-By Warner Todd Huston
I found a reply on my ChicagoNow blog that is so emblematic of the essential anti-Americanness of the left in our country that I thought I’d explore it in a full post instead of just replying to it on the original page on which it appeared.
The comment was oozed out by some extremist named Tom Degan, a blogger whom I’d never heard of before. Apparently he has his own blog on the Google-owned Blogspot system. (No link love for Tommy, look for his blog yourself) He is himself utterly inconsequential, of course, but his reply on my blog was a prosaic leftist rant, devoid of inventiveness, that was quite typical of the unhinged left. It really a sort of non-sequitur to the post on which it appeared, and its content was pretty much just your average, every day, simple-minded, left-wing boilerplate, but it is what passes for “thinking” on the left, so it stands as a good example of the left’s folly.
Mr. Degan started with this paragraph:
We are standing on the edge of an economic cataclysm and there is only one way out. It will involve taxes – a decade or more of serious taxation. The politicians won’t tell you that but that is the way it is, folks. Unlike the last forty years, however, there is no reason why the poor and middle class should have to bear the burden of getting us out of the hole that the uber rich dug us into.
All the assumptions made in that paragraph serve to explain the meat of the difference of opinion between those that believe in American values and the Euro-left that has infested the American polity over the last 60 years, a left that has finally reached its height of influence with this most socialistic of presidents this nation has ever seen.
Degan says that the “only way out” of this “economic cataclysm” is to wildly raise taxes. Like most leftists, Degan never gave a moment’s thought to the idea that cutting government programs, making government smaller, and slashing spending could also serve to get us out of this “economic cataclysm.” Naturally his “only way out” is really nothing but an agenda, not a solution, and his agenda is to forever increase government until that is all there is.
Secondly he takes it as a given that the “uber rich” are the ones that dug the hole we are in. This is just more simple-minded hatred and class warfare right out of the Communist Manifesto. In truth wealth and the wealthy in and of themselves were not the catalysts for the “hole” we are in with government today. From local, to county, to state, to the federal government, the hole(s) we are in — and they are many, indeed — did not come from “the rich” but from the profligate spending and nannystate interventionism indulged in by government officials pushing upon us all a statist, un-American, Euro-like ideal. This boated statism, this tearing down of the true America, is what dug these holes, not America’s capitalist wealth creators — the largest number of whom are small businessmen.
This is not to say that corporations and businesses are entirely innocent of adding their hand to digging those holes in Mr. Degan’s laments. Certainly the business community and their lobbyists played their part in laying low these once great United States. But the main reason they were able to play a part at all is because politicians took on more power unto themselves than they should have or even deserved to. You see, without government officials enlarging their own field of power first lobbyists wouldn’t have had any capability to play their destructive part.
Lobbyists are government’s fault, not the fault of business. Lobbyists correspondingly grow in number and power with the growth of government interventionism. It isn’t the other way ’round.
Mr. Degan’s next paragraph rambles a bit, but it is filled with the sort of historical ignorance that the left so often wallows in.
Once upon a time there existed a class of people who were SO FILTHY RICH that they lived in a ninety percent tax bracket. In other words, they kept ten percent of their income, handing over the rest to the federal government. It wasn’t as much of a sacrifice as you might think. They still had more money than they knew what to do with — they only had ninety percent less of it. That situation has not existed in this country for a long time. But it will exist again — count on it. I’ll be very blunt with you: Our very economic survival depends on us “soaking the rich” if you will. The last thirty years was their party and you and I were not invited. It’s time for them to pay the piper — not us. This is not class warfare, nor is it revolutionary thinking on my part. That is what is known as good old fashioned common sense.
Oh, but it IS class warfare, Tommy boy.
That wonderful time that Degan is speaking about started during the tail-end of The Great Depression! Yeah, that was such a wonderful time for the country, wasn’t it Mr. Degan? It continued right after WWII and finally ended when President Kennedy lowered the U.S. marginal tax rate below 80% for the first time in 24 years.
Now, it is true that America did well between 1950 and 1964 despite the confiscatory tax rates. But the U.S. has one person to thank for the huge financial success it enjoyed in those post WWII years and it isn’t the God Father of American socialism, FDR. His name was Adolph Hitler. You see, the rest of the civilized world was pretty much destroyed by Hitler’s aggression during WWII. The U.S. was the only large nation left physically untouched by that great conflagration and was the only industrialized nation in a position to help rebuild the world after the war. Not only that but our very character was ideally suited to serve as a platform for that success.
