04.22.15
The Song remains the Same
Every week, the words are the same, and so the song is, too:
[The GOP’s political message] is divorced from coherent policy. Take the central issue of inequality. Republicans like to say that the problem is disparity of opportunity, not disparity of wealth. But the two are increasingly one and the same, with federal budgets and inheritances playing a major role in both.
The Republican budget plans, for instance, obviously tilt the economic playing field in favor of the wealthy by cutting tax credits for the poor while leaving intact tax breaks for the wealthy.
Do you believe in the death tax? You know, stealing from families that have worked hard all their lives and created hard-earned savings, then thieves like you actually think you have the right to snatch it away from them.
If you truly want to know if a person is good or bad, simply ask them if they believe in the death tax. If they do, then they admit that they are thieves and reside solidly in the liability column of America. Case closed.
Until everybody does indeed earn and pay their fair share and we eliminate the legal thievery of the anti-American death tax, America will never be the best that we can be. The current system is actually bribing people to not produce.
It’s repeal the estate tax season, which means we are hearing all sorts of nonsense about how the tax forces people to sell their family farm or business. It should be self-evident that this is nonsense since no one owes a penny of tax on an estate worth less than $5.4 million …
But if you still think that families are losing their farms because of the tax, then it’s worth going back to an old NYT story by David Cay Johnston. Johnston called the American Farm Bureau, a major lobbyist against the tax, and asked to be put in contact with someone who had lost their farm due to the estate tax. The Farm Bureau could not produce a single family anywhere in the country who had lost their farm as a result of the tax.
In short, families do not lose farms or businesses due to the estate tax. They lose them because the next generation doesn’t feel like operating them. This is just one more story that politicians tell in order to justify reducing taxes on the very wealthy.
And from me. Sing it! I demand it. Are you people crazy? We got a hit single here! It should easily be over 1,000 plays (wow!) by now!
Hang around and notice Youtube’s autoplay feature lines up Atlas Shrugged, Part III, for your enjoyment.
I watched it. It recommends home schooling because public schools are crap. John Galt is tortured by the American president for not sharing his machine that makes electricity out of air. But he is freed by the libertarian rich people’s resistance movement, escapes and wins in the end. Dagny Taggart shoots an unarmed guard because he can’t decide to obey her fast enough. And Dagny and Francisco D’Anconia rejoice and hug on the waterfront on the news that her bridge has collapsed, presumably killing thousands!
‘Effin great stuff.
On Ted Nugent at the NRA’s annual convention in Nashville:
The NRA exists so that regular freedom-loving Americans can carry guns to protect themselves. We all can’t be liberal elitists with our own armed security team, I was told. But while the NRA raged on about those liberal elitists with their own private security, the NRA VIPs were given armed security. Ted Nugent’s booth had three uniformed Metro Nashville Police officers standing guard, while multiple plain-clothed security guards stood closer to Nugent.
Nugent wasn’t the only VIP with security details. As I walked around the convention center, there were many with their own phalanx.
Nugent used his speech at the convention to talk about shooting Harry Reid.
Livin’ in America furnishes so many inspiring stories about how being a public disgrace is virtuous, your head will explode.