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Breathtaking Moment in the Annals of Wingnuttery
Excerpt from a letter in the NYTBR from Donna Wiesner Keene, "a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum" (pardon my italics) :
Conservatives believe spending is out of hand and never use "investment" as a synonym for tax and spend. [The notion] that "there really is no example of small government among rich nations," is unsupported nonsense. Think Dubai, free and rich.For only this, I miss the Evil Empire as a living example of big government. What is apparent is that our spendthrift policies are bringing the United States the empty store shelves of Communism....
There's the slogan conservatives have been looking for: Emigrate to the Emirate, Don't Go Back to Russia!
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Republicans hate giving anything to anybody. I'll bet Christmas with them is a real treat.
C
February 8, 2009 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's just it, if you are a member of the club they take care of you. They don't mind socialism amongst themselves, but the rest of us shouldn't ever be invited to the party.
February 8, 2009 2:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your are right. What was that the George Carlin said ? "It's one big club and you and I aren't in it."
C
February 8, 2009 3:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Their words and their rhetoric are merely in service of elitism. They nazi fascist to the core. They misdirect, change the meaning of words, use your own arguments against you, and project their own behavior on to you. They are like a machine in service of gross inequity.
February 8, 2009 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think our Senior Fellow of Whatever should wing on out there and take a job doing contract labor. Free and rich, all right.
February 8, 2009 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually you'll find that conservatives give more to charity than liberals. Also, unlike liberals, conservatives pay their taxes. Tsk.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/rev2007-01-18hh.html
http://newsbusters.org/node/9323
February 8, 2009 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought you said giving money and helping people wasn't the same thing...No?
February 8, 2009 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have no idea what you're referring to. Maybe you should address the reasons why libs are so stingy with their own money. and free with everyone elses.
February 8, 2009 6:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
And who are we to challenge an economist who "studied economics at the famously demanding Rand Graduate School"?
I know this is the kind "statistical nitpicking" your reviewer was loathe to put up with, but a larger number of uber-wealthy Republicans might be pushing up the statistical average and taking skin-flint middle income Republicans along for the ride.
For the record, my income is decidedly middle and I gave more than the average Republican last year.
February 8, 2009 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I read somewhere that the reason conservative gave more was that the survey used donations to churches as charitable giving. Of course, since much of that money simply pays for a platform for demagogues and bigots to rail against liberals, blacks and homosexuals, I question the validity of those numbers.
Bob Somerby recently wrote that either the survey or its methodology were never published, so there's never been a real chance to verify its results. At this point, it's kind of become an urban legend that conservatives trot out whenever they need to rebut the stinginess charge.
February 9, 2009 12:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Looks like you may be right on church giving:
Full disclosure: I misrepresented the author, who claims that the average Republican household gives 30 percent more to charity while earning 6 percent less.
From my experience as a corporate donations manager, I can say that giving to individual charities, for all the good they do, is a horribly inefficient way to address social ills.
February 9, 2009 12:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bingo on both posts, charitable giving to churches and the inefficiency of same.
February 9, 2009 8:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Two points here, Shooter.
One is that liberals in the blue states are already supporting those charitable givers and everyone else in the red states through their taxes. However, the red states don't pass that on efficiently to the neediest of their citizens because they prefer giving it to the wealthiest of them.
The second is just curiosity on whether conservatives really do claim that charitable giving creates wealth by, among other things, forging good character? As far as I can tell, that didn't work out so well on Wall Street.
February 9, 2009 8:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who doubts that virtually everyone in the upper 10%, at least, have contingencies plans in place that involve extant foreign residences, citizenship, investment, bank accounts,...
Any competent insurance scam artist knows that you can't count on living in the building you are burning down for profit.
February 8, 2009 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well said...
February 8, 2009 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
To people like Keene anything to the economic left of Friedman and Hayek represents communism. Why these people can't/won't be dismissed as the lunatic fringe free-market absolutists that they are is beyond me. Trickle down economics got us into this mess to begin with and doubling down and going even further is the last thing we should try to do to get out of it. This is the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the wealthy, and their well paid and placed propagandists, is what I expected to see and hear.
February 8, 2009 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think we could help Ms. Keene on her way to the land she loves by sending her a visa application.
February 8, 2009 7:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
February 8, 2009 7:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
When was the last time was, that a poor person gave me a job? That is so worn-out shooter, give it a rest.
I am not saying take all the wealth and redistribute it equally just as the economy is not anything less then a zero sum game...and for the winners there will be losers. So the in fact the only results from the rich doing better is the rich having more then the rest of us. We have had trickle down economic policies in place for over 20 years and our economy has ended up where it has. Was that benefit for the rest of us the illusory inflation of housing values which made us think we got more? How did that work out?
February 8, 2009 7:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
February 8, 2009 8:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
To the first part I never said that we should do completely away with the wealthy.
In response to the middle section I disagree. There are winners and losers. For example with globalization the winners were workers in India and China, who made more money then they were before, and Corporations, who made made more money by paying Indian and Chinese workers less money then they had to pay American workers. While the American workers were the losers. But they, the American workers, were 'rewarded' with unrealistic inflated home prices and access to easier credit which put us further in debt...which of course is just another downside.
Now to finish with the last part. Since Reagen the US government has tried to facilitate this faux trickle down economic theory. They stripped regulations away, repealed/passed laws that helped the wealthy gain more wealth while doing nothing to guarantee that there would be benefits for society as a whole. The business model is to make more money for the executives and shareholders and not to voluntarily raise the level of the employee's wages.
