Every night, during my lunch break, a subscribe to my self imposed “Two Minutes of Hate”. It keeps the fire in the belly.
I make a quick run through the hate-filled leftist uber blogs and try to keep my food down (and try not to spray it across my employer supplied flatscreen monitor when one of these nimrods says something completely insane).
I found two last night that I would really like to share with you.
The first is from the FireDogLake blog, who, if they didn’t hate, would have no reason to exist. The never sensible Ian Welsh posts a personal request for help for Jack Murtha
But when it came time to step up on the war, Murtha did it, and he did it under heavy fire. It would have been far easier for him, far safer for him, to have laid low and kept supporting the war, or even to have opposed it in a low key way. Now he may pay the price, not just for that, but for daring to say the obvious, that Western Penn has a lot of racists. Stupid thing to say politically, but once again, Murtha called it as he saw it. More guts than a slaughterhouse, we used to call it. Americans say they want politicians to tell them the truth, but here’s the truth, telling the truth is bad for your political health.
I guess what Ian is trying to say is that Jack Murtha has been put into his House seat by racists since 1974. Wouldn’t that, by even the slightest sense of rational thought, make him a racist as well, because he politicked for and accepted their votes?
Oh wait, I forgot, Murtha is not a Republican, so that slanderous turd of an oxygen thief gets to share the Byrd Shield of Deniability.
The second piece I had to actually read twice to make sure that it wasn’t a joke.
Member of the Daily Kos Animal Farm and Petting Zoo, sad pony guerrilla girl (yes that is her actual handle), watched the Sunday blowhards and comes to the conclusion that if it wasn’t for capitalists, the whole would would be full of happy ponies (or something). This is going to take some excerpting to get the full dose of hate across.
Consider, for example, McCain’s new Joe the Plumber stories. When McCain first mentioned him in the third debate, I just rolled my eyes. I’ve judged and coached enough high school debaters to know a common, annoying, and lame debate tactic coming up when I see one, and this one was just screaming it. Joe the Plumber was worried that he’d be taxed more under Obama’s tax plan, a plan that would leave everyone who makes under $250,000 unscathed, if passed in its current form.
Obama said that, and McCain responded by saying that Joe was looking to buy his employer’s plumbing business. That would put his income substantially over $250,000, meaning he’d have to pay more in taxes.
And now that I’m back in a battleground state, I’m seeing this ad all the time:
(posts the YouTube of McCain’s Joe the Plumber ad)
All I can hear is “I can’t do math” over and over again in that ad.
The problem is that there are significant number of Americans who believe that they’re going to be millionaires one day. They think that if they work hard then a six- or seven-figure income will just come to them.
And as Joe the Plumber so brilliantly demonstrates, that means that their loyalty is transferred upwards. Of course more taxes on the wealthy means more taxes on me! I know I’m going to be rich one day!
It’s a perversion of what the American Dream is supposed to inspire, since people who haven’t yet achieved what they want to achieve financially work hard to make sure that others won’t be able to get into the middle class since they won’t want to share the wealth when they get there. The irony is that they prevent themselves from reaching a decent quality of life in the process, since they themselves are the ones who have to be kept out of the millionaires club.
Apparently, spgg doesn’t know anyone who has worked the first half of their lives to become wealthy enough to live comfortably for the second half of their lives. I know more than a dozen. I also know that if I work hard and save smart, spend smart and invest smart, that I too will join their ranks in the future.
spgg needs to realize that economies aren’t zero sum. That money is always expanding, transferring, being spent and earned, or as she would probably put it “Lost and Won”. She probably believes it to be fact that “rich people” hoard their money.
And because of these childish beliefs, she doesn’t have the slightest idea where the money to buy her home came from. Though, looking at her loser attitude she probably believes that owning real estate is some sort of sin against the government.
On Friday my brother posted on his Facebook page, “[his name] is wondering how much ‘spreading the wealth’ will cost him.”
One commenter replied, simply, “Nothing.”
And then emailed my wife and asked if he made $250k a year, or was just trying to make people think that he made $250k a year.
He doesn’t, but he 1) would like to someday, and 2) works in commercial real estate, where he constantly deals with people who DO. You know, business owners. People who already get raked over the coals by the tax man and tend to live very frugally, investing all of their money in their businesses.
