Socialist America Sinking
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage. A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:
"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."
Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.
Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When "Silent Cal" Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.
And today? Obama's first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.
The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.
Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers. Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes, and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes and, soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.
Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi's House. A surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1 percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8 percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to provide health insurance for employees.
Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that businesses provide their employees.
The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?
While the hardest working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.
Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.
Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.
Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.
All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America—as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution—"for ourselves and our posterity."
China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that's swollen to double its size in a year. The 20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows another pattern.
"The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event," writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. "Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious."
Even the establishment is starting to get the message.
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Another great one from Pat. "The Chinese are not fools....China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that’s swollen to double its size in a year" -- and a massive foreign empire we longer can afford.
That's all you need to know.
Why didn't Americans elect Pat when he could have prevented this?
Mr. Buchanan,
The estalishment does not get the message. The establishment is the parasite which is sucking the life out of the host - the withering remnant of those who actually produce wealth - until the host is dead. This parasite, unAmerican as you have pointed out, will not die with the host. It will attempt to move on to some other global host.
Mr. Seiler @ 1
"Why didn’t Americans elect Pat when he could have prevented this?"
Two points to your words cited supra: The Führerprinzip, even when applied to and by a man like Mr. Buchanan, should always be suspect; and no one man could turn the anti-culture of America around.
On the subject of how well the establishment "gets it", our mainstream media is flailing away at capitalism and free markets as though these are the culprits to be attacked over the current mess we're in.
Today, Lawrence Vance's column on LRC contains this gem:
"These recent attacks on capitalism are not only wrong they are misdirected. One of the greatest myths about the free market in the United States is that we have one."
Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.
Teriffic! Judging by the millions of credit hours wasted by Enormous State Universities around the nation on remedial math and rudimentary English grammar, you'd think the liberals would pay a little a little attention to one of their favorite bumper stickers: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
We've tried education and it has not done very well. However, the ignorant can compete with Mexicans for menial yet dignified work.
re- #3
"The Führerprinzip, even when applied to and by a man like Mr. Buchanan, should always be suspect;"
I agree, Mr. Peters. Also, I might add that Mr. Seiler's question contains another fallacy: "Why didn’t Americans elect Pat....? "
Americans, at least the voting public, have absolutely nothing to do with electing a president. The electoral process is pure sham, and nothing voters can do will affect it in the least.
I often agree with Mr. Seiler, but not on this particular point.
Socialism is the least of our worries. The problem with America is not socialism, it is Americans.
Dr. Wilson,
The anti-culture which is the alliance of the Hobbesian state, i.e. the state which has a monopoly on coercion and the ability to define the limits of its own power, and the "autonomous" individuals with their abstract rights has subsumed and supplanted culture which is the set of symbols, institutions and processes which restrain the individual's compulsions and desires so that he can fulfill the obligations, duties and responsibilities which come with natural relationships into which he is born: God, family, church and local community. Americans are not only embedded in the anti-culture; it is embedded in us. I shudder as I continue to discover how much of the anti-culture in embedded in me.
Mr. Roberts,
Your words:
"The electoral process is pure sham, and nothing voters can do will affect it in the least."
Yesterday, I returned from an eighteen-day trip to see my son and daughter. Upon my return, I found a most official letter from the Office of the Voter Registrar. The letter had been posted on 26 June 2009 and likely arrived at my house the day on which I departed. This is important to the story because the letter gave me until 16 July 2009, twenty-one days after posting, to appear in person to the Registrar of Voters at the court house and prove that I had not voted in another state, which, if true, made me ineligible to vote in Louisiana. Well, yesterday, the day of my return, was the 16th. I missed the deadline.
I boldly said, "Amen!" However, my wife retorted with, "What is someone has stolen your identity?" That prompted a call to the Office of the Voter Registrar. (Kafka's der Prozeß always comes to mind when I deal with such bureaucrats!)
I told the good lady who answered that I was calling in response to the correspondence which I had received for the purpose of stilling my curiosity as to the state in which I allegedly voted and to check against potential identity theft. I told her that I was not interested in the fools farce of voting, although I do vote for sheriff and for my local justice of the peace, the only two offices with which I deal and from which I actually get some service. She gave me a lecture about calling our election process a fools farce and then asked if I had ever voted in Arkansas. I said, "Yes." My wife and I had lived there for three years over ten years ago, in a state, which, from my experience, is a thoroughly rotted limb of the South. I told the good lady that I had been registered to vote in Louisiana, the state of my birth, for the last ten years and had faithfully voted for sheriff and justice of the peace every four years. She asked me to verify my address, which I did. She said that it would not be necessary for me to appear in person. That got me to thinking. It would appear that illegal aliens, legal aliens and thugs with their names on a gum wrapper can register to vote in the oddest of places. Yet, I as a resident by birth and ancestry of Louisiana, having voted in numerous elections, be it but for sheriff and justice of the peace, can be told that I must appear in person at the court house within twenty-one days to prove that I was not registered in some other state, an allegation likely based on some miscommunication between Arkansas' computers and Louisiana's computers.
Such is the state of things.
#1 "Why didn’t Americans elect Pat when he could have prevented this?"
The two parts of the question are linked this way. If he had been elected, it would have meant that he could have prevented this because it would have meant that citizens understood enough to be a part of his preventing this. He was not elected because people did not understand enough to know that he could prevent this.
re-#9
"It would appear that illegal aliens, legal aliens and thugs with their names on a gum wrapper can register to vote in the oddest of places."
That's true, Mr. Peters. I didn't know the half of it, though, until I went to a VDOT office to renew my driver's license. In the line ahead of me was a man who apparently spoke only Spanish, who was being asked by the clerk if he wanted to register to vote while applying for a driver's license. He kept saying "No se" until the clerk waved him on to the next line.
I asked the clerk, "Why are you asking him to register as a voter? He's obviously not even a citizen, since he doesn't speak English." She replied that she had been told to do so.
I suppose that since voting is regarded as an inalienable human right rather than a privilege of citizenship, that anyone who manages to arrive here in time for an election must not be barred from exercising that sacred right. Of course, those of us who were born here must be scrutinized for disqualifications.
As Thomas Berger's character Jack Crabb said in Little Big Man, "Sometimes this world is just too ridiculous a place to try to live in."
@ Comment #2
"Mr. Buchanan, The estalishment does not get the message."
I fear the establishment not only gets the message, it is the sender of the message. And the message is "We're doing this and you have no say in the matter. Global government is on the way."
It is the people who, by and large, don't get the message. The world that they have known is coming to an end. Quickly. Just think. The generation born after about 2010 will probably never know anything about the America that someone born in 1990 remembers. Much less 1945.
Clyde Wilson is, as usual, correct. I would, however, go further and say the problem is people. Byron said it best in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:
There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory -- when that fails,
Wealth, vice , corruption, -- barbarism at last.
@13 Andrew
I believe it was Oscar Wilde who once noted that America is the only nation that went from barbarity to decadence without ever being a civilization in between.
That said, I'd like to offer up Dixieland Jazz, Federalist architecture, Robert Frost, and Virginia Gentleman as proof that we tried.