I defy you or anyone to give examples in our current economy of how the American worker has benefited one iota from wealth being redistributed upwards. Like I said...there are winners and there are losers in this game.
February 8, 2009 8:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
February 8, 2009 11:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Are more people being employed? More is the key word. Taxes were lowered on the wealthy and they were empowered to take full advantage of global markets with the hitch being there would be an upside for the American people...so yes, the wealth was allowed to be redistributed upwards from the American worker, by weakening unions, and by allowing outsourcing of jobs with the caveat that we would all benefit. That was the story that was being told when these tax reductions were made and global markets made more accessible. They have streets named after deals like that...they're called 'one-way'.
February 8, 2009 11:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
shooter,
wealthy people have more influence with Congress because of their wealth, ergo, they use their wealth to get Congress to write legislation that is favorable to them at the expense of the rest of society.
Those who run hedge funds pay 15% tax on tens of millions they make thanks to the purchase of favorable tax treatment they bought. The corporate executives like the Wall Street bankers who controlled so much money they were able to buy Phil Gramm and Chuck Schumer to repeal, and then write new legislation that enriched the bankers. It has nothing to do with manufacturing anything. Nothing to do with some little guy in a garage starting a business.
Oh, and I won't get into the bought and paid for off shore tax dodges.
February 9, 2009 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Heh. I'm trying to think of the last time a rich person gave me a job.
Could possibly be because those uber-generous rich folk haven't been putting a lot of effort into job creation these last eight years.
February 8, 2009 7:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Heh. Sure they have. Just not in the US. You're too expensive.
February 8, 2009 8:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
And by taking a job from an "expensive" worker whose wage enabled him to buy your product and pushing it offshore to a worker making 90 percent less, you're eliminating your market and ultimately driving yourself out of business. Which is pretty much what's happening now.
Heh heh.
February 8, 2009 8:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Kinda like a shark eating his own entrails, right?
It's the same peerless conservative logic that prefers tax cuts at a 1.02 ROI to infrastructure investment at 1.59.
And figured if you cut a bad debt into small enough pieces and hide the pieces in enough places you can make it disappear.
Guess it all makes sense to a rich guy, though.
February 8, 2009 8:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
February 8, 2009 11:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fair enough. I'm a few shovelfuls of lard short of a full bucket, but that's politics.
I enjoyed the discussion. See you in Opportunity.
February 8, 2009 11:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, shooter does have a point.
We've spent and otherwise committed a shitload of money in Defense spending and in off-budget spending for the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That doesn't seem to have worked out too well, from an economic standpoint.
Sure, it's a different type of spending, but it is spending.
Although I haven't heard much about the relative ineffectiveness of tax cuts that the last few decades have demonstrated. At what point do we get to say that mega-tax cuts have been tried, and failed?
February 9, 2009 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think reducing marginal tax rates has very little to do with economic growth and everything to do with transferring money from the public sector to the private sector.
Entitlement programs are the conservatives' white whale. They've tried to eliminate them piecemeal but failed because the social safety net still enjoys broad popular support. So they've employed a "starve the beast" strategy that involves shrinking tax receipts until the programs become unsustainable.
Then there's the defense budget . . . .
February 9, 2009 11:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well I have a solution to that...let workers collectively bargain globally. If the corporations should benefit from markets that are global why shouldn't workers rights to collectively bargain be the same? Just a thought...
February 8, 2009 9:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Shooter242 is a long-time troll who works Salon.
Apparently he is looking for a change of venue.
February 9, 2009 11:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't recall exactly how long shooter242 has been commenting on TPM and ancillary sites, but it's been a while; I'm thinking well over a year.
His comments fit into a subset of the troll profile, but not the copy/paste-"libs r dum" model.
For instance, he will happily post facts if they support his points. And he does engage on substance on many occasions.
I think he's flogging his ideological preferences, but believe that he's sincere in them.
February 9, 2009 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Heh. Sure they have. Just not in the US. You're too expensive."
It's so interesting that you would say this, Shooty, because I've never encountered this phrase of yours--"when's the last time a poor person gave you a job"--anywhere else until just yesterday.
Yesterday, I encountered it at a site discussing the connection between what they called deliberate "financial debasement" (or market crashes) engineered by financial elites as a means of paying for corporate "infrastructure" and a means of obtaining less expensive labor.
But I guess that's not what you mean when you say it.
February 9, 2009 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Government is too big and can't be controlled so there has to be less government. This is the current neo-con meme. Of course, the neo-cons are all for huge governement, huge defense spending and huge deficits but the meme is still being circulated by the neo-cons as if the neo-cons were Jeffersonians and as if just letting the invisible hand alone would result in anything but disaster. Neo-cons are for huge goverment that doesn't assist anyone. Being against government regulation of markets is like being for businessess that lack accounting departments and quality control departments. Without accounting departments and quality control departments businesses could then concentrate on the core elements of the corproation providing goods and services. This is of course senseless but no more senseless than shunning regulation of the national economy with a transparent and light as possible but effective set of regulations.
February 9, 2009 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
The question is why this particular meme - the communist meme - at this particular time. The guess is that the rank and file of the neo-cons are being pressured like never before to stay the course not to break lines, all questions about the effectivenss of neo-cons policies from the rank and file are to be quashed harshly. Rank and file neo-cons are now living in a tightly regulated space where a word out of line results in disaster sort of like the disaster people under communsim experienced. Pressure is being exerted on rank and file neo-cons by elite neo-cons so per usual neo-cons blame Democrats for difficulties arising fron neo-con policies.
February 9, 2009 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink