Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending,” that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.”
(via New Paltz Journal.)
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28 comments:
But most of the Jim Crow laws were written by democrats, IIRC, right?
I'm confused. Dissent is patriotic if you're a jim crow Democrat, but if you believe in the Constitution and the rule of law you're a terrrist? I need this on some kind of laminated card or something so I can remember the rules.
og: Better not laminate that card; and write it in pencil so that, if you can keep up with them, you can integrate the rule changes made by the left to fit whatever they find is poitically expedient at any given moment.
Oh, and even if you DID manage to keep up to date, prepare to be "wrong" simply because you don't agree with whatever liberal you happen to be talking to regardless of what solid evidence and stitistical data says.
I give up, let them win and prepare to survive the fallout. It's much less annoying that way.
s
I didn't know George Bush was black. Huh. The things you learn from th' Innernet.
@Stuart the Viking
FYI, Obama is the first democrat president to spend like a republican.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
Apparently, the only republican presidents who did not increase the debt to gdp ratio were Eisenhower and Nixon.
It doesn't really matter who is the president. There's no reason to believe McCain would be any better, finance-wise.
It's something like a "going-out-of-business" sale. While the dollars are still worth something, massive spendings is needed. Fill the public trough to the brim for the last time.
"Apparently, the only republican presidents who did not increase the debt to gdp ratio were Eisenhower and Nixon."
A lot of our biggest current budget woes were ticking time bombs that took decades to detonate.
And the smackdown of the week goes to Tam, for having actual facts at her disposal.
I love the knee-jerks of the comments. (I refer to the comments themselves rather than the renderers of those statements.)
The business about Republican presidents over-spending has become a cliche. The overlooked element is that the President is responsible for submitting a budget. Beyond that point the issue of spending and debt are the purview of Congress. Congress seldom complies with the limits in the budget of even the most responsible Presidents.
Reagan cut taxes drastically and revenues rose, but for several years of his presidency he had a Democrat-controlled Congress. Clinton presided over a reduction in deficits and the national debt, but for most of his presidency he had a Republican controlled Congress. See how that works?
Unforunately for all of us the legacy of the Congressional Republicans in the Bush(43) years is a spending spree that makes them indistinguishable from Dems.
All of it pales in comparison to the current situation, however. Regretably the rhetoric of the Messiah regarding fiscal restraint is unmatched by his actions and those of his minions at the far end of Pennsylvania Ave.
"Clinton presided over a reduction in deficits and the national debt, but for most of his presidency he had a Republican controlled Congress."
Boy, do I miss gridlock... :D
@Tam
Assuming the DoD budget and extra appropriations for the war on "terror", the bailout money, don't matter (it's been less than a trillion in the past 10 years) the policies ..
Why haven't the Conservatives done away with agricultural subsidies? They've been in place for more than seventy years.
Same goes for social security. (~20% of federal gov't expenditures)
Or Medicare(another 20% of federal expenditures)?
Isn't it outrageous that public money is being spent on people who should have instead exercised personal responsibility and saved money in anticipation of old age and the illnesses that very often come with it?
Though, I suppose, one has to blame the people. You have a representative government after all.
If Americans weren't mostly a bunch of socialist welfare-appreciating bums or that apathetic, those fiscally unsound socialist programs could've been history decades ago.
So, who do you blame?
Aussenseiter (cute nom de plume that): Our problem is that our cities, mostly along the coasts, are filled with culturally unassimilated Europeans. And I say that with an EU passport in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser.
Generations here, and they never left Italy, Russia, or the stettl.
I agree that we're stuck with Sopcial Security and Medicare/Medicaid, because too many people got to where they are now without putting something aside, typical everywhere socialized medicine is found.
Interestingly, Germany, where social security was invented, now offers American style HMO's for those willing to ante up the extra Euros (soon to be once again Deutchmarks, if Greece is any indicator).
Our defense budget might be a tad smaller if our "allies" were willing to maintain real militaries and actually use them as something more than a repository for obese beer and sausage swilling losers, essentially unemployable at any other thing than taking up space and embarrasing their country.
Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case, as certain European countries (most of them actually) seem willing to acceed to the wishes of the terrorists and hand over their countries without a fight.
I understand that Germany has shut off the water and electricity to a number of towns and cities in the southeastern part of the country as a result of declining population. Most of Europe has a birth rate one third lower than it's death rate, and in good sized cities, most of the births are to Turkish, north African, or Kurdish women. All of them Moslem, all from a culture that will glory in the death of Europe.
In America, the typical 35 year old Republican, predominantly suburban, small town, or rural (American) woman is married and has 2.3 children. The typical, mostly urban, Democrat (European flovored) woman is single and has 1.4 children.
Who is more likely to want government assistance, and be willing to tolerate the disintegration of society a decade in the future to guarantee her security now?
The disease started in Europe and spread here.
A majority of my extended family is Bavarian, Austrian, Swiss, or Sudeten, so I'm not "Kraut-Bashing".
But Europe gave the vote to the peasants in the 19th century, without trying to encourage them to move up the ladder to American style bourgoise lifestyle and values, the same situation you'll find in America's sad and unredeemable urban areas.
The nightmare that resulted can be traced, even here, back to that sorry exercise in social engineering. G.B. Shaw wrote a mean novel, but he and the other well intentioned naiives in the Fabian movement were the primary movers in the eventual suicide of the west. They set the stage for Marx, and handed him the ammunition he needed.
The situation is, reductio ad absurdum, the American in a sinking boat, with a meter of freeboard left, being ridiculed by the European with water coming in over the gunwales.
"Why haven't the Conservatives done away with (fill in the blank)?"
I could give the flippant answer ("What conservatives?" A-ha-ha...), but the truth of the matter is what I've stated here before many times: That the U.S. political system, as practiced for more than a century, is set up to function not as a pendulum, but as a ratchet.
It's even entrenched in the names of the factions. We don't need "conservatives" and "progressives", we need reactionaries.
Außenseiter,
Re SS & Medicare: Some of us had large amounts of money extracted from our paychecks (without permission) for 50 years. Some of us at the highest rate for most of that time. The govt. decided to spend that money on other things like giving it to people who hadn't worked for 40+ years. If all that money had been put in a passbook savings account SS & Medicare wouldn't be insolvent today.
Taktron
Thanks Tamara for sharing.
http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/03/21/GR2009032100104.gif
So, nothing new, right? The other guys are JUST as bad, right?
(Dont' get me wrong. The other guys were & are evil too. But -- well, follow the link.)
Personally I liked this quote:
"Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time’s Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was “seditious,” because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to “educator” William Ayers’s education reforms, nobody knows what “seditious” means anymore."
It says a lot about a faction when they think that quoting a founding document ideas about limited government is a threat.
It says a lot about a faction when they think that quoting a founding document ideas about limited government is a threat.
________
It is a threat. Teaching that the American Revolution was a tax revolt, that the Founders raised an army and went to a war over the 18th century equivalent of the government raising the cigarette tax a couple percentage points might make people stop and think about whether a government that takes half the wealth of the nation into its pockets is worthy of their obedience.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pick up my Wookie suit from the dry cleaners.
Sedition, you say.
Damn wookies...
Though being all 2nd amendment one's halfway in the suit.
People seeing the goverment make up rules as they go along, ignore what a law acutally says, and pretend the Constitution doesn't limit their actions?
Oh and you'll be called a paranoid racist hater for pointing these things out.
Welcome to our world.
Ok, the system is broken. What does a fixed system look like, and how do you get there?
Jim
There's no such thing as a "fixed system". That tends to push people towards solutions--which fail--and that eventually leads to final solutions. Even if there was a solid solution, leaving it in the hands of a politician makes it a solid failure.
Your best bet is to get them out of your face, and do your best to make sure they don't get paid to be douchebags. It's way too profitable being an authoritarian douchebag these days. Challenge them, ignore them, fire them, take away their douchebag funding.
@reflectoscope: The system in Chicago could be said to be "fixed"...
wv: shise. Rhymes (sort of) with German Scheiße, means...
"If all that money had been put in a passbook savings account SS & Medicare wouldn't be insolvent today."
Unless you're getting an astoundingly high interest rate on that passbook savings account, SS and Medicaid would still be underfunded.
The system worked pretty well when 5 to 7 workers were supporting 1 retiree, health care costs were low, and the average retiree was living for about 5 years after retirement. If the boomers were going to fully fund their retirement and health care for 15 or more years, in an era of high health care costs, with fewer working offspring to support them, they would have had to have paid much higher taxes in their working years.
@Tam
It all boils down to whether it's possible to maintain a sane fiscal policy in a system where it's almost politically impossible to cut welfare or retirement benefits. Or do something about companies buying representatives.
