Not only does Elizabeth Warren hate freedom, she wants to undermine the family

She wants to insert government into the finances and relationships of post-American households in an unprecedentedly intrusive way,  with a universal child-care plan that would use her recently proposed wealth tax to guarantee that no matter how many kids a family had, the family would never have to spend more than 7 percent of its household income on child care.

Warren’s plan would cost taxpayers $70 billion per year, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics economists Mark Zandi and Sophia Koropeckyj. It would be paid for with some of the revenue from an annual wealth tax Warren has proposed on assets above $50 million, the person said.

The proposal would “substantially increase the number of children able to receive formal child care” from 6.8 million (or one-third of those under 5 years old) to 12 million (or 60 percent of children under 5), the economists said. It would cut formal care costs for families with young children by about 17 percent.

Two glaringly obvious reasons why this is sinister and must be opposed by decent normal people who love their freedom:

One is that using the tax code to punish wealth is tyranny of the rankest sort. People have the right to make or have as much money as they damn well want to, and should be free of the anticipation that the state might seize a greater percentage of it than it did when they made or had less.

The other is that the last thing we need in this country is yet more of a push to hand over young children to the state or the "child care" institutions it enlists in its mission to destroy the basic building block of a functional, happy, safe society.

Whenever this comes up - in face-to-face conversations or in online exchanges - we must be prepared to argue forcefully from the standpoint of these two reasons.

Don't let jackboots like Warren claim the prerogative of framing this in any other way.

Trumpism is NOT conservatism by any stretch - today's edition

Are we beginning to discern the contours of this "populism" that has eluded precise definition?

Even though Leftist demagogues like Chuck Schumer still want to call the tax proposal Squirrel-Hair seems to have settled on a gift to wealthy people and a "punch to the gut" to "working Americans," it strains credulity to think he doesn't know he's engaging in pure grandstanding.

You see, a key feature of the proposal is a significant hike on the rate of the highest bracket.

While it's always impossible to parse just why Trump does anything, it looks like his desire to curry the favor of those who look down on him (he missed the boat, at least on this, which Schumer, didn't he?) was a driving factor:

What prompted Trump’s move on taxes for the highest earners? His desire to jump in bed with Democrats again, according to Politico:

President Donald Trump — eager to work with Democrats on tax reform — upended Republican leaders' plans to cut taxes for the rich just as the party is set to unveil its much-awaited tax proposal.

During a meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Trump made a point of telling GOP and Democratic lawmakers that his top tax advisers — Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, both very affluent individuals — won’t see their tax bills reduced. Both men nodded in agreement, sources in the room told POLITICO.

While S-H is no genius, he's surely aware of what the percentages are regarding which brackets pay what:

Highest Quintile (above $234,700): $57,500

Fourth Quintile (above $83,800): $14,800

Third Quintile (above $49,800): $7,400

Second Quintile (above $29,600): $3,200

Lowest Quintile (above $15,500): $500

When you factor out the government transfers received, only the top two quintiles actually pay net federal taxes: $46,500 for the top quintile, $700 for the fourth quintile. As Mark Perry of American Enterprise Institute writes:

the richest 20% of Americans by income aren’t just paying a share of federal taxes that would be considered “fair” — it goes way beyond “fair” — they’re shouldering almost 100% of the entire federal tax burden of transfer payments and all other non-financed government spending.

Granted, the proposal lowers the corporate rate substantially, from 35% to 20. But that merely underscores the inconsistency and absence of principle that characterizes most of what S-H does.


But may I make a modest suggestion? It involves the same principle that I discuss in the previous post, the one about health care: speaking plainly about basic human freedom.

It doesn't matter if a person is rich, poor, or middle class, government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking the first red penny from any citizen. Therefore, if we're going to tax income, the only fair way to do it is at a flat rate across the board.

The odds of such a discussion getting a prominent airing are pretty dim in the Trump era.

 

At the confluence of government tyranny and its cultural facilitators

Your tax dollars are going for this dog vomit:

The Environmental Protection Agency has given $30,000 to a Unitarian church that preaches about “white privilege” and says that America is “structurally racist.”

