We are fighting wars and not increasing taxes to finance them. Thus we finance our wars on the backs of the poorest Americans and by letting America's infrastructure rot, and by depriving children of inexpensive college educations through which they can compete with the children of the wealthy in our free market economy. Republican Eisenhower held the lowest tax rate at 19% until the 2nd World War and the Marshall Plan were paid for. Deficits can be met by increasing revenue as well as by slashing social programs and privatizing everything and letting corporations own all of America. Corporations aren't good citizens. Corporations gave us Enron, our Great Depression, the recent Great Recession, the dot.com bubble, the penny stock fiasco and the Savings and Loan crash. We taxpayers underfund education and social programs to bail corporations out of the messes they make of our economy. If we didn't have to keep bailing out business and financial corporations, we'd have money to maintain our social programs, our infrastructure and our educational systems.
We Americans must stop blaming politicians for our personal poor budgeting that has made us live beyond our means so that we are not willing or unable to meet our responsibilities to the poor, to our children and to our infrastructure. Bitching about taxes plays into the Republican plan to undermine and weaken government so that deregulated businesses can repeatedly rip us off and, then, blame government for what business has done to the American economy. It's the Republican strategy. When a Republican says that "government is the problem, not the solution", he's misrepresenting the facts.
Libertarians would turn everything over to businesses and, thus, they also will give us more of the same unregulated free market scams that have ruined the American economy time after time. They are Republicans in disguise, but they've sure got the pot smokers behind them. I'm beginning to think of myself as a Progressive. We might become as happy as the Danes under Progressive leadership, but Americans have been brainwashed by the idea of personal freedom to the point they can't see themselves as one among many in a nation of millions. Pride is our weakness. We like the idea of the dog eat dog struggle that is capitalism, no matter how unhappy it is making us.
2 comments:
yeah, let's try what they did in
the former Soviet Union or what
they're still working on in Cuba
and see if we can make it work
better for us somehow, someway.
Like all egalitarians, we progressives just want government
to enforce equal results from
unequal causes or equal rewards
for unequal performance masquerading as something that we
coined called "social justice".
Actually, I agree that different people with different genetic inheritances and different nurture will perform their functions within the capitalistic economic system with different results. We're all electrochemical robots and, of course, will perform differently. The capitalistic economic system is excellent at distributing the financial rewards according to the luck of the genetic and nurture draw. Some people are very lucky in what they have no choice about receiving from their parents. Others receive poor genetic inheritances, and capitalism will always leave those with poor genetic inheritances and poor nurture behind in the evolutionary struggle for survival, BUT, some of us are trying to escape our evolutionary pasts. We are trying to develop a humane economic system by which no one lives in poverty just because they are poorly performing robots. We accept that the underpinning for capitalism is an evolved adaption to which the human species has given the name "greed", but that is a moral way of talking about the human species adaptions for survival. I'm hoping that someday we humans will become caring enough and intelligent enough to escape that evolved drive we call greed. Who knows if it can be accomplished? Most people can't escape their evolved drives to get over on his/her fellow human being. But, perhaps, someday, all of us will be smart enough to see that we could have a more peaceful existence if none of us had to starve our fellows so that we may have more than they have. Like I say, it'll be hard since as far as I can see now, very few humans can even imaging creating a world free of evolutionary drives for survival. Thousands of years of religion have not achieved it. Let's see if thousands of more years will let new knowledge in neuroscience help us achieve a better world. It's hard to do. How does one escape his evolved drive to beat out the next man if his consciousness can't control those unconscious drives? I'm capable of imagining it. So many other humans don't seem to be capable of imagining it, let alone achieving a better world of cooperation and peace. First of all we must get out of the political arguments founded in Russia and Cuba and get more rational and understanding about the human condition. Thanks for your response. Glad when anyone reads my work and responds.
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