The Morality of Being Mugged.

Obama wants to raise taxes. Lots of taxes. On everyone. 

Great. He's a Democrat. That's what they do. At least it provides clarity on the distinctions between the idiots who still believe that we can tax our way to prosperity and decent, freedom-loving folk.


In all seriousness, it is time to have a discussion about what freedom actually means. Does paying more in taxes make you more or less free? What does voting in punitive tax increases against others say about your morality and your responsibility? If we allow it to happen, are all men really equal under the law? How can you feign to love and defend freedom when you have advocated government control of schools, hospitals, and retirement planning? How can you deceive yourself into a self-image of a freedom fighter if you continue to push for tighter regulations on banks, manufacturers, restaurants, and all manor of employers. This is far less about the budget than it is about reclaiming our birthright of liberty.

The selfish budget? Or the selfless one?

By Eugene Robinson, Thursday, April 14, 8:00 PM

It was refreshing to hear all those unambiguous declarations from President Obama on Wednesday.

This man can do no wrong to these people. His last major address was an awkward, groping attempt to explain why we clusterfucked our way to calamity in Libya (since which time there has been absolutely no progress towards any of the goals that he laid out). The hallmark of that speech was moderation of absolutes to the point of incoherence. Liberals adored that he wasn’t using the same type of cowboy language as Bush, no matter how stupid the idea of a no fly zone over Libya was, is, and will for the foreseeable future will be.

Now, his stark to the point of being combative, and this, too, is celebrated? He saves a special contempt for the American right that he simply can’t muster for terrorists, despots, or criminals. On the right, we look at Obama’s erratic behavior and wonder why he does it and what type of lunatic would find it appealing. The answer is that his base encourages it because they have no guiding belief except expediency and the hoarding of power, and they find it appealing because they’re petty .

“I will not” let Medicare become a voucher program or deprive families with disabled children of needed benefits.

That’s an odd time to jump in and out of quotations and paraphrasing. Also, notice the sneaky language of associating vouchers with deprivation, which is just asinine.

“We will” reform government health-care programs without disavowing the social compact.

Now I’m no Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in our social contract (the Constitution) about free healthcare.

“I refuse” to sign another renewal of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. Republicans “want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut

The Bush tax cuts, outlined in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 lowered the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 35%. That would mean that Obama’s yearly taxable income would have to be $4,347,826.09 to earn $200,000 of tax cuts. This places him in the 99.49^th percentile.

The short answer is that no one is getting these types of breaks. At this point, you’re looking at the statistical anomalies at the extreme outliers of a distribution that was calculated to accurately represent the middle of the distribution.

that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. . . .

There is no offset in the federal budget. The money is not going from seniors to the rich. Quite the opposite; less money is going from the rich to the government. It has nothing to do with how much the government spends on granny. When the President discusses saving billions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse alone, you know that linking tax cuts to spending cuts is extremely disingenuous, particularly when tax rates have an impact on the level of taxable income. Namely that high tax rates encourage waste, fraud, and abuse.

And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president.”

Don’t worry. That won’t be much longer.

Okay, there weren’t any lines with the simple heat of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” or the terse power of “Make my day.”

Seriously? The greatest orator of our time comes up short against a Hollywood dullard with Alzheimer’s and Dirty Harry?

But Obama’s budget manifesto

For a guy espousing socialist beliefs, you might want to stay away from that word, Jack.

represented a significant warming of his usually cool rhetoric. He said he wanted to find common ground but instead devoted much of the speech to drawing lines in the sand.

In other words, he lied about a desire for bipartisanship, he attacked his guests as inhuman killers of autistic babies (projection if ever I’ve seen it), he demagogued, and he insufferably pandered to his base…and his poll numbers are still going down.

And thank goodness. If ever there were a time when lines desperately needed to be drawn, it’s now.

Now. But not a week ago when the budget debate was going on. When Republicans held the high cards it was all about compromise. And I suppose it will be time for compromise again when the debt ceiling is being debated. But now? Now is the time for lines in the sand. Why? Because Eugene Robinson--the pre-eminent political thinker of our time-said so.