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton, Florida, received an “environmental justice grant” for education and training about sea level rise and climate change, the agency announcedWednesday.

The grant is to provide “Replicable and Scalable Community Climate Resilience Building in Two Communities in Palm Beach County, Florida.”

“EPA’s environmental justice grants help communities across the country understand and address exposure to multiple environmental harms and risks at the local level,” said Matthew Tejada, the director of the Office of Environmental Justice.

“Addressing the impacts of climate change is a priority for EPA and the projects supported by this year’s grants will help communities prepare for and build resilience to localized climate impacts.”

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton is a “liberal religious community” that currently offers classes on “Being White,” and holds town meetings on Black Lives Matter. The church supports same-sex marriage and has a climate-change working group.

“I’d lived through the voter’s rights violence and marches of the late 1960s, but at that time I was wrapped in a cocoon of white privilege so I was not much affected by all of what went on,” wrote Carolyn Brown, a member of the church’s “Healing Justice” program, in its latest monthly newsletter.

“Blacks in our society lead diminished lives due to structural racism, an insidious disease that started eons ay, gives privilege to those of us who are ‘white.’ It’s just the way it is, the standard we have come to accept as normal. Sadly, many blacks have come to accept that standard as well.”

Brown said the church’s leader, the Rev. Ms. Harris Riordan, recently led the congregation on a “privilege walk.”

“In the first 2nd Hour Class On Being White led by Rev. Harris we did a privilege walk … and learned visually where we stand in terms of privilege,” she said. “Most of us fit squarely in the middle group: Neither Highly Privileged (the million-billionaires of society) nor among the impoverished locked out of society folk.”

“Clearly fitting into the privileged majority,” Brown said.

Riordan recently preached a sermon called “On Being White,” where she said she wants to become a “White Ally” to combat the “systemic, structural racism” of America.

“It has been and still is a system holding white supremacy in place,” she said.

“Sometimes when I have soul work to do, my body wants in,” Harris said. “I need to do something, to make something. I didn’t fold paper into a 1000 cranes, this time it was needle and thread. I am making a badge, that when it is done, I will wear on my robe.”

Tax dollars for which you busted your tail end are funding this insanity.

"Privilege walk."

"Soul work."

"Environmental justice."

The UU denomination is reliably on the wrong side of every issue on our society's radar screen.

Another example of how the post-American Left manages to combine silliness, tyranny, disconnect, and cultural influence way out of proportion to its size.

Let's check in on Hillionaire

What's the latest with the second most prominent Alinskyite in the Freedom-hater party?

Well, she wants to double the capital-gains tax rate for top earners.

She saw the ass-whuppin' O'Malley came in for at Netroots and decided to get in front of the race issue,  making sure to use the approved "Black Lives Matter" phrase at recent campaign appearances.

And she reaffirms her support for Planned Parenthood at the same moment when corporate donors are fleeing as fast as they can.

And she has two inspectors general breathing down her neck over the private-email-account matter

Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.
The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.
It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.
But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.

Oh, and she's having poll number troubles:

If this news doesn’t have Joe Biden, Al Gore, or Elizabeth Warren seriously considering entering the presidential race — and serious Democrats urging them to do so — then nothing will. According to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll, Hillary Clinton trails Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker in Colorado, Iowa and Virginia.

Two of the three Republicans Clinton trails are neither well known nor in possession of a well known name. Thus, the poll results should be viewed mostly as a referendum on Hillary. 

This assessment is confirmed by Clinton’s favorability ratings. In Virginia, they are 41-50. In Colorado, they are 35-56. In Iowa, where Clinton has been a fairly constant presence, they are 33-56 — a tribute to her skill as campaigner. 

Hey, Hillionaire, try tripling down on the class warfare and identity politics. That ought to turn things around.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

The arrogance necessary to publicly presume this is breathtaking:

With the release of its 2016 spending blueprint Monday, the Obama White House officially signaled its intent to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, in part by placing limits on retirement savings.