There's a lack of alternatives to representative democracy, and no non-violent means of changing to such a system.
@Ed Foster
Living and working conditions in the 19th century were pretty awful. I don't think one can blame someone for trying to do something about that. It's quite possible that in the absence of socialist democratic policies, actual communists would have prevailed.
"It all boils down to whether it's possible to maintain a sane fiscal policy..."
So far, the old saw about it only working until the people realize they can vote themselves largesse from from the public treasury has proven 100% historically accurate.
I also agree with Billy Beck in that I don't think that this is something we can vote our way out of, since it was voting that got us into it in the first place.
Barring a massive change in the culture, we are on a one way trip to one or all of the following:
A) A Eurosocialist-style fiscal collapse. (The entire model of that society is based on population growth and a death shortly after retirement.)
B) Some manner of far more autocratic and centralized rule.
C) Balkanization.
Whatever it is, I just hope it holds off until after I'm dead and gone.
Actually, living conditions in the 19th century were quite variable.
The industrial revolution in the New England region was noted for it's gentility. The Waltham clock factory in Massachussetts was the role model for the entire reformation.
Large windows and natural lighting, with workstations along the windows, mandatory dresscodes, clean and chaperoned boarding houses for all unmarried men and women, with counselling from ministers and free nightschool for all employees.
Altruism write large? Of course not. There was a frontier, with free land available and new industries desperate for help. The eastern companies had to offer tremendous work packages to keep the help.
The system worked well until the 1870's, at least outside the major cities, until the hordes of eastern and southern Europe came to the states, driving down the value of the individual worker.
What ensued was essentially a human inflation spiral, too many people chasing too few jobs.
The same thing happened in Europe after the bubonic plagues.
The origin of the modern European middle class, and the decline of the nobility, was in the desperate need for workers, and the ability of those workers, now much fewer in numbers, to bargain more effectively for larger shares of the profits. And quite often the outright ownership of their land.
If actual communists had prevailed in 19th century Europe, they would have starved, and everyone with a brain and initiative would have moved to America or Australia. I suspect most did.
In his second book, Adolf Hitler referred to Americans as the true superrace, as they had been skimming most of Europe's best for centuries. Google it up, it's an eerie but interesting read.
My objection to the Fabians was their naiive assumptions about the rather brutalized and brutal occupants of the typical Victorian slum. It would have taken generations to seperate the wheat from the chaff, but the egos of the well intentioned refused to let nature take it's course, and issued control of their new democracies to a collection of lazy sociopaths.
The American east coast was settled by middle class bourgeoise from Britain, with similar settlements inland from Germany and Holland. Even the indentured servants who worked their passage were from carefully vetted families, middle class people who had fallen on hard times.
Virtually the only "wild" people allowed in were the Irish and Scots of the Appalachin frontier, ideally suited for Indian fighting, exploring, and military service. Also crime.
If you ever get the chance to read "Bloodletters and Badmen", an encyclopedia of the American west, the first thing that will strike you is that, conservatively, more than 90% of all the wild men were "Scoth-Irish".
In a dinner conversation with captured British general David Sterling, Irwin Rommel once said "The Irish are the greatest soldiers in the history of the human race".
When George Patton heard that, he added "It's true. Also the greatest politicians, con men, and used car salesmen".
The point I'm trying to make is that we have a cultural divide in this country that closely matches a geographical division.
I conceed the Appalachins and areas of the west settled from them don't quite fit the mold, as among Celtic people tribal loyalty often (usually?)trumps common sense, but for the most part we are two very different peoples in this country, one still very much steeped in a traditional middle class sensibility, one not.
The collectivist European ethos never really made it out of the coastal cities, and if we could dump them, what would be left would still be, as Abraham Lincoln said, "The last best hope of mankind".
Tam,
planning on leaving the party early? I'm fairly sure that is the only way your hope will be realized.
That light in the tunnel ahead is not daylight, it's an express train running very very late, and they have the throttle tied wide open while the current fireman is shoveling fuel into the firebox as fast as possible. The fireman is actually the engineer, and the train headed the wrong direction is intentional. The resultant smash-up may not be expected by those on board that express, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. Interesting times ahead.
wv: fightl...
I really have no desire to live in interesting times.
I really hope there is some way to get things going in a better direction. I can't just hope that things hold together until I've shed this mortal coil, as I have a niece and a nephew who stand to inherit this mess and all its onerous obligations.
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