Nation Is In Decline Because of Morons

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The Buffalo News gets letters. Every single sentence of this letter, written by a James Costa of Elma, Erie County, New York, USA, is a symphony of stupidity.

Mr. Costa is a retired teacher living in Elma, who once enjoyed hitchhiking, accepting handouts from hardworking Americans while he and his friend hoboed it across the country. He also used to troll the Topix Forum using colorful pen names such as “MILFMan”, and “Brillo Pad Headwhere he enjoyed tearing into librulz. (His posts are deleted, but you can see many of them in others’ blockquotes.) But the person who posted as “Brillo Pad Head” also has fond memories of teaching – in the public school system – and the joy he got from that calling. Weird dichotomy.

Here is the letter from this leech retired hypocrite public pension-receiving teacher:

To fulfill its promise of social and economic justice, liberalism must transfer power from the people to government.

What is the government? What is the government but us – people? We live in a representative democracy, where we are given the franchise to elect people to do what they believe to be in our best interests. If the people do not think the politician is doing this, they are free to elect someone else. The power is the people’s. Always. We just don’t wield it as often as we might.

By selling the concept of redistribution of wealth as “fairness,” social programs are created and expanded to capture new classes of dependents.

Well, any system that taxes people to pay for public things is redistributing wealth. Which is to say, every functioning state taxes people to pay for public things. Social programs? Assuming the retiree here is a Medicare and Social Security recipient, he is directly benefitting from our social safety net. Not only that, but as a retiree from the public school system in New York, he receives a public pension that is completely free from state income taxation. You can’t sit there on top of a pile of public cash and whine about redistributive policies.

Under the pretext of ensuring “clean” air and water, government further enhances its power by destroying industries through crushing environmental regulations, thus swelling unemployment and welfare rolls.

Got that? Potable water and breathable air are no longer goals for which we should aim. It is not the right of the individual to breathe clean air or drink clean water that is paramount – it is the right of “industries” to ruin the air and poison the water that is of primary importance in this person’s addled mind.

Its “man-made” global warming claim is a ploy to boost taxes on all energy.

I think that’s a swipe at “cap and trade” – a conservative-invented, market-based system of reducing emissions and pollution which the conservatives abandoned when Obama decided he thought it was a good idea, too.

When Obamacare is fully implemented, costs will skyrocket, services will be rationed, quality care will nosedive and meddling bureaucrats will gain unprecedented control of our lives.

Says the guy receiving free or massively discounted, taxpayer-provided single-payer public socialized medicine.

Recently the formerly great city of Detroit has declared bankruptcy. This tragedy is a microcosm of a national trend.

Hm. Not really.

Having intentionally created these proliferating economic time bombs, heroic liberalism will magically appear deus ex machina to save the country with loads of fiat money and new regulations.

Someone intentionally created a 60 year decline in the city of Detroit, whereby its population plummeted, abandoning it to move to the suburbs? Also, Mr. Costa seems to be a fan of the gold standard, which we abandoned two generations ago.

For decades liberals have been laying the foundation for a socialist America: They’ve demonized religion, polluted the airwaves, corrupted childhood innocence, sabotaged education and aborted millions of babies.

Polluting the airwaves is bad, but polluting the air is good. I don’t know how liberals have “demonized religion” or “corrupted childhood innocence” or “sabotaged education”, and I’m pretty sure people of all political persuasions have aborted all those babies. I’m guessing this guy has a problem with Hollywood, and maybe some other things perhaps reflected by his “Brillo Pad Head” pseudonym used in other fora.

They’ve weakened and demoralized the military with mixed genders.

Where is the evidence of that? What does he mean “mixed genders”? Women in the military? Gays in the military?

They (with complicit Republicans) have opened our borders to illegal aliens, further burdening our economy.

Immigrants – documented and undocumented – are not as massive a drain on the economy as people suspect.

They’ve promoted class envy and fomented racial hatred.

Says “Brillo Pad Head”.

They’ve smothered free speech with PC, and targeted the Second Amendment.

PC is political correctness – the notion that, e.g., if you say or write something that’s racist, you should be humiliated and criticized for it. PC is the notion that you should be accountable and responsible for what you write – for instance, Mr. Costa enjoyed referring to autistic kids as “retards” in the Topix exchange linked-to, above.

Welcome to the Utopia of “fundamental change.”

James Costa

Elma

You should immediately return your next Social Security check to the government, reject your next pension payment, pay the state taxes on what you’ve already received (that tax benefit is a direct subsidy from the taxpayers of New York), and forevermore pay every medical bill in cash and never submit to Medicare again.

Romney vs. the 47%

1. David Frum is the Tweeter to watch this campaign season. 

2. Mitt Romney began running against the press last week; he’s running against half of America today.

It was supposed to be a campaign reboot. But instead, Mitt Romney had a bad day. What a day Mitt had. Sad. Mitt. Bad. Had. 

The day started with a Politico article detailing what can best – and most charitably – be described as complete and utter disarray within his campaign apparatus.

For a guy running on his management bona fides, he’s running the worst national campaign I can remember. Heavy on ideology – light on details, the Romney campaign is now suffering through the type of postmortem interviews that usually happen after they lose on election day. (It was then that all the stories about just how awful Sarah Palin was came out).  David Frum Tweeted: 

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/247686830009487360″]

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It got worse. 

Late yesterday, former Bush aide and current sane conservative David Frum Tweeted that, “If you’re not running for president of all the country, you won’t be elected president of any of it.”

He was writing in response to a blockbuster series of videos that were clandestinely recorded during a big-money fundraiser that was held in Boca Raton on May 17th, where Romney spoke. What it revealed was the real Mitt Romney – the guy who is in his element and doesn’t feel constrained by politeness, inclusiveness, or basic political correctness – some pretty key qualities needed in a viable candidate in a general election for President of the United States. 

In a surprising nod to the theories of horrible person Ayn Rand, Romney broke down the American electorate into producers and moochers;  that 47% of Americans don’t pay any taxes, don’t work, take no personal responsibility and enjoy being dependent on government for all needs. Why, they even feel entitled to receive health care! Can you believe it?! Romney concluded that he was never going to convince these people to vote for him, so he wasn’t running to convince them. He even added – astoundingly – that they pay no income tax and had no sense of personal responsibility. Instead, he explained, he was running for the 5 – 10% of the electorate that are “thoughtful” “independents” who voted for Obama but are disappointed in him – pretty much the theme of Romney’s convention speech. 

Romney painted himself into a corner by affixing a percentage to that number. He has no wiggle room – he can’t say, “oh, I was talking about a small population that just lives off of public assistance” – he indicted almost fully half of the American population for being do-nothing takers and moochers. That’s astonishing

On the first anniversary of the Occupy movement, you’re not just the 99%, you may also be the 47%. 

Coincidentally, 47% is how many people in Michigan plan on voting for Obama versus 37% for “native son” Romney. 

The Atlantic broke down and identified the 47%:

In 2011, 47% of Americans paid no federal income taxes. Within that group, two-thirds still pay payroll taxes. The rest are almost all either (a) old and retired folks collecting Social Security or (b) households earning less than $20,000. Overall, four out of five households not owing federal income tax earn less than $30,000, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Here’s another, slightly wonkier, way to think about the 47%. Divide the group into two halves. The first half is made tax-free by credits and exemptions, the vast majority of which go to senior citizens and children of the working poor. The half that you’re left with is so poor, they wouldn’t owe federal income taxes even if there were zero tax expenditures.

There are some not-so-poor outliers, like the 7,000 millionaires who paid no federal income taxes in 2011. But for the most part, when you hear “The 47%” you should think “old retired folks and poor working families.” …

…Mitt Romney’s off-the-record comments were inelegant. But they were also part of a long trend of Republicans attacking the 47% as lazy, or playing by a different set of rules, or not fully contributing to the country. Michele Bachmann went after the non-payers. So did Rick Santorum. And Sen. John Cornyn.

The 47% aren’t lucky ducks cheating the system. They’re mostly poor working families getting pilloried by the political party that wrote the rules they’re following. If the 47% are the monster here, then Republicans helped play the role of Dr. Frankenstein. “Non-payers” have grown in the last 30 years because of marginal tax rate cuts and credits like the EITC passed under Republican presidents and continued by both parties in Congress.

It would be one thing to ask poor working families to pay higher taxes if Republicans were trying to raise money to improve government services. Quite the opposite, Romney’s tax plan would, if passed, either reduce revenue or come out neutral by raising taxes on upper-middle class families. Meanwhile, his budget would gruesomely gut Medicaid and income-support programs below their projected 2020 levels.

The working poor families and elderly people who make up the 47% also tend to live in the deep South, in predominately red states: 

But now, remember that Mr. Romney has repeatedly refused to release more than (a) a partial, incomplete 2010 income tax return; and (b) an estimate for 2011 income taxes. He will not release any more taxes.  Here’s a guy who wanted pretty desperately to change the subject on his own taxes – and thanks to a press that’s sensitive about being called “liberal”, he was largely successful. Yet here he opened the door for everyone to re-examine his own tax situation.

When you factor in the payroll taxes that the working poor automatically pay every pay period, the actual figure for Americans who pay “no income tax” is reduced to about 18%

…according to the Tax Policy Center, more than 60% of those non-income tax paying households did pay federal payroll taxes—meaning Social Security and Medicare taxes.  (Considering all Americans households, including those that owed income tax, 62% paid more in payroll taxes than in federal income taxes.)

What of the 18.1% of U.S. households that paid neither income nor payroll taxes?  More than half of them were headed by a senior–in other words, by someone who paid payroll taxes and likely some income taxes too, in the past.  (No, the amount the elderly have paid in does not cover the cost of the Medicare  benefits they are now getting. And that is true despite the fact that in a Romney TV adattacking Obamacare’s cuts to the growth in Medicare spending, an announcer seems to suggest otherwise, intoning:  “You paid into Medicare for years, every paycheck…. So now the money you paid for your guaranteed healthcare Is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”)

Of course, it goes without saying, that those  folks who aren’t paying federal taxes are almost all paying state and local taxes—state sales taxes, real estate taxes (either on their homes or built into their rents) and possibly state income taxes too, since those taxes tend to exempt fewer poor families than does the federal income tax.  If they buy gasoline, liquor or tobacco, or have telephones, they’re also feeding the federal purse.

The tax deadbeat thinks half of Americans are tax deadbeats who aren’t worth fighting for. We’ve become a country where the millionaires and billionaires express envy for the extremely poor. This is evidence of madness. 

Here are the videos. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9V6eOFO38] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjET1LGw5vM] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8g3ZqTqKs4] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkPBNi7D1hA] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5iazS-hjv0]

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