Before we get carried away with praise,

Too late, you slobbering buffoon.

let’s remember that even as he gets in touch with his Old Testament side, Obama is playing defense.

The American people forced that change.

Republicans have already forced him to accept budget cuts that he abhors,

And that conservatives abhor for very different reasons, which gives you an idea of just how wide the gulf is between Obama and reason.

and it’s a given that more slashing and burning will follow. Obama noted the questionableness

Not a word.

of choking off government spending at a time when the economy is struggling for altitude.

Since I’ve already made the case for divorcing federal revenues from federal expenditures, I’m forced by my own intellectual honesty to acknowledge that government spending does spur GDP growth (it is an item in the GDP equation, after all.) Yet it does not spur innovation, technological advances (in the economic sense), or organic job creation. All of those are hallmarks of an economy that’s humming and a vibrant private sector. None of these can be achieved by government redistribution, no matter how diligently you work to make the piles of money even.

Yet he proposes doing just that — which means his GOP opponents are setting the agenda.

Let’s also remember that those tax cuts for the rich were as unjust, outrageous and totally unacceptable last fall as they are today.

Uh……………Why is it unjust, outrageous, and totally unacceptable to give tax cuts to the wealthy when you’re giving tax cuts to the lower class, the lower-middle class, the middle class, and the upper-middle class, the working class, the bohemian class, and Miss Laughlin’s 7^th grade Social Studies class? The reason that we have a Republic and not a Democracy is that the founders feared the tyranny of the majority. As in, one large group of people (the middle class) using their voting power to pilfer from another smaller group of people (the rich). It’s no less morally abhorrent than it would be to systematically withhold government services from the poor.

Which many commentators noted (ahem).

Yep, and you were just as dumb then as you are now. Maybe you’re dumber now. Idiocy amongst WaPo writers seems to have an inflation factor built-in. The point is, you’re definitely not getting any smarter.

Before someone caved to Republican demands and signed legislation extending the millionaires’ tax break for two more years. That someone being Obama.

Win for Boehner!

The president glossed over this inconvenient history.

Didn’t anyone other than me connect the dots between the extension of the tax cuts and the ticking down of unemployment by a full percent?

What he managed to do admirably, however, was distinguish between his vision of America and the one sketched by

Wait for it…

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)

Pause for the requisite totally hetero man-swoon.

Okay continue.

on behalf of House Republicans. It was, as Obama’s critics charge, a political speech — and rightly so. The questions at the heart of the battle over spending and entitlements are, after all, fundamentally political.

The critique isn’t that it’s a political speech. The critique is that the political nature of the speech that valued earning rhetorical points—scored somewhere in the dark recesses of Chris Matthew’s head—has obliterated any potential for the two sides to work together. In fact, the speech was the exact opposite of political. Politicians running for office can bluster all they want; people expect them to. By firing a shot across the bow of the GOP 18 months away from the next election, President Obama has forfeit the next two years of his term to a re-election bid. The problem wasn’t that this was a political speech, the problem was that it was a self-defeating political speech.

It’s not just a matter of drawing a graph in which the line called “expenditures” meets the line called “revenue.” The question is how this intersection is made to occur.

Fucking brilliant. I had no idea that when I made graphs that were representative of a financial situation occurring in reality that those lines actually meant something.

Ryan’s plan and Obama’s plan both reduce the deficit by about $4 trillion over the next decade,

Budgetary accounting is nonsensical, as it’s not in any way tied to reality, but go on.

but they do so in starkly different ways.

Perhaps the clearest example of the difference is how the two plans would handle Medicare and Medicaid, the chief drivers of the deficit. Obama wants to maintain both programs as entitlements.

So…to punt the issue.

He believes, as I do, that we have a collective interest

If the “collective interest” doesn’t strike you as pure socialism, then you might be a Democrat.

in ensuring that the elderly and the poor receive the health care they need and deserve.

I don’t think he knows what deserve means. Usually it is the product of achievement.