Sort of like my dad, who retired at age 60 after working his ass off at his own business that he started at age 30. We lived off of savings for almost ten years and had a very, very strict budget, with not a lot of fun and games built into it.
Now my folks are comfortable, and over those 30 years he employed probably 80 different people. When he retired, he employed 50 people. He helped create a great deal of wealth. Clearly, he must be punished.
This is the worst of the comments above:
“It’s a perversion of what the American Dream is supposed to inspire, since people who haven’t yet achieved what they want to achieve financially work hard to make sure that others won’t be able to get into the middle class since they won’t want to share the wealth when they get there. The irony is that they prevent themselves from reaching a decent quality of life in the process, since they themselves are the ones who have to be kept out of the millionaires club.”
Summary:
1. Zero-sum game meme, as you point out.
2. “They are voting against their own best interests” meme, which is the biggest bunch of crap I’ve ever heard and I am getting very tired of it.
3. I am keeping myself from having a decent quality of life by voting a certain way – even though I work my ass off and earn a decent income. SORRY, you’re wrong. I have to work hard to earn more. I pay way too much in taxes. Health care is expensive. But your give-aways will just make it worse, and hurt my quality of life immensely.
4. There are people actively keeping other people out of “the millionaire’s club”.
Sorry, nope, nobody is actively keeping people poor, nor is there a mechanism by which this could happen, outside of the tax structure. I know immigrants who came here with nothing and very little education – they didn’t even speak English – who are now worth millions of dollars, and they earned it honorably, through hard work and frugality. The only mechanism by which people are kept poor is self-governed or pure fate (which I don’t put a lot of stock in, aside from purely random medical issues or true accidents). A lot of it is based on having children early, feeling entitled to a quality of life that you don’t have to work for, and feeling that you have a right to leisure. Note the key – “feeling.” 😉
The biggest keys to wealth – savings, delayed gratification, wise investment, and living well below your means. There are a lot of people that are well off in the burbs. They are not the ones driving Mercedes-Benzes, living in huge houses, and dressing their children in fashionable clothing. Again, clearly, they must be punished.
Besides – who believes that these people will stop at people who make $250k a year? Anybody who has more than anybody else is a target.
And one thing for you to always ask these Zero Sum types: Does Obama support making permenant the Bush tax cuts before they expire in 2010?
If they say he does, they’re lying because Obama will not answer that question.
If they say they don’t know or that he doesn’t, then you have to remind them that the recision of a tax cut is a tax increase.
It is the best trap their Messiah ever laid for them. They’re too blinded to ask it for themselves and when those without the rose colored glasses ask it of them, they get a sick feeling in their stomach from the realization that they’ve been bamboozeled for 21 months straight.
I don’t see how any of them can comment on “the perversion of the American Dream” bit when their dreams of America include the “love” that Bill Ayers has. Their dream is a fuzzy Future Dream of the American Communist State, not America as it is and has been built by countless immigrants who benefited and created jobs and a society – but an ideologically completely different America that they project and wish it to be made of handouts and Third-grad paper cut-outs and gold stars for everybody. Sheesh, it’s an infantile nappy-time dream.
If you listened to the demo-socialist candidates these past few days, that $250,000 has dropped down to $100,000. Obama dropped it to $200K and then Biden droppd it to $100K. The actual figure is apparently around $42K, based on some of Obama’s pervious votes..
A lovely post on a vile subject; I will just add two little observations.
1) These zero-sum types are actually negative sum types. Taxes don’t spread wealth, they impede wealth creation and are usually net wealth destroyers. Also, what’s all this spread the wealth crap, they’re sending our money to 535 congressmen and senators*, not spreading it around to the poor or charitable organizations.
2) They consistently confuse wealth and income, and then go and invoke various billionaires and uber-rich celebrities while criticizing upper income earners who are vastly less wealthy than the Bill Gates and Warren Buffets of the world.
*Who’ve proven they can’t be trusted with the vast ‘sums of loot’ the already siphon from our pockets.
I suppose if you werer a pony ridden by a guerilla girl all day you too would be sad. her math is atrocious. She thinks earning 6 figures makes one think they will become a millionaire someday! I have been earning a six figure salary for a few years now, I never envision myself as becoming rich, and am far from it now as I will remain when I retire next year. Am I comfortable, yes I am. Am I rich – hell no.