Tag Archives: political parties

Progressives, Terrorists, and Civility

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Brett Kimberlin, the Speedway Bomber, was convicted in 1981 of a week-long bombing spree in Indianapolis, IN, a serial bombing sequence in which eight separate bombs caused extensive property damage, destroyed a police cruiser, and severely maimed a man, which eventually led to the man’s suicide.  Kimberlin spent 17 years in prison for his crimes, including having his parole revoked when, after losing a $1.6 million judgment in favor of the widow of the suicide victim, he refused to pay—not couldn’t pay, refused to pay.

Of course, there is the possibility of redemption and of correcting old ways, of making amends.  But not all are repentant.  Consider that Kimberlin still hasn’t paid the judgment.  Consider the $200 thousand bounty that Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution put on the Chamber of Commerce’s Tom Donohue.  Consider the attacks on Patterico (also via Memorandum, if that link doesn’t work), and on Stacy McCain, and on Michelle Malkin.  While the attacks on Malkin may not have been perpetrated by Kimberlin and his…colleagues…they are of a type.

But, aside from these cowardly attacks from the Left against people whose only crime is that they are conservative and both act and write like it, I also am interested in the Progressive leadership condoning such bullying and potentially criminal behaviors.  Where is the hue and cry about Brett Kimberlin’s activities and those of his ilk?

To be sure, nor conservatives nor Progressives need decry every little wrong, every smearing speech such as Arizona State Senator Linda Lopez’ (D) attempt to lay the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords off on conservatives, that this or that extremist makes.  But surely these ongoing and dangerous attacks, not only against the conservatives, but their families also, warrant an outcry from an honest left.  But the President, his campaign advisors, the DNC leadership, the Progressive leadership in Congress all are silent.  And by their passive silence about these events of which they surely are aware, they actively condone them.

But it’s of a piece with Progressive civility.  This is the civility that has Congressman John Lewis (D, GA) claiming—without substantiation even today—that conservative Tea Partiers called him a nigger, that has Congressman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) dismissing those who protested against Obamacare as not American and Astroturfers, that has DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D, FL), at her protest gathering outside then-candidate Allen West’s campaign headquarters, saying about conservatives and conservative protesters

I don’t see any swastikas or any pictures of the President in black face or burned in effigy here.  The difference between the way we express our First Amendment rights and the way I’ve seen Tea Party extremists—Republican Tea Party extremists—express their right is dramatically different.

And President Obama saying

Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?

All they haven’t done, yet, is to send out their own SWAT teams.

France and the US

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Guy Milliere has an interesting article on the French elections last Sunday and on the decline of a once proud nation (the article was written before the elections, but what he wrote remains valid today–RTWT).

Milliere decries the failure of France and sees its present strait as no better than the precipice, beginning with:

…among the 10 candidates in the first round [of the French presidential elections last month], three were Trotskyites advocating a Leninist revolution; a disciple of Lyndon La Rouche; a former Norwegian judge who appears to think she is an environmental Robespierre (Eva Joly); a populist from the extreme right (Marine Le Pen); a moderate who would find his place in the left wing of the American Democratic Party (François Bayrou); a Gaullist speaking as if it were still 1965 (Nicolas Dupont Aignan); a very « socialist » Socialist (François Hollande); and the outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Bonapartist who, in the UK, would be to the left of the Labour Party.

At least with a two-party system (and occasional third-party spoiler) like ours (or even a three-party system with occasional spoiler flashes in the pan, as in Great Britain), the fringe groups don’t have much post-election effect, beyond the spoiling aspect of turning an election from one main party to the other.

But Milliere continued:

…no candidate defended free-market principles;…all of the candidates harshly attacked the financial world, multinational corporations, and globalization;…of the two finalists, one[‘s]… program appears to have been written before the development of the Internet.

Now we get to the parallels.  President Obama’s hostility toward free market principles, and toward business generally and banks explicitly, are both manifest (his claims to the contrary even as he follows them with screeds against the fat cats notwithstanding) and rooted in (and unchanged from) the late ’60s and early ’70s radical “community organizing” of his mentors.

Milliere went on:

France’s problems date from long before the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.  [It is a] country where no budget has been balanced since 1974, and where public expenditures have risen continuously in recent decades to represent a crippling 56% of its gross domestic product….  It is a country whose public debt is growing far faster than the public debt of its main economic partners in Europe, and will hit 87% of GDP this year (actually 146%, if what France owes to the European Union is included).  It is a country where reports on the inevitable failure of pension systems were presented to successive governments for over 25 years without a decision being proposed or taken.  It is a country where the…number of people living in poverty is between eight and ten million out of a population of 65 million.  It is also a country where…two-thirds of all higher education diplomas are worthless on the labor market.  Graduates with Master’s degree become fast-food servers or cashiers in a supermarket—if a position is available.

So it is in the US.  Our current economic disaster has been years, and administrations, in the making: very few actually balanced (as opposed to accounting gimmick balancing) budgets and national debt exploding over the last three years.  We’ve been ignoring the impending failure of our entitlement programs for decades, even though the originally forecast date range of their bankruptcy has moved very little in all that time.  Nearly 45 million Americans are currently receiving food stamps, which is roughly the same 14% of our population as is Milliere’s Frenchmen living in poverty; although, according to the CBO report at the link, that number is 70% higher than it was in 2007, immediately before the housing bubble burst.  And we insist on loaning taxpayer monies to students who wish to degree in gender studies, women’s contemporary literary issues, or basket weaving instead of in the productive STEM skills that a burgeoning and technologically evolving economy needs for national survival.

