A Nation of Socialists
It is always amusing to listen to the teajadis and their bleats about socialism or redistributing wealth — especially since you know that most of them are some of the biggest beneficiaries of government handouts on the planet. Now we can see exactly how much redistribution Americans take advantage of and we don’t even *know* that these are government programs:
This is from a paper “Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era,” by Cornell’s Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions Suzanne Mettler, who used this chart to document the fact that Americans who tell you they are not taking advantage of any social programs really, really are. Americans keep being told that the Government Is Bad For You, yet no one wants to remind people that there are plenty of Americans who would not have the lives they lead without the kind of government supports shown in that chart. It also makes you wonder what the so-called political divide might look like if someone used these programs that so many people take advantage of and made a full-throated *defense* of government supports for middle and working class families.
H/t for this from BoingBoing, who note:
It’s the “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who’ve been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.
Indeed.
Tags: Republican Bamboozlement
And that does not even address the other quality of life benefits provided by governments that Republicans take advantage of everyday (eg. safe food, roads, police & fire protection)
I was talking to an old Republican yesterday who claimed that “the debt” is the biggest problem facing the country in one sentence – and the next sentence said the we need to invest more in manufacturing to get people back to work.
I think that we’ve become a country of idiots.
Problem, half of the items on the list are not government programs. 529’s are people saving their own money like education IRA’s,child tax credits, and mortgage deductions likewise are not government programs. Are you so desperate for government success that you have to claim these to make the numbers look larger? 529’s child tax credits, and the like happen to be Republican tax policy by the way. So I guess by your logic the most widely accepted and successful government “programs” are mostly Republican initiatives and they don’t involve setting up new bureaucracies or interfereing in people’s lives.
Via Republicans, down with progressives.
Jason, both of your old Republican’s statements are spot on. Saddly you think the way to achieve more investment in manufacturing is some socialist enterprise. Far from it. Fair tax. Ramp up the economy and more money will come. Our problem is economic growth and the destruction of our manufacturing economy. That is now expanding to other sectors.
We cannot become a nation of bureaucrats. There is nothing wrong with government workers, we need them. We also need at several times the private sector workers to be able to afford them at the lifestlye they seem to want. We have to get the private economy moving again.
half of the items on the list are not government programs. 529’s are people saving their own money like education IRA’s,child tax credits, and mortgage deductions
David has a point. I hope those aren’t the “loopholes” Obama wants to close in his tax reform plan.
To get manufacturing and the private economy going again, we have to raise capital gains and dividend taxes back to the Reagan and Clinton levels. That will tell corporations to either spend their money on hiring people and buying manufactured goods, or else we will tax it and do it for them.
David: Without the government’s rules on 529s, people saving their money would have to do it with after-tax dollars. Similarly with mortgage interest deductions — if they didn’t exist, people wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgages they currently do (not entirely a bad thing, by the way, but it would take many years for the market to reset itself).
As for the “fair tax,” you need to do some research on that. There is a vast difference between nominal tax rates and effective tax rates. If a fair tax replaces only income taxes, it will increase the burden on the middle class and reduce it on the upper income levels. If you’re talking about replacing ALL federal taxes, it comes out more fairly, but there’s also no good reason to move to it. If the goal is to eliminate loopholes, there’s an easier way to do so: Eliminate the loopholes.