The proposed budget, which allots $4 trillion in spending for fiscal year 2016, proposes to cap tax-deferred saving in 401(k) and Individual Retirement Accounts at about $3.4 million. 

That amount of savings generates more than $200,000 in income annually when annuitized, an amount that should be sufficient for most, according to the Obama administration’s rationale behind the proposal. 

The Most Equal Comrade is really stoking the class envy this year.  It's The Great Leveling Project in action.  Punish ambition.  Keep the cattle-masses dependent on Leviathan's machinations:

The cap – an idea that Obama proposed last year as well – is a relatively small gambit in the budget’s larger effort to raise revenues by increasing capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, and taxes on foreign revenue streams of U.S. multinational companies.  

If the Most Equal Comrade says one syllable about having an interest in sound policy, it's a God-damned lie.  His motivation is pure ideology. Recall his 2008 conversation with ABC's Charlie Gibson:

Mr. Gibson: “In each instance, when the [capital gains tax] rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.
“So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”
Mr. Obama: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

Willing to take in less money just to stick it to "the wealthy."  You don't get any more socialist than that. 
Listen up, you totalitarian jackboots.  A person's money is his or her money and it matters not a whit whether he or she is rich, middle class or poor.  Your government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking one more penny than is needed to carry out the functions specified in Mr. Madison's precious document.

The Most Equal Comrade's latest class-envy ploy

He plans to propose capital-gains and inheritance-tax increases at the SOTU, in order to "pay for" various "breaks" for the middle class, as well as "free" community college.

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air clarifies what this is and isn't:

Let’s just get one thing out of the way up front. This dog and pony show has zero to do with policy and everything to do with politics. Obama already knows that not one of these proposals will ever make it within smelling distance of the floor for a vote in either chamber. What’s being done here is essentially a hand-off of the baton to Hillary Clinton and all of the Democrat hopefuls with an eye toward the next election. This doesn’t make it a stupid idea for the President. He doesn’t need to jack up the tax rates to be successful. He just needs to make the Republicans refuse to jack up the tax rates.

This populist message is referred to as “populist” for a reason. People with less wealth are often hard pressed to resist feeling a bit of jealousy toward those who are more successful. Even if draining all the wealth from the wealthy won’t make any significant difference in their own lives, there is a nasty siren call associated with the idea of taking the fat cats down a peg or two. 

This is a message which can be countered, but only if it’s done intelligently. If there is one thing which is more powerful than jealousy, it’s aspiration. As far as the working class goes, they almost universally have one thing in common; they aspire to reach a higher, more comfortable status themselves. Traditionally we saw Americans who didn’t hate or even envy the rich to a great degree. They looked at that big house in the more expensive part of town and didn’t want to burn it down… they wanted a house like that for themselves. And if they did manage to make it up near the top of the ladder they certainly didn’t want a 75% tax rate bill waiting for them when they arrived.

Shaw recommends, as I do, staying positive, staying focused on the core conservative message, which is that freedom unleashes the inherent power and marvelousness of the sovereign individual.  The message needs to be, don't envy, aspire.

The toxic cesspool that is the post-American university - today's edition

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government today, every stinking campus in the country tomorrow:

The administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has agreed to work with a student group to implement a “mandatory power and privilege training” as part of its orientation, according to several reports by the group.

“We have exciting news to share — the administration has officially expressed its desire to collaborate with us on designing a privilege training component for Orientation week for every HKS degree program!” states a post on the group'sTumblr page.

The post also states that the group, which calls themselves ‘Speak Out,’ will meet with the Dean some time this week to secure funding and “make sure this training is institutionalized across school.”

Although the exact stipulations of the training have not yet been determined, earlier posts on the page reveal what kind of topics the group expects the privilege-checking training to cover.

“A mandatory power and privilege training that examines components of race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, international status, and power differentials for every incoming HKS student starting August 2014,” it states.

The post also claimed that this mandatory training was absolutely necessary for anyone seeking to be a leader in public policy.

“The exercise of public leadership … requires an honest assessment of structural power dynamics, of in-group and out-group dynamics, and of privilege,” one of these posts states.

There is no corner of post-American life that these Freedom-Haters will refrain from poisoning.  Their Great Leveling Project is very far along.

Trying to "solve" the "problem" of inequality is like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall

Ben Domenech at The Federalist on why focusing on inequality is a silly distraction from life's real concerns:

If you’re not an economist, you may know inequality of outcome by another term: life. In any society, what you earn over the course of your life is unequal to others and ought to be unequal to others because you are not others, you are you. Your earnings will be unequal to that of others, because you are a different person with different skills and different work ethic and different priorities. In a free society, these earnings will be largely due to your own knowledge, your own work ethic, and the quality of what you produce. In an unfree society, it will be due to who you know.

Read the whole thing.

The Left's lame attempt to assign abstract class causes to black poverty

I'm seeing a meme develop in response to two recent events.  The events are the MEC's introduction of the My Brother's keeper initiative, and Paul Ryan's remark on Bill Bennett's radio show that inner-city black culture is "in a tailspin."

An article at Think Progress.org, the broad scope of which is the parental governing style of the MEC, discusses Dr. Brittney Cooper's concerns that the MEC is putting too much emphasis on the problem of family breakdown and not enough on - well, let's let her explain it:

When writing about the program, Salon’s Dr. Brittney Cooper described himas “donning the role of father-in-chief” for black people while introducing My Brother’s Keeper.

But there are potential pitfalls in playing the role of America’s dad, too. Obama has drawn some criticism for over-emphasizing black men’s responsibility to step up. “Like many African-American men, the president has bought into the narrative about the problems of absentee black fathers and about the potential danger and destructiveness of fatherless black sons,” Cooper notes in Salon. Cooper wrote about these concerns earlier for Ebony last year, lamenting Obama’s decision to blame “broken black families” for much the much larger structural issues of poverty and violence. And even though Cooper is quoted here, she’s hardly the only person to make this point.

Well, sheesh, where does she think the poverty and violence come from?  Oh, that's right.  Systemic racism!  Structural bigotry!

I have to say that, while, in the last few years, Andrew Sullivan has written very little I've found admirable, in his piece today he sticks up for Paul Ryan against accusations of racism.  He even sticks up for Charles Murray in the process:

He noted that “Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard – those guys have written books on this.” Cue liberal freakout. Josh Marshall focuses on the citation of Murray:
When you start off by basing your arguments around the work of Charles Murray you just lose your credibility from the start as someone actually interested in addressing poverty or joblessness or really doing anything other than coming up with reasons to cut off what little assistance society provides for its most marginalized members or, alternatively, pumping up people with racial resentments against black people and giving them ersatz ‘scholarship’ to justify their racial antipathies.
That’s because Murray’s public career has been based on pushing the idea that black urban poverty is primarily the fault of black people and their diseased ‘culture.’ Relatedly, and more controversially, he has argued that black people are genetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence. Yes, that last part should be crystal clear: Murray is best known for attempting to marshal social science evidence to argue that black people are genetically not as smart as white people.
Sigh. Josh seems to be arguing that Murray blames all resilient urban black poverty on culture …. and then blames it all on genes! Pick one canard, would be my advice. And the truth is: in The Bell Curve, Murray was concerned about the role of genes andenvironment in the resilient IQ differentials among different ethnic groups, as anyone who actually read his book (I did, most liberals wouldn’t) would know. As And it is simply untrue that Murray has argued that “black people aregenetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence.” Murray’s work specifically insists that there are countless African-Americans with higher IQs than countless whites and Asians and Hispanics. (He has recently focused his efforts on white poverty as well – which would seem to disprove some of Josh’s claims.) It’s just that the bell curve (which was the title of the whole fricking book) starts at a slightly different place for different racial groupings – something that drives blank slate liberals nuts with cognitive dissonance. Years later, the differentials still exist. Why do you think there are de facto quotas to prevent brainy Asians from dominating the Ivy League? But of course, nothing drives ideologues nuts like reality.
One more thing: I’m sure Murray has gotten used to this distortion of his work. But it still strikes me as outrageous that a scholar like Murray is subjected to being called a racist of the worst sort and a dishonest scholar – simply because the resilient data support his core point, and because he dares to cite genetics. (It’s an old and great line that liberals believe nothing is genetic but homosexuality, while conservatives believe everything is genetic except homosexuality. For my part, it seems pretty damn obvious that almost all human behavior is a function of both – and the interaction between them.) 

