Two-Tiered America
Congress is attempting to screw working people exactly the same way corporations have screwed their workers, by setting up a two-tiered system for Social Security and Medicare. They think they can con people 55 and older into remaining quiet while the taxes paid by younger people get looted for the benefit of the top 1%. It isn’t just the Republicans, the Democrats, led by Zero have bought into every lie the Republicans have told, and have refused to fix the economy.
I’m sick of hearing restatements of the failed policies of Hoover to deal with the Depression, and disgusted by Zero and the Democrats failing to use the tools that FDR proved worked.
The only “problem” with the deficit and Social Security is the reality that one in five American workers is either unemployed or underemployed. If you put people back to work, tax revenues increase, and all of the problems become easy to resolve. Tax breaks don’t create jobs. Demand for products is the only way jobs have ever been created, and that has been proven repeatedly over history. The Shrubbery passed tax cuts early on, and didn’t have enough private sector jobs created to during his entire eight years to cover the introduction of new workers.
Life expectancy falls in many parts of U.S. – how’s that for a headline, after hearing repeatedly that we have to raise the age for benefits, because people are living longer? The US isn’t even in the top three dozen in countries for life expectancy. I’m not interested in conventional wisdom from DC, where are the facts?
If these people are interested in reducing government, they can start by cutting the Senate in half. There is no reason for a state to have two Senators, when one can be just as worthless.
No one who pays FICA taxes should ever vote for anyone who messes around with the benefits. If they can’t leave well enough alone, they need to be unemployed to learn some humility. If they try it, everyone with a stake in Social Security should make them pay.
5 comments
Tell it, brother!
They are revolting in Spain and Greece and Portugal and France and Ireland against the corruption and inequity of having the expenses of the capitalist casino being put on the lower classes. It’s socialism for the upper classes and capitalism for those below.
Will the U.S. lower classes be the only sheeple left in the world?
This may be the start of some real change.
Who’s on board?
More facts are available at my site and elsewhere.
Suzan
“Sire, the peasants are revolting!”
“You said it. They stink on ice.”
Both major parties are displaying all the political and social acumen of Mel Brooks’s Louis XVI. The last time I was going downhill as fast as we all are today, I was on a bicycle, the hill was in Bartlesville, OK and the bottom of it was almost the end of me. I can only hope there’s one more miracle left in the bag today, because we’re gonna need it.
I think the reason there are two Senators is in case one dies in office, the state still has representation for the three months required to notify the state legislature on their farms and homesteads, gather them together, have them select a new Senator, then have said Senator travel via horse and buggy on muddy dirt roads to Washington D.C. and the Senate chambers. Oh wait, you’re saying we have a system designed for the 18th century? And behaving more like a 19th century legislative body? You don’t say!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Oh BTW. There’s worse economic policies than those of Herbert Hoover. Take the GOP economic policy, which Steve Bates so aptly characterized as those of Louis XVI. “Let them eat cake” indeed… at least Herbert Hoover funded soup kitchens and other such relief efforts. Today’s GOP? Nope.
As Anatole France wrote: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Yes, Suzan, you and others have been screaming about this a very long time, but no one inside the bubble wants to listen to the truth.
Steve, one of the things about the Tommy Douglas “Mouseland” fable is that he has been telling it since before World War II, and most people still elect “cats”, like those that live inside “the bubble”.
Badtux, Hoover did most of his feeding in Europe after the two World Wars. He expected private charity to deal with the problem in the US. Like today, the people in DC didn’t understand how bad things were, and the media did its best to hide the truth by talking about the economy as a local story. The lie by omission of the media is one of the reasons so many people began moving – they thought things were better in other areas.
I also think it is absurd for a state to have twice as many Senators as Congresscritters, but then I would like a real representative democracy, as in something that represents the voters rather than the elites.