So I got an email from a supposedly "progressive" member of Congress saying that any deal to raise the debt ceiling should include "shared sacrifice". Excuse me? You raise my taxes by 5%, that's not a shared sacrifice -- I'm in the top 10% of taxpayers, I plop a big chunk of change into savings every month because I have way more money than I need to live on. You cut an old person's Social Security benefits, that's not only shared sacrifice, that's lying and theft -- that person worked all his life paying into the Social Security fund expecting to get that money, and now you're yanking it away from him?
Funny how when folks talk about "shared sacrifice", it's only about how much the *poor* will sacrifice, because the supposed "sacrifice" that the rich would have to make is not one. I mean, if I can only put $2800/month into savings rather than $3000/month... some "sacrifice". Oh wah! Yeah, right. Meanwhile, you yank away old people's Medicare and make them wait for 2 more years to get it, and people *die*. But Republican lizard people apparently don't have a problem with that. They, like, get woodies the size of fucking TREES just thinking about dead corpses in the morning. All them old prunes just clog up the highways as they poke along in their old cars anyhow, right?
Meanwhile, as The Onion so accurately points out, Congress continues the debate over whether the country should be economically ruined. Oh joy.
-- Badtux the Unsacrificing Penguin
I have occasionally wondered how much sacrifice I'd be willing to make, to fix the country. (Higher taxes would not be a sacrifice for me either.)
ReplyDeleteNone of the things I'd call sacrifice is on the table, except a repeal of the health-care reform law.
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ReplyDeleteI am sorry. Didn't you know? How much money one has is a direct reflection on how worthy they are as a person? If you tax them more than the poor, it just isn't fair. Those poor slobs should have had the foresight to be born to upper middle class white parents willing to pay for things like a college education. We really shouldn't be rewarding people for failure to take the most basic steps towards their future success.
ReplyDeleteJoe, sacrifice is something that would require me to change the way I live, that would require me to take fewer vacations, eat out fewer times per month, maybe give up my gas guzzling car and use public transit, *something* that requires me to endure some sort of hardship. Every proposal I see in Congress requires poor people and old people to change the way they live, but not me. I just end up putting slightly less money in the bank every month as my "shared sacrifice".
ReplyDeletePurple: Said "progressive" is very old and his staff were simply repeating what President Barack Obama (R-Chicago) was telling Democratic congressmen to say. This is nonsense that came straight from our Republican President. Well, he'd be a Republican in a sane world -- his policies differ little from those of Dwight D. Eisenhower, after all, and are actually more conservative than those of Richard Nixon (who, remember, proposed a guaranteed minimum income). If it wasn't for the fact that his skin color sends the batshit racist contingent of the Republican party absolutely nuts, we wouldn't be having this discussion because he gives Republicans everything they want, including a Republican health care plan that was proposed originally by the Heritage Foundation for cryin' out loud.
Lynne, yep. I've actually heard that logic logic from Republican lizard people who propose to end public education. "If poor kids want an education, they should choose to be born to people who can afford private schools." It makes no sense in this reality, but I suppose that in the universe that lizard people come from, it's quite reasonable.
-- Badtux the non-lizard Penguin
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ReplyDeleteWell, if THAT is the case then I'd say that very few of the Republicans are acting like actual Republicans and so we shouldn't bad-mouth that party either.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, Purple, WTF is that supposed to mean? There hasn't been a real Republican in decades. Nixon, for all his personal faults, might have been the last. Since Reagan, it's been getting more crazy every god-damned year.
Tux -
Fuck shared sacrifice. For anything close to shared sacrifice to occur, the wealthy will have to make up for 4 decades of taking it all.
I was an upper 10%-er too, until 2008. Then I retired and dropped a couple quintiles. I haven't suffered much -- yet. But my kids, who are about your age and pretty much doing OK, do not have the opportunities I had, and will not retire with my level of comfort.
Meanwhile, from at least the median income level on down, we've been doing our part for the last 40 years. The great stagnation has resulted from large and continuously growing wealth disparity and the misallocation of economic resources that this dislocation has enabled. To a large extent, all this results from the Reagan-era tax code changes.
This is what bird-brains like Purple refuse to comprehend.
WASF,
JzB
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ReplyDeletePurple -
ReplyDeleteI sincerely apologize for the personal attack. It was unseemly. The fact that I was reacting to two comments of yours in this thread that make absolutely no sense is no justification for my ungentlemanly behavior.
Further, though your aquo-avian avatar invites such invective, it does not justify it.
Let me rephrase: This is what people who spout nonsense in public, like Purple, refuse to comprehend.
rather I disagree with his assessment that the Democratic Party isn't to blame 'cause the Democrats in office aren't progressive enough to be called Democrats.
If that is what you are getting from anything Tux says, then I suggest a course in remedial reading comprehension.
And, your final sentence betrays that you are projecting.
Now I must go hug a squid.
JzB
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ReplyDeletePerhaps I misunderstood what was being communicated when it was said that Obama is really a Republican so Tux doesn't blame the Democratic Party for any of this mess
ReplyDeleteCorrect. You misunderstood. Ridiculing pseudo-progressives for their psuedohood an lack of progressivity in no way acquits the democratic Party. That is an unfounded assumption on your part.
If anything, Tux would perhaps be defending a Democratic party composed largely of actual Democrats; but we haven't had anything like that in over 30 years.
Perhaps you didn't notice.
WASF!
JzB
The purple bird-brain prefers beating strawmen with his limp herring, JzB. That way he can avoid actual issues and instead make personal attacks upon blog proprietors accusing them of, well, being partisan, apparently. The fact that he would accuse me of defending the Democratic party when the whole point of the post was that the Democrats either are a) spineless, b) stupid, c) senile, or d) Republicans in disguise (in the case of Obama), passes beyond the point of ridiculousness into theatre of the absurd, ludicrous nonsense hardly worthy of spending all this verbiage addressing.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the non-straw Penguin
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ReplyDelete