Well, now. I’m sure Senator McCain has a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, and would kindly like to remind you to leave Obama alone and shut your stinking pie hole, hater. Big Government:
Responding to widespread criticism of his AWOL status on the budget fight, President Obama today unveiled a fiscal plan. It already is being criticized for its class warfare approach to tax policy, but the most disturbing feature may be a provision that punishes the American people with higher taxes if politicians overspend.
Called a “debt failsafe trigger,” Obama’s scheme would automatically raise taxes if politicians spend too much. According to the talking points distributed by the White House, the automatic tax increase would take effect “if, by 2014, the projected ratio of debt-to-GDP is not stabilized and declining toward the end of the decade.”
Let’s ponder what this means.
If politicians in Washington spend too much and cause more red ink, which happens on a routine basis, Obama wants a provision that automatically would raise taxes on the American people.
In other words, they play and we pay. The last thing we need is a perverse incentive for even more reckless spending from Washington.
Of course, I predicted this in advance of the speech — and I speculated that by way of a linguistic twist Obama would work to shift the economic paradigm in this country. So when he bragged yesterday once again about “transforming” this country, he was being quite literal in a place we as consumers of campaign speeches generally expect politicians to speak figuratively and hyperbolically: at the heart of Obama’s thinking is that all the wealth of the country belongs to the government, and that the government is the font of all things — from charity to your personal dignity to the source of whatever income you’re allowed to keep as part of your “fair share.” The rest will be administered and doled out by an all-powerful, benevolent, centralized authority bent on “social justice” and equality of outcome.
This is Marxist thinking — and the President’s speech yesterday was a direct and soaring appeal both to and for the glories of the social welfare state, and an attack on the foundational principles of this country. To his way of thinking, the country became great only when it began overstepping its Constitutional authority, when it created bloated — and now, largely failed — entitlement programs run by the federal government. Individualism is to be traded in for the coming together of community; freedom and liberty are replaced by “security” and “dignity” — as if one’s dignity is derived from the largess shown one by the kindly leviathan of state.
It was, in short, a speech that, far from pragmatic, espoused the very socialist ideas many of us have insisted animate this man. It was repulsive to me, and it should be repulsive to anyone who respects the kernel assumptions of the American experiment.
I’ve been screaming for nearly 10-years now that the way forward is to confidently contrast classical liberal/constitutional conservative ideals with those of the progressive left that have taken on the ridiculous label of “liberal.” And I’ve been trying to show, at every occasion, how “progressive” ideology — for all it’s Utopian promises — can only lead, inexorably and inevitably, to authoritarianism, liberal fascism, and a kind of economic and intellectual slavery.
Obama’s speech couldn’t have been more stark in it message: when the government overspends, that means less money for the taxpayer to keep. Making the taxpayer, by definition, subordinate to the government that is supposedly his. And this, too, is inevitable once we allow the semantic shift that turns government overspending into “unpaid tax expenditures.”
The government owns all wealth. It just allows you to keep some — depending on how much it feels it needs at any given time. Not only that? But some of you — the productive class — need to either stop doing so well, or pay more to the federal maw, so that the money can be used to fund programs aimed at properly redistributing that wealth to those who now have no incentive to be productive.
That’s not a social safety net. That’s a cultural noose. And as a tenet of governance, it is as anti-American, in the strictest sense, as is possible.
(thanks to geoff b)
Hey, Mr. President? How about if you go fuck yourself?
It’s a social comfy hammock. FOR LIBERTY!!!
How can you be free without a big government teat swollen with free milk?
“‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to
programs like Medicare and Social Security……personal savings, personal retirement investments, personal rainy-day funds, and local charitable organizations that help knit our neighborhoods together by helping our neighbors.”
Fixed that for ya, Mr. President. Happy to be of service!
Not a rhetorical statement. Folks should let that sink in.
Every aspect of “private” American life involves forced fealty to some authority, somewhere, typically federal. Banking, personal taxation, money itself, commerce, retirement, property, building, housing, maintenance and improvement, inheritance, medicine, education, scores of activities and recreations, the environment, transit, and personal defense.
Undoubtedly there are more. The notion that this is a free country is a joke. This is the USSA.
Hey, Obama didn’t say automatic tax increases! He said spending reductions in the tax code! BREITBART LIES!!!!
Let’s look at this another way. Let’s say politicians continue going apeshit with expenditures then automatically passed on to us. Their constituents.
Surely Obarky meant to encourage voter recourse in such cases.
Called a “debt failsafe trigger,” Obama’s scheme would automatically raise taxes if politicians spend too much
I’ve got a better idea. If the politicians spend too much, how about that trigger automatically kicks them all out of office?
and the President’s speech yesterday was a direct and soaring appeal both to and for the glories of the social welfare state, and an attack on the foundational principles of this country.
Yea, we’re a country of rugged individualists who LOVE LOVE LOVE our social welfare state.
Who wrote that speech?
Who wrote that speech?
The same guy who wrote this.
And this is exactly how we must cast yesterday’s speech by Obama, despite the press’ desire to laud it being of a vein of his Philadephia “race” speech to defuse the Wright revalations (which, in a way it is just as content free as that was)…
Yesterday’s speechifying revealed Obama’s fundamental mindset, one that is antithetical to the beliefs of the founders of our nation, and as Jeff said, should deeply disturb all Americans.
The idea that collecting less taxes is somehow a spending reduction can only mean 2 possible things. One would be as Jeff outlined, that Obama belives all earnings belong a priori to the government. The only other possibility was that it was an outright lie, in a “rose by any other name” kind of way. So either he was lying, or is a full on communist, either possibility is bad for him-and for us.
But even worse are the ramifications of the mindset, that from government flows all things-our liberty included.
We have to make this his Waterloo for real…
As I said yesterday…How bout we automatically trigger a one month reduction in his term for every time he plays golf or goes on vacay?
If we make Stephanie’s trigger retroactive he’d be out now.
All you “tax paying” citizens are “spending” way too much of Obama’s “stash” of cash. Fritz Hollings was right, “There’s too much consuming going on out there”, and he aims to reign you in.
I am going to call my bank and see if I can set up my checking account so that if I overspend, Barcky Obumblefuck or some other Dem has to pay for it.
You have a checking account, JD? Clearly it’s opened on the backs of the poor, with checks written in the blood of autistic children. How dare you???
I killed 6 cats, 3 poor autistic transtesticled minority babies, and a handful of old people in my quest to earn a living Darth.
If I spend more than I make and borrow my credit cards right up to the limit then my employer is legally obligated to raise my pay to cover the excess, must never fire me even if I do nothing that helps the company to grow, and my credit card company must raise my limit every time I bump up against it.
Sounds like a plan for a life of ease paid by my legally owned slaves. What’s not to like if you’re not one of the slaves.
http://dailycaller.com/2011/04/14/does-obama-want-to-push-us-tax-policy-to-the-left-of-sweden/
Great analogy, geoffb.
Only 6 cats? what are you, some kind of PETA freak?
[…] Goldstein’s take on Obama’s speech yesterday. Of course, I predicted this in advance of the speech — and I […]
What happens when everyone works for the government? And all we get to eat are crisp $20 bills that roll off the printing presses? Low sodium, fat free twenties though.
“What happens when everyone works for the government? “
You’ll get your ass out in the field and grow mother
Russiafucker some beets. That’s what.