All this makes the task of deeply concerned black thinkers and activists focused on eradicating the cycle of the aforementioned poverty and violence - people like Star Parker and  Robert Woodson - all the more daunting.  They aren't interested in abstract smokescreens that perpetuate dependence.  They would genuinely like to solve the problems of their community.

It will be interesting to see how long this Brother's Keeper program stays true to its original mission.  Will its champions, including, ostensibly, the Most Equal Comrade, feel compelled to dilute the focus in order to appease the class-warfare stormtroopers?  I'd say the clock is ticking.  The program had better show some results early on, so as to have some substantiation with which to hold the hardest-core pro-dependency forces at bay.

Our enemy president

The Most Equal Comrade is going to use an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors.  So many layers to peel back on this one.

I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I do know that spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, and this is a spending decision, is it not?

To reiterate something I've found occasion to assert fairly often here at LITD, the minimum wage is bad and wrong for the following reasons:

• It is government telling a private organization how to conduct its affairs.
• It distorts the true market value of an hour of a given type of labor
• It elbows those who are in most need of a way to enter the world of work - young, unskilled people, particularly minorities - out of the job market

Then there is the Freedom-Haters' understanding that the minimum wage issue is a tailor-made focal point for their overall class warfare.  It is essential to their propaganda that the cattle-masses never consider the fluidity of income brackets or the effect of ambition on an individual's upward mobility.  The FHers must paint a scenario of fixed groups within society: some kind of mythic " the man"-type stratum that has all the power and prestige and holds the fates of various victim groups in its hands.

The Most Equal Comrade will play this to the hilt tonight.  We must make sure our weapons - clear, reasoned explanations of how freedom actually works and how prosperity happens - are cleaned and loaded.  This is a particularly intense battle in the war for America's soul.

The Freedom-Haters made up the term "trickle-down economics"

Thomas Sowell says that when you hear totalitarian Leninists like the Most Equal Comrade  or Bill DeBlasio try to justify the punishment of achievement by using the term "trickle down," remember that it appears nowhere in any actual economist's writing.

Nothing more delicious than a smackdown of Robert Reich

He has to be on anybody's list of the most repugnant columnists in the US or Europe writing today.  (Other contenders - and this could become a time-consuming parlor game: Joan Walsh, Paul Krugman, Sally Kohn.)

He recently lit into America's wealthy for - get this - their private, voluntary charitable contributions.  It did not go unnoticed by NRO's Kevin Williamson.  He begins his piece by looking at why envy is the tawdriest of the seven deadly sins:

To be possessed by envy is to admit a humiliating personal inadequacy: We do not envy others those attainments that we think we too might achieve, but those we despair of ever possessing. Wrath, greed, pride, lust — all assume a certain self-possession. Sloth and gluttony are practically standard issue in times of plenty such as these. Wrath and pride are the sins of great (but not good) men. Envy is the affliction of the insignificant. It is the small man’s sin.

And then he shows how Reich is all about envy:

 . . . he scoffs that America’s rich philanthropists are phony and self-serving, investing too much in opera and ballet and fancy colleges, and too little in feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. He particularly resents the fact that our tax code encourages such giving, with deductions that reduced federal revenue by some $39 billion last year — federal revenue that could have gone toward employing men such as Robert Reich.This calls to mind Edmund Spenser’s description of Envy personified: “He hated all good works and virtuous deeds / And him no less, that any like did use / And who with gracious bread the hungry feeds / His alms for want of faith he doth accuse.”

Professor Reich being Professor Reich, you can guess how his argument unfolds. (If you have read one Robert Reich column, which is one too many, you have read them all.) He writes: “As the tax year draws to a close, the charitable tax deduction beckