Stupid Liberals

[CMike]

WEll it's a drop dead certainty that if you tax only on taxable INCOME, but not wealth itself, then it pays dividend to START OUT WEALTHY, doesn't it?

Give me a million or ten, and I will never pay a single cent in taxes, while clipping tax free coupons, folks.

I will not touch the principle, and I will live a life of extreme affluence while the rest of you working stiffs are duped into paying my share of the taxes.

I will take advantage of every service this government provides for me, and it will cost me not one thin dime.

But hey, you people who believe in the American dream?

You just keep paying my taxes for me, while I enjoy the benefit of welfare for millionaires, okay?

And be sure to vote Republican, too, so that never changes, would you?

Thanks in advance for being sheep.

I would love to know this trick about not paying taxes. For last year (2009) my taxes were more than double my entire income the prior two years.

 

[Coyote]

I feel like there's a point to this somewhere... I hope.

The only point is on his head...





(just the latest retard...that is - hack - to join the board I guess...)

 

[Coyote]

Over and over again I read about some dumb liberal whining about how the rich should pay more in taxes. What these yahoos don’t get is that taxes have nothing to do with being rich or not, that is the scam the progressives want us to believe. Many of the biggest liberal losers here keep pushing this idea because they are too stupid to think for themselves.

Taxes are based on income in a given period of time, not on wealth. Ex:

Bob is out of work and lives with his mother. Bob strikes it rich in the lottery and wins a million dollars. Bob now has to pay taxes on a million dollar income.

“Giant-tech” corporation has billions in assets, buildings, trucks, and inventory. Sales slump due to a slow economy and “Giant-tech” has a loss of income for the year, spending more than it takes in. Giant-tech would pay nothing in income tax because it had no income to report.

The PROGRESSIVE income tax is designed to punish those who make money, not punish those who have money. This little tool keeps the rich insulated from hard working successful people that are climbing the socio-economic ladder. This is why so many RICH LIBERALS want taxes, the more the better because it keeps the average guy down, while keeping the poor addicted to the government programs that promote laziness.

How much time do you spend putting together this drivel?

Your "message" makes no sense.

That's because he got if off the back of a cereal box (Fruit Loops probably)

 

[Skull Pilot]

The problem with republicans is, they think they are going to make it rich one day. In the real world, the chances of that happening are slim.

Chances would be a lot better if we all got to keep more of the money we earn.

Do you realize that if over 45 year working lifetime that even a person who averaged only 45K a year could retire as a multi millionaire?

All he would have to do is save the 15% of his salary that is confiscated by the government for Social Security in a privately held account and earn an average of 5% interest over that time frame.


Sounds like striking it rich to me.

This is why you need a more stable economic system that is not victim to the boom and bust of an unregulated market.

Do you realise just how many people lost retirement investiments during this mess?

Do you realise this whole mess was created by people who stood to benifit off of it and it was orchestraed by the 1% who many people defend as if they are gods?


If we had tax laws that made people by a fair capital gains tax of investement earnings and had regulations that kept the economy more stable (like glass steagal) then the little guy would not get HOSED every couple of years.

Excuse me but booms and busts are part of regulated markets too.

Markets manipulated by government are insulated from external forces that moderate fluctuations.

Artificially low interest rates fueled the mortgage bubble and made derivatives way more volatile than they would have been.

If interests rates were allowed to behave as they historically have there would have been a slight rise in rates and not the effective negative rates that we saw for the years leding up to the housing bubble.

And let's not for get the government guaranteeing of mortgages. There is absolutely no reason for the government to guarantee the payment of private contracts.

And FYI anyone with in 5 years of retirement who had all their money in stocks are the ones who screwed up.

Whose fault is it that most people spend more time planning one two week vacation that they do planning their retirement?

 

[Truthmatters]

List of recessions in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Please study teh real history of recessions and you will understand teh boom and Bust I am talking about.
Yes any economy fluctuates but an unregulated market provides a Boom and Bust cycle tha tonly the wealthy can profit in.

The vast majority end up gettting fleeced every few years in the down time.

Why ANYONE who cares about this country insists on not seeing this I will never know.

 

[Defiant1]

I feel like there's a point to this somewhere... I hope.

There is?

Hmmm... all I'm getting is the same point made in every righty hack troll thread - "Liberals are icky and have cooties".

Do I get the kewpie doll?

No, icky and cooties can be fixed.

 

[Skull Pilot]

The problem with republicans is, they think they are going to make it rich one day. In the real world, the chances of that happening are slim.

Chances would be a lot better if we all got to keep more of the money we earn.

Do you realize that if over 45 year working lifetime that even a person who averaged only 45K a year could retire as a multi millionaire?

All he would have to do is save the 15% of his salary that is confiscated by the government for Social Security in a privately held account and earn an average of 5% interest over that time frame.


Sounds like striking it rich to me.

You forget that the government is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure that makes commerce possible.

The problem with neo-Cons is that they want across the board tax cuts but also want to sacrifice nothing in the way of services.

How does one keeping the money the government confiscates for the Social Security Ponzi scheme effect the other taxes that support the government functions of which you speak?

FYI we pay a whole other set of state federal and local taxes that are supposed to support infrastructure and how well has that money been spent?

 

[Skull Pilot]

List of recessions in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Please study teh real history of recessions and you will understand teh boom and Bust I am talking about.
Yes any economy fluctuates but an unregulated market provides a Boom and Bust cycle tha tonly the wealthy can profit in.

The vast majority end up gettting fleeced every few years in the down time.

Why ANYONE who cares about this country insists on not seeing this I will never know.

And which of those recessions occurred in a completely unregulated market?

If we followed your logic then every recession would be less severe than the one preceding it because there has been nothing but increasing regulation. But that is not the case is it?

 

[Luissa]

The problem with republicans is, they think they are going to make it rich one day. In the real world, the chances of that happening are slim.

Not necessarily.

The problem with the democrats is that they feel that the poor will always be poor, therefore, according to them, if they are poor everyone must be poor.

Republicans want everyone to be rich.

So does Peter Pan, but I have no plans to follow him to Never Never Land.

 

[ihopehefails]

The problem with republicans is, they think they are going to make it rich one day. In the real world, the chances of that happening are slim.

The problem with 'liberals' is they sucked in marxist idealism and now can't tell the difference between being a liberal and being a socialist. When we call you guys socialist you say 'we are liberal and liberal is good'. Only the second half of that is true but being a liberal never meant being a socialist. That was what progressivism did to the concept of American liberalism.

 

[ihopehefails]

The problem with republicans is, they think they are going to make it rich one day. In the real world, the chances of that happening are slim.

Exactly. Ironically, the average conservative who argues for lower taxes for the rich is actually arguing for a bigger share of the tax burden to be paid by himself.

I can't really understand your logic. How does paying the same rate or lower mean that I am paying more taxes?

 

[SuMar]

Over and over again I read about some dumb liberal whining about how the rich should pay more in taxes. What these yahoos don’t get is that taxes have nothing to do with being rich or not, that is the scam the progressives want us to believe. Many of the biggest liberal losers here keep pushing this idea because they are too stupid to think for themselves.

Taxes are based on income in a given period of time, not on wealth. Ex:

Bob is out of work and lives with his mother. Bob strikes it rich in the lottery and wins a million dollars. Bob now has to pay taxes on a million dollar income.

“Giant-tech” corporation has billions in assets, buildings, trucks, and inventory. Sales slump due to a slow economy and “Giant-tech” has a loss of income for the year, spending more than it takes in. Giant-tech would pay nothing in income tax because it had no income to report.

The PROGRESSIVE income tax is designed to punish those who make money, not punish those who have money. This little tool keeps the rich insulated from hard working successful people that are climbing the socio-economic ladder. This is why so many RICH LIBERALS want taxes, the more the better because it keeps the average guy down, while keeping the poor addicted to the government programs that promote laziness.

How much time do you spend putting together this drivel?

Your "message" makes no sense.

Sorry I didn't speak slow enough for you.

 

[Vanquish]

This thread is an entirely partisan hack thread..which is why it's in this forum I'm guessing.

Anyone who thinks any one particular party is ALL BAD and their party is ALL GOOD....is misguided.

SuMar...that means you.

 

[Coyote]

This thread is an entirely partisan hack thread..which is why it's in this forum I'm guessing.

Anyone who thinks any one particular party is ALL BAD and their party is ALL GOOD....is misguided.

SuMar...that means you.

You know...I have to wonder - WHY is it in this forum?

Seems more like a flame imo.

 

[midcan5]

'What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?' Philip E. Agre


Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy. In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

Before analyzing current-day conservatism's machinery of deception, let us outline the main arguments of conservatism. Although these arguments have changed little through history, they might seem unfamiliar to many people today, indeed even to people who claim to be conservatives. That unfamiliarity is a very recent phenomenon. Yet it is only through the classical arguments and their fallacies that we can begin to analyze how conservatism operates now.

1. Institutions

According to the first type of argument, found for example in Burke, social institutions are a kind of capital. A properly ordered society will be blessed with large quantities of this capital. This capital has very particular properties. It is a sprawling tangle of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. It is generally tacit in nature and cannot be rationally analyzed. It is fragile and must be conserved, because a society that lacks it will collapse into anarchy and tyranny. Innovation is bad, therefore, and prejudice is good. Although the institutions can tolerate incremental reforms around the edges, systematic questioning is a threat to social order. In particular, rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative than rational thought, because people who think rationally might decide to try replacing inherited institutions with new ones, something that a conservative regards as impossible. This is where the word "conservative" comes from: the supposed importance of conserving established institutions.

This argument is not wholly false. Institutions are in fact sprawling tangles of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. And people who think they can reengineer the whole of human society overnight are generally mistaken. The people of ancien regime France were oppressed by the conservative order of their time, but indeed their revolution did not work, and would probably not have worked even if conservatives from elsewhere were not militarily attacking them. After all, the conservative order had gone to insane lengths to deprive them of the education, practical experience, and patterns of thought that would be required to operate a democracy. They could not invent those things overnight.

Even so, the argument about conserving institutions is mostly untrue. Most institutions are less fragile and more dynamic than conservatives claim. Large amounts of institutional innovation happen in every generation. If people lack a rational analysis of institutions, that is mostly a product of conservatism rather than an argument for it. And although conservatism has historically claimed to conserve institutions, history makes clear that conservatism is only interested in conserving particular kinds of institutions: the institutions that reinforce conservative power. Conservatism rarely tries to conserve institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease the common people's dependency on the aristocracy and the social authorities that serve it. To the contrary, they represent those institutions in various twisted ways as dangerous to to the social order generally or to their beneficiaries in particular.

2. Hierarchy

The opposite of conservatism is democracy, and contempt for democracy is a constant thread in the history of conservative argument. Instead, conservatism has argued that society ought to be organized in a hierarchy of orders and classes and controlled by its uppermost hierarchical stratum, the aristocracy. Many of these arguments against egalitarianism are ancient, and most of them are routinely heard on the radio. One tends to hear the arguments in bits and pieces, for example the emphatic if vague claim that people are different. Of course, most of these arguments, if considered rationally, actually argue for meritocracy rather than for aristocracy. Meritocracy is a democratic principle. George Bush, however, was apparently scarred for life by having been one of the last students admitted to Yale under its old aristocratic admissions system, and having to attend classes with students admitted under the meritocratic system who considered themselves to be smarter than him. Although he has lately claimed to oppose the system of legacy admissions from which he benefitted, that is a tactic, part of a package deal to eliminate affirmative action, thereby allowing conservative social hierarchies to be reaffirmed in other ways.

American culture still being comparatively healthy, overt arguments for aristocracy (for example, that the children of aristocrats learn by osmosis the profound arts of government and thereby acquire a wisdom that mere experts cannot match) are still relatively unusual. Instead, conservatism must proceed through complicated indirection, and the next few sections of this article will explain in some detail how this works. The issue is not that rich people are bad, or that hierarchical types of organization have no place in a democracy. Nor are the descendents of aristocrats necessarily bad people if they do not try to perpetuate conservative types of domination over society. The issue is both narrow and enormous: no aristocracy should be allowed to trick the rest of society into deferring to it.

3. Freedom

But isn't conservatism about freedom? Of course everyone wants freedom, and so conservatism has no choice but to promise freedom to its subjects. In reality conservatism has meant complicated things by "freedom", and the reality of conservatism in practice has scarcely corresponded even to the contorted definitions in conservative texts.

To start with, conservatism constantly shifts in its degree of authoritarianism. Conservative rhetors, in the Wall Street Journal for example, have no difficulty claiming to be the party of freedom in one breath and attacking civil liberties in the next.

The real situation with conservatism and freedom is best understood in historical context. Conservatism constantly changes, always adapting itself to provide the minimum amount of freedom that is required to hold together a dominant coalition in the society. In Burke's day, for example, this meant an alliance between traditional social authorities and the rising business class. Although the business class has always defined its agenda in terms of something it calls "freedom", in reality conservatism from the 18th century onward has simply implied a shift from one kind of government intervention in the economy to another, quite different kind, together with a continuation of medieval models of cultural domination.

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This alliance between traditional social authorities and the business class is artificial. The market continually undermines the institutions of cultural domination. It does this partly through its constant revolutionizing of institutions generally and partly by encouraging a culture of entrepreneurial initiative. As a result, the alliance must be continually reinvented, all the while pretending that its reinventions simply reinstate an eternal order.

Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.

//2 How Conservatism Works

Conservative social orders have often described themselves as civilized, and so one reads in the Wall Street Journal that "the enemies of civilization hate bow ties". But what conservatism calls civilization is little but the domination of an aristocracy. Every aspect of social life is subordinated to this goal. That is not civilization.

The reality is quite the opposite. To impose its order on society, conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.

* The Destruction of Conscience

Liberalism is a movement of conscience. Liberals speak endlessly of conscience. Yet conservative rhetors have taken to acting as if they owned the language of conscience. They even routinely assert that liberals disparage conscience. The magnitude of the falsehood here is so great that decent people have been set back on their heels.

Conservatism continually twists the language of conscience into its opposite. It has no choice: conservatism is unjust, and cannot survive except by pretending to be the opposite of what it is.

Conservative arguments are often arbitrary in nature. Consider, for example, the controversy over Elian Gonzalez. Conservatism claims that the universe is ordered by absolutes. This would certainly make life easier if it was true. The difficulty is that the absolutes constantly conflict with one another. When the absolutes do not conflict, there is rarely any controversy. But when absolutes do conflict, conservatism is forced into sophistry. In the case of Elian Gonzalez, two absolutes conflicted: keeping families together and not making people return to tyrannies. In a democratic society, the decision would be made through rational debate. Conservatism, however, required picking one of the two absolutes arbitrarily (based perhaps on tactical politics in Florida) and simply accusing anyone who disagreed of flouting absolutes and thereby nihilistically denying the fundamental order of the universe. This happens every day. Arbitrariness replaces reason with authority. When arbitrariness becomes established in the culture, democracy decays and it becomes possible for aristocracies to dominate people's minds.

Another example of conservative twisting of the language of conscience is the argument, in the context of the attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, that holding our side to things like the Geneva Convention implies an equivalence between ourselves and our enemies. This is a logical fallacy. The fallacy is something like: they kill so they are bad, but we are good so it is okay for us to kill. The argument that everything we do is okay so long as it is not as bad as the most extreme evil in the world is a rejection of nearly all of civilization. It is precisely the destruction of conscience.

Or take the notion of "political correctness". It is true that movements of conscience have piled demands onto people faster than the culture can absorb them. That is an unfortunate side-effect of social progress. Conservatism, however, twists language to make the inconvenience of conscience sound like a kind of oppression. The campaign against political correctness is thus a search-and-destroy campaign against all vestiges of conscience in society. The flamboyant nastiness of rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter represents the destruction of conscience as a type of liberation. They are like cultists, continually egging on their audiences to destroy their own minds by punching through one layer after another of their consciences.

Once I wrote on the Internet that bears in zoos are miserable and should be let go. In response to this, I received an e-mail viciously mocking me as an animal rights wacko. This is an example of the destruction of conscience. Any human being with a halfways functioning conscience will be capable of rationally debating the notion that unhappy bears in zoos should be let go. Of course, rational people might have other opinions. They might claim that the bears are not actually miserable, or that they would be just as miserable in the forest. Conservatism, though, has stereotyped concern for animals by associating it with its most extreme fringe. This sort of mockery of conscience has become systematic and commonplace.

* The Destruction of Democracy

For thousands of years, conservatism was universally understood as being in opposition to democracy. Having lost much of its ability to attack democracy openly, conservatism has tried in recent years to redefine the word "democracy" while engaging in deception to make the substance of democracy unthinkable.

Conservative rhetors, for example, have been using the word "government" in a way that does not distinguish between legitimate democracy and totalitarianism...."

Read the rest here: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?


"Life under aristocratic domination is horrible. The United States is blessed to have little notion of what this horror is like. Europe, for example, staggered under the weight of its aristocracies for thousands of years. European aristocracies are in decline, and Europe certainly has its democratic heroes and its own dawning varieties of civilized life, and yet the psychology and institutions that the aristocracies left behind continue to make European societies rigid and blunt Europeans' minds with layers of internalized oppression. People come to America to get away from all of that. Conservatism is as alien here as it could possibly be. Only through the most comprehensive campaign of deception in human history has it managed to establish its very tentative control of the country's major political institutions. Conservatism until very recently was quite open about the fact that it is incompatible with the modern world. That is right. The modern world is a good place, and it will win." Philip E. Agre

 

[CMike]

Nonsense

 

[Vanquish]

There's actually a lot of that which rings true. Not all of it...but it's an interesting read.

There is definitely a group that wants to be part of an aristocracy...and therefore they push such values. Human beings judge themselves based on their status...relative to other humans. It's simply a sociological fact. That this theory takes that into account gives it credibility.

The recent SCOTUS decision to let corporations exert their influence with money is a perfect example of the monied interests protecting themselves.