It’s necessary to change course.  And that course change must be in the direction of smaller, limited government that leaves more of our money, and our responsibility, in our hands.

Or we’ll end up like France.

Tomorrow!

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President Obama once said that if he doesn’t turn our economy around, he would be a one-term president.  Now he says that the question

is not just about how we’re doing today, it’s about how we’re doing tomorrow.

But as the Progressive’s hero, John Maynard Keynes once said

In the long run we are all dead.

Indeed.  Americans are hurting today.  Today, the labor force is shrinking to historic lows as people give up on finding a job.  Today, people can’t pay their bills.  Today, people are losing their homes.  Today, people are becoming ever more dependent on food stamps.

No, as Obama said in another of his sound-bite slogans, “We can’t wait” for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow
You’re always a day away

Mind Sets

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One of President Obama’s jokes at the recent Correspondents’ Dinner was along the lines of

I want to thank all the members [of Congress] who took a break from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws to be here tonight.

So, says the Progressive-in-Chief, Government’s role is to pass more laws, to be more intrusive and controlling.

Others have an alternative mind set.

[A] part-time Congress.  Cut their pay in half, cut their time in Washington in half, cut their staff in half, send them home.  Let them get a job like everybody else back home has.

Then they could have a productively busy schedule.

Party and Taxes

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The argument over the House of Representatives’ just-passed Small Business Tax Cut Act demonstrates the stark contrasts between the Republican and Democratic Parties’ attitudes toward Americans and our money, even as the bill demonstrates a continued Republican failure—it’s a temporary measure, and so it has no economic value whatsoever.

The SBTC allows businesses with up to 500 employees to take a tax deduction equal to 20% of their profits, up to a maximum deduction equal to 50% of their employee wage bill.  This deduction is good for one year, only.

This bill plainly encourages hiring, with the size of the deduction driven by the company’s payroll cost.  Pay raises or intrinsically high wages are themselves unlikely to yield improvements in production or in productivity as efficiently as hiring new employees: a larger work force brings more working hours to a company than simply paying more for an existing number of working hours.

On the other hand, the deduction also can be put to uses other than hiring that are good for our economy.  Improved capital equipment improves the productivity of the existing work force, leading to lower prices to consumers.  Paying down existing debt strengthens the company against the uncertain future our present economy is inflicting on all of us.  Funding active R&D helps the company to stay ahead of evolving consumer demand.  Simply saving the money adds to the company’s strength by building its cash cushion for deployment in crisis or for use in an unexpected opportunity.

What the Republicans say about the bill:

…the one-year tax cut for businesses with fewer than 500 workers would boost job creation.  Only companies that pay wages would be eligible for the deduction of 20% of their domestic business income….

We need to let small-business owners keep more of their hard-earned money so they can start hiring again[.]

It treats every small business equally.  This bill does not pick winners and losers[.]

What the Democrats say about the bill:

…a giveaway to wealthy business owners since it includes no requirement that companies hire workers.

…the tax cut favor[s] richer small businesses, since the tax savings would be larger for firms with higher income.  Democratic aides cited a Joint Committee on Taxation report showing 125,000 business taxpayers with income of more than $1 million would receive $7.35 billion in tax cuts, or $58,500 a tax filer.

…the legislation would cost $46 billion and add to the deficit…. …Democrats said they backed Mr. Obama’s plan for an alternative minimum tax of 30% for people making more than $1 million.

The differences in attitude are clear.  Republicans view the money as our money, and with lower taxes they attempt to leave more of it in our hands and to leave the use of it up to us.  They plainly prefer the money to be used for hiring, but they do not presume to dictate to us how we must spend it.  Republicans trust the judgment of Americans, as effected both by individuals and through our free market, more than they trust the judgment of government.

On the other hand, Democrats have a real problem with Americans becoming rich.  Rather than helping all Americans to do better, as the SBTC could have a chance of doing, they much prefer holding back the wealthy to the level of the rest of us.  Anything that helps them along with the rest of us is anathema to Democrats.  This, of course, caps our own chances of bettering our lives.

The beef about the SBTC favoring the rich is plainly bogus.  It elides the fact that the businesses with the larger profits have the larger payrolls—the larger work forces—and it is the work force bill that is the limiter on the deduction, not the profit.

Democrats consider the “lost” revenue to be the government’s money, not us taxpayers’, and when forced to leave some to us, they want to dictate to us how we must use it: “You must spend our money on hiring.”  Democrats trust their own judgment more than they do that of individual Americans.

Moreover, Democrats insist on raising taxes even further, particularly on disfavored groups, while refusing the obvious alternative: reducing their spending to make up for the reduction in the amount of our money government gets to collect.

As I said at the outset, though, this bill has a serious problem: it’s temporary.  No business is going to do anything of a long-term nature—like permanent hires—on a temporary measure.  To properly impact our economy and have the advertised effect, it needs to be made permanent.