He sees this as a matter not just of compassion but of common sense: We’ve already fallen behind other industrialized democracies in major health indicators, including life expectancy, and we certainly won’t “win the future” by becoming an unhealthier nation.

Given that “winning the future” is, in Obama’s verbiage, defined by economic production, a lower life expectancies for the elderly and impoverished, neither of which contribute to the economy, would actually be productive towards those goals.

Not advocating. Just saying.

Republicans apparently believe it’s enough to ensure that state-of-the-art medical care is available to those who can afford to pay for it.

In other words, Republicans acknowledge that scarcity exists within the medical field, and that the market is the most efficient way to allocate resources. Conversely, Democrats do not acknowledge that scarcity exists within the medical field. When they are unable to pay for everything, they turn to bureaucratic solutions to ration care. We had this debate last year. Republicans won.

Under Ryan’s plan, Medicare and Medicaid could no longer be described as true federal entitlements. This is no exaggeration, because under neither program would adequate health care be guaranteed. Seniors and the poor would, increasingly, have to fend for themselves.

It’s not enough to carry his water, now you have to plagiarize his phrasing too? I wonder when Robinson realized that he was nothing more than an easily replaceable shill.

The Republican plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program that subsidizes the purchase of private health insurance.

Fantastic idea. Vouchers usually are. School choice next!

So what if an individual’s insurance premiums are not covered by the voucher?

Two options:

1. You look for a new insurance provider. There will be insurance providers that price their product to meet the dollar amount of the voucher. Active consumers shopping for the best insurance for them and constantly monitoring their expenditures and refusing to pay for services that they do not need will drive down prices.
2. You take the voucher, sprinkle in a little of your savings (yes, that is possible, even for the lower end of the income spectrum) and buy the plan you want.

This isn’t complicated. This is like advocating the nationalization of all food production for fear that private market will charge too much for cheese. Is cheese too expensive? Of course not. The market prices it exactly at the point where marginal benefit and marginal cost are equal. This is the free market. It works every time it’s tried.

So what if health costs, and premiums, continue to skyrocket?

Again, they won’t, because the market will be pricing premiums, not bureaucrats. However, playing along with your asinine hypothetical, if they do, the amount on the voucher is something that Congress can adjust every year. To argue that the government can efficiently run health care but can’t accurately index the voucher system to healthcare costs is beyond insulting my (considerable) intelligence.

The free market will surely take care of all that, somehow or other.

Is this flippant backhander meant to imply that the free market is not the most efficient means of allocating scarce resources? If not, what is?

On Medicaid, Republicans want to shift the burden to the states,

In other words, localize the problem and giving more freedom to the legislators and politicians that are closer to their constituents in accordance with their Tenth Amendment responsibilities. Someone please tell me where providing for the individual health of the citizens of the United States is authorized by the Constitution.

giving them block grants and essentially telling them to take care of the indigent however they choose. Some states would be diligent in providing adequate medical care. Some would not.

Compare to the federal government, which is never diligent.

Is this the kind of America we want?

Absolutely.

How selfish are we, really?

Just enough.

How selfless?

On the day that Atlas Shrugged Part 1 comes out, I feel obligated to remind everyone that selflessness is not a virtue.

To what extent does this churchgoing nation take the biblical instruction to “love thy neighbor” seriously?

“Love thy neighbor” does not mean “pay into a slush-fund for blithering idiots to curry political favor by pandering to potential voters who could otherwise help themselves.” The government is not a mechanism for charity.

These are the kinds of basic choices we face.

Reform (Ryan) or the Status Quo (Obama). Oh what a difference three years makes.

There are two plans on the table now.

Actually, there are four. The GOP released another budget proposal independent of Ryan’s. Similarly, Obama’s ignored debt commission still has some ideas floating around there.

Only one of them — Obama’s — appeals to the better angels of our nature.

Obama’s budget appeals to the guilty and the leeches, two blights on the human condition that are certainly not the better angels of our nature. The solution is, as it always has been, freedom from the shackles from government. It used to happen by force; now it happens by guilt and shame.