So America did not do well because of unionism, high taxation and the wild growth of government, it did so despite it and because of its unusual position as the one nation that could benefit most quickly in the aftermath of Hitler’s war. After all, it should be remembered that the U.S. had barely stepped out upon the world stage prior to WWII and was still in many ways almost a third world nation even in 1940. Further, FDR’s New Deal was an utter failure. What got the U.S. out of the Great Depression that Roosevelt’s policies made worse was its unique position during and after WWII, not a high tax rate on “the filthy rich.”
Also contrary to Degan’s class warfare rhetoric (despite his lie that he isn’t engaging in such), it’s a fact already that the top 50% of wage earners pay 96 percent of the taxes in this nation with the top five percent paying 54 percent themselves. The top one percent pays over a third of all taxes sent to Washington. It isn’t like “the filthy rich” don’t pay their fair share.
Here are some of the facts about taxes:
The top 1% pay over a third, 34.27% of all income taxes. (Up from 2003: 33.71%) The top 5% pay 54.36% of all income taxes (Up from 2002: 53.80%). The top 10% pay 65.84% (Up from 2002: 65.73%). The top 25% pay 83.88% (Down from 2002: 83.90%). The top 50% pay 96.54% (Up from 2002: 96.50%). The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.46% of all income taxes (Down from 2002: 3.50%). The top 1% is paying nearly ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50%! And who earns what? The top 1% earns 16.77% of all income (2002: 16.12%). The top 5% earns 31.18% of all the income (2002: 30.55%). The top 10% earns 42.36% of all the income (2002: 41.77%); the top 25% earns 64.86% of all the income (2002: 64.37%) , and the top 50% earns 86.01% (2002: 85.77%) of all the income.
Degan and his fellow leftists who pass thier sort of mindless hatred off as “analysis” also ignore an essential truth with hate-the-rich rhetoric. Even if we simply outright confiscated all the wealth of “the rich” in the U.S. there wouldn’t be enough to pay the trillions of dollars that Obama has put us in debt for.
Degan wants to pretend he is the champion of the middle and lower classes but as seen above Obama and his socialist cohorts have to target the very people Degan claims to support with confiscatory tax rates as well in order to pay for all his re-distributionist schemes. Obama targets people for high tax rates starting in the $60,000 range, a range that isn’t so “rich” as Degan wants to pretend it is.
With the simple truth realized that “the filthy rich” don’t even have enough to float Obama’s socialist society, it makes Degan’s ideas of confiscatory taxation merely punitive instead of ameliorative. And that is anti-American because in America we are all about fairness, not capriciousness. But neither he nor his fellow travellers are smart enough to understand this… or perhaps they do understand this but simply don’t care for the truth, only the promulgation of their hatreds.
Degan ends his little tirade with name-calling, hatred, a hope for violence against those he dislikes, and lies. Typical left-speak, really.
Knowing all this as I do, it is a laugh riot for me watching these Tea Party jackasses at any given event. They have been brainwashed by the plutocracy into doing their bidding and they’re doing it quite handily. And remember, contrary to what their leaders would have you believe, this was not a “grass roots” movement. It was created, promoted and, in some cases, financed by Rupert Murdich’s FOX Noise. Watching them protest the “evil Liberals” and knowing that the median income of these idiots is probably around thirty-five-thousand per year — if that — is enough to send me into gales of uncontrollable laughter. I’d really miss them if they were gone. Honestly I would.
First of all, it is simply a lie that the tea party movement was invented by “Fox Noise” and GOP leaders from above. I know because I was there at its birth. In fact, still today the GOP and its bigwigs can’t figure out a way to get their hands around the movement. No, the truth is that the tea party movement is one of the most pristine examples of a political grassroots movement that this country has ever seen. Are there some well-funded Conservative groups adding their voice to the tea party movement? Of course there are. Do they run and/or control it? Not even close. So, on the tea party movement, Mr. Degan is either willfully uninformed, or a lair. It’s one or the other.
Finally, it is telling how he ends his propagandistic extravaganza by hoping that his foes die. What else could he mean by “gone” in this context, anyway? Just like an unhinged, leftist, just like good ol’ Uncle Joe Stalin, Pol Pot , Mao Zedong, or Barack Obama’s friend William Ayers, Tommy Degan feels that if you can’t get them to join you… kill them.
So, from the historical ignorance, the hatred for American tradition and capitalism, the desire to execute those that disagree with him, we see in Tom Degan the essential un-Americanness exhibited by the left in America today.
But thanks for stopping by, Tommy boy. It was fun.
(Updated to remove that the ChicagoNow site is “run by the Chicago Tribune.” It is owned by the Tribune company but is not part of the newspaper.)
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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Using a definition of “fun” to which we are unaccustomed, of course!