Democratic addiction to taxes

The latest tax talk regards an old idea of a carbon tax. Democrats are at least blustering as if they believe they have enough political mojo following the election to combine their populist victory with a concern for the earth and convince enough Americans that a carbon tax on rich bastards is the way to go to both raise revenue and reduce carbon emissions -- it has the appeal of taxes on cigarettes. On one hand the purpose is to reduce smoking, but on the other hand government wants the tax money, so more smokers would bring in more money. A carbon tax will not save the earth, but it will cost jobs.

The Democratic obsession with raising taxes reveals their priorities in Obama's second term. It appears Obama has his eyes on a spectacular government investment effort that turns around the economy and brings back full employment, while also moving the progressive agenda along. With government in control of the investment, Obama and Company can invest in progressive projects. If Obama can coopt Boehner and McConnell, he can invest in projects that build on the Democratic political alliance that's shooting for a permanent majority. Both parties have dreamed of a permanent majority in the last few decades, but the Democrats believe that demographics and Silver-Science favor them now. This is not just a another political narrative for show -- this could be the real thing, a real permanent majority for a long, long time.

In order to complete and sustain this political alliance, Democrats need plenty of money. Hitting the rich up for higher taxes early in 2013 is a down payment -- it's going to take a lot more. When the Obama machine goes into campaign mode in 2013 it will be to convince the nation that statism is our hope, and that free market ideology is dead. As the economy continues to stagnate, Americans will become desperate to believe government has a plan. It's an investment plan. That's what we need, right? Investment. Yes, investment in the future, forward. I think the American people just might buy it. Well, the Democrats did win, so...America will get what she asked for.

As the country goes forward with this, I simply advise that all concerned Americans find a good source of economic information and follow the progress of the investments. This could go terribly wrong, and if it does, we'll have to act quickly to correct the course. I don't think government investment will work, but Democrats think it will, so we'll see. I also think that more than the rich will end up paying for this investment. Hold on, America, it's going to be a bumpy, and expensive, ride.

Up with Chris Hayes 7/22/2012 -- Please, tax the rich

Social democrats in the Democrat Party are on a major campaign to raise taxes on the rich. Chris Hayes started his morning show with a call to raise taxes, challenging his guests to debate the pros and cons. Hayes openly admits that he is fully supportive of higher taxes on the rich, up to 70 or 80% even.

Taxing the rich will pay for a week or two of government spending, but I guess social democrats believe that every little bit helps. For the Left now it has a become a principle of fairness -- their version of fairness -- and it has nothing to do with reducing the debt or funding stimulus, because it will do neither.

The Left simply can't fund their agenda by taxing the rich -- they will wind up hurting the very government programs which now send money to Americans in need. For one thing, we live in a world with a large global market that's interconnected in ways earlier generations could not have imagined. At the level of wealth production, the activity is less national and more global. Corporations can operate their businesses anywhere in the world, and capital will flee to where it gets the best return.

If government wealth-confiscation begins running businesses off to other countries, it will ultimately reduce government revenues. American government has basically given large American corporations favored treatment at the expense of small businesses in America -- if government now begins to call in favors and starts taxing these corporations heavily, the corporations will likely do whatever they have to do to avoid the confiscation of their their wealth. Big Corporations will see the writing on the wall, that only they are producing enough wealth for government to take, and it will only get progressively worse as government's funding needs become greater from increased spending.

Until we have widespread economic growth which entails growth in small businesses, there will not be enough revenue to fund the progressive agenda. Democrats have promised 98% of the country that their taxes will not go up, and there's simply no way to get enough just from rich people to fund government spending. Once the world rejects our spending, government programs will be cut, and we all know that the poor will get hit the hardest - the middle class will use their clout to protect their government goodies, but the poor have no one to fight for them. This is what social democrats are creating in the name of fairness.

Austerity nonsense

Even the talk of austeriy has brought out the modern madness of government dependence, reactionaly statism and wishful thinking in incredible ways. Obama and Biden talk as if some mysterious Republican force is creating an era of austerity, when in reality deficit spending is out of control. Europe talks about austerity as if there have been actual cuts in spending rather than an approximate 9% planned increase. Hell, France went socialist to avoid even the talk of austerity -- it's sort of like taking poison because some blowhard threatened to kick your ass.

There is no austerity, except among the people who can't get decent work in this butchered economy. In the US, the majority of Americans who call themselves Democrats obviously believe that we can stack up 17 trillion in debt and 80 or so trillion in unfunded liabilities with no consequences. As Krugman says, we only need to raise taxes on the rich and government needs to keep on spending until the economy gets back to normal. So what's all this fuss regarding austerity? Life's ups and downs have been fixed by progressive government if the Republicans will only listen. Democrats are counting on the public's agreement that we can't know until we try, so why not go forward, spend the money and tax the rich, like the socialist in France is recommending, then see what happens. Why should we suffer austerity if government can simply spend money, support everyone who's having a hard time and let the rich pay for it. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it. Don't worry. government has it under control. 

Up with Chris Hayes 9/24/2011 - Minions on the Left

Chris Hayes is the most unlikely host of a morning talk show, awkward, irritating, geeky, snarky, un-charismatic, but here he is on Saturday and Sunday from 7am - 9am with his Leftist buds trashing Republicans and all things Right, letting his handful of watchers know how things are done in his circle jerk world. Most of the groups the Left supports would watch this with glazed eyes, if they were awake this early on the weekend, and they wouldn't understand any of it except the explicit "Republicans are idiots" claims. Chris and his buds talk their insider talk, with code words and short-hand ideas, and I don't think they realize how exclusive this is, and how it shuts out the very people they surely want to reach -- this is an echo chamber. There are plenty of reasons to criticize past and present Republican performance in government, but Chris and the gang make so many hyperbolic claims that it comes off as so much propaganda and spin.

I've followed the young Left's conversation on blogs, so I can keep up, but most people who happened to land on MSNBC by mistake and listen for part of a minute will quickly dismiss this as gobledygook. Surely Chris and his buds aren't just talking to their followers who make up a statistically meaningless portion of the public, and who won't likely buy the products advertised during the show.

To break it down, the Left is bummed that Obama has to play the political game and can't just push his progressive agenda on through and really stick it to the Koch Brothers of the world. The Left needs money and practically unlimited power in order to, ostensibly, help the middle class and poor -- then they can maintain permanent power and arrange society in ways that, ostensibly, promote social justice, but Republicans and Tea Partiers are obstructing the plan. Hayes said he's tired of Republicans stating over and over that the top top 10% already pay 70% of the income taxes, even though it's true, and he even had a chart showing that with a flat tax, the rich would still pay more than others, so what's the big deal?

What Hayes and his buds, Ezra Klein, Liliana Segura, Anne-Marie Slaughter and the new-age George Wills, Reihan Salam, who is the token person-who-is-not-a-raging-Leftist, failed to make clear is that most rich people have been okay paying more in taxes than everyone else, and that's not really the issue -- the issue is the current push to make it appear the rich aren't paying their "fair share", so they must be forced to pay more, and more, and then, I'm sure, more, as spending goes up and up and up. They even had a Leftist economist on who admitted that spending will necessarily go up and up and up, and that cutting waste, fraud and abuse will not touch the increase in spending, so the only solution is to get more from the rich.

Chris Hayes and his buds spent a lot of time criticizing the Right's positions on all the major issues, but very little time on what plans the Left has prepared to deal with the problems and why we should implement the plans. Salam, to his credit, did bring up the problem of how the money is spent. Just raising more revenue is not a good plan if the money is wasted on cronyism and buying votes. It doesn't tell us anything when the Left criticizes Republican support for Israel when they don't tell us their brilliant solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem. It doesn't help general understanding to denigrate the Republican position on immigration when no viable plan from the Left is proposed, but this is how Chris and his gang roll, if you can figure out what they're talking about.

The New Obama

The New Obama comes with a ready made political narrative -- Obama's best chance to get something done is to be forceful and gain public support for tax hikes on the rich. Afterall, Obama has tried working with the Republicans and agreeing to concessions, so now he must stay strong and back Republicans into a corner.

This narrative assumes that a majority of Americans will respond emotionally to the rich paying far more to fund government spending. It assumes that the public isn't really against government spending as long as the rich pay for it. If this narrative is true, then nothing has changed, because this has been the case with the public for a long time -- give me mine and let someone else pay for it, and who better to pay for it than the filthy rich, except it's not only the filthy rich who'll be paying. Small business owners will pay too, and this means that fewer jobs are created, and, thus, everyone gets hurt, unless the middle class and the poor are satisfied living off government welfare.

You can't continue a situation where more and more money is confiscated from the private sector and have economic growth, expansion and job creation -- you can't have both. The public has to choose one or the other -- does the public want economic expansion and new jobs, or does the public want stagnation tilting toward decline, high unemployment and welfare benefits? The New Obama is just the same old Progressive we've seen since FDR through LBJ, Carter and Clinton, the Left's version of statism which has competed against Right statism from Nixon through Bush. The only thing "new" is that now we're at a tipping point, and we can't play the statist game any longer without the type of financial crisis which invites authoritarian rule and loss of freedom.