying their "fair share"?

    And so despite all the bromides about how fair-minded we Americans are, let's not forget this tidbit of reality: Voters love free stuff, as long as someone else is paying for it.

    Taking shots at wealthy Americans is nothing new, of course, in Democratic politics. Dividing Americans by how much money they make, turning the middle and lower economic classes against the wealthy is part of the liberal/progressive playbook. Waging class warfare is what they do – for votes.

    And they know that socialism isn't a scary concept anymore, especially to young Americans who never heard of Venezuela or Margaret Thatcher, let alone her famous line about how the "problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

    All this left-wing economic insanity got me to thinking about one of my favorite books, the 1957 classic by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.

    It's a novel about how the government of the United States punishes successful business people, how it sees them as the villains of society, and how a mysterious heroic man called John Galt convinces business leaders to walk away from their companies as a "strike" by productive individuals against the "looters."

    Rand's said her goal for writing the novel was "to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to the world without them."

    What happened in Atlas Shrugged is that the most successful business people did in fact drop out of society and guess what ...without them the economy collapsed; America sank into a great Depression.

    And imagine if, in real life, the wealthiest Americans followed John Galt's lead and said something like, "You might be able to confiscate our wealth but you can't stop us from dropping out. You can't make us keep our businesses open. You can't stop us from furloughing workers as a protest against your toxic class warfare malarkey."

    What would all those Americans who think that socking it to the rich is a great idea, think then?

    In my less generous moments, I root for the kind of chaos that would ensue if the rich said, "We've had enough!" And I (admittedly ungraciously) think it might actually be fun to see those suddenly scared faces when they learn that Lady Thatcher was right about how the party ends when the government runs out of other people's money.

    Like the ending of Atlas Shrugged, they'll be begging the rich to come back, to open their businesses, to resuscitate the economy and give them back their jobs.

    Where have you gone John Galt? With so many progressive presidential wannabes vilifying success and offering "free" stuff in exchange for votes, America needs you now more than ever.

    https://bernardgoldberg.com/we-love-...paying-for-it/

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  3. #2
    I often wonder how the majority of people can always be some stupid and weak minded. Then I read the Mosaic books, see how stupid the majority of Israelites were, despite all of the teachings and promises given and the miracles they saw, and it now makes sense. Even after the millennium when Satan is released after 1000 years numerous people who have experience 1000 years of Jesus Christ reigning on earth with peace, prosperity, and health will still listen to Satan and turn against God.

    As my former pastor, Paul E. Terry, Jr. often said, "peeples are crazee."
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  5. #3
    The American Dream is coming to an end. Banks and the deep state will end up sabotaging the very thing that made them rich in order to gain more power, more quickly. When socialism arrives, the ultra rich will be atop the stack looking down.

    Yet, when Jesus returns they will weep over the burning Babylon and will cry out for rocks to hide them. They will indeed have gained the whole world and lost their own soul.

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    Ezekiel 33 (02-04-2019)

  7. #4
    Imagine for a moment that a presidential candidate made this speech:

    My fellow Americans, I’m here today to tell you about my economic plan. Each year, I will require every middle-class family across this great country to write a check. We will then pool the money and distribute it to the richest Americans among us — the top 1 percent of earners, who, because of their talent, virtue and success, deserve even more money.

    The exact size of the checks will depend on a family’s income, but a typical middle-class household will hand over $15,000 each year. This plan, I promise all of you, will create the greatest version of America that has ever existed.


    You would consider that proposal pretty radical, wouldn’t you? Politically crazy. Destructive, even. Well, I’ve just described the actual changes in the American economy since the 1970s.

    Economic output — known as G.D.P. — per person has almost doubled over this period. But the bulk of the bounty has flowed to the very rich. The middle class has received relative crumbs.

    If middle-class pay had increased as fast as the economic growth, the average middle-class family would today earn about $15,000 a year more than it does, after taxes and benefits. Instead, that middle-class family effectively forfeits the money to the rich, year after year after year. (Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, first got me thinking about calculations like these.)

    The extreme redistribution of income — upward — has multiple causes. Some of them, like technological change, stem mostly from private-sector forces. But government policy plays a crucial role. Tax rates on the wealthy have fallen sharply. Labor unions have been undermined. Big companies have been allowed to grow even bigger and more powerful. The United States has lost its lead as the most educated country in the world.

    More often than not over the past 40 years, our government has helped the rich at the expense of everyone else. As a result, economic inequality has reached Gilded Age levels.

    In the face of these trends, the radical response is to do nothing — or to make inequality even worse, as President Trump’s policies have. It’s radical because soaring inequality is starting to threaten the basic fabric of American life. Many people have grown frustrated and cynical. Average life expectancy, amazingly, has fallen over the past few years.

    Over the sweep of history, the main reason that societies have declined, as the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have written, is domination “by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people.” The name of Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s book on this phenomenon is, “Why Nations Fail.”

    It’s worth keeping all of this in mind when you hear critics (or journalists) describe the economic proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates as “radical.” They’re not radical, for the most part. The proposals are instead efforts to undo some of the extreme economic changes of recent decades and to ensure that most Americans workers — not just a narrow elite — fully benefit from economic growth.

    The proposals also happen to be popular, broadly speaking. On social issues, like abortion and immigration, the country is deeply divided. But clear majorities support higher taxes on the wealthy, higher taxes on corporations, more education funding and expanded government health insurance. No wonder: Americans don’t resent success, but they do resent not receiving their fair share of economic growth.

    The coming primary campaign will be a good time for the candidates to hash out which specific ideas make sense and which don’t. So far, the agenda looks pretty good. Elizabeth Warren has a plan to increase workers’ power within companies — and help them get larger pre-tax raises. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris want to lift the after-tax pay of the middle class and poor. Kirsten Gillibrand and others support reducing major living costs, like child care and education.

    Perhaps most important, some Democrats have begun pushing for a wealth tax — to reverse the upward redistribution of the past 40 years. Warren has proposed an annual 2 or 3 percent tax on large fortunes. Bernie Sanders has proposed a big increase in the inheritance tax.

    These wealth taxes are a classic example of policies that are less radical than their opponents claim. Do you know who already pays a wealth tax? Middle-class Americans. It’s called the property tax, as Noah Smith of Bloomberg Opinion has noted. Every year, homeowners pay a percentage of their house value in tax. A house, of course, is the biggest asset that most families own. If middle-class families can pay an annual tax on their main source of wealth, wealthy families can, too.

    The United States as we have known it — optimistic, future-oriented and more powerful than any other nation — cannot survive the stagnation of mass living standards over many decades. I’m glad to see that some political leaders understand this and are trying to recapture a core feature of American life.

    Maybe we should start describing those leaders as conservatives.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/o...gtype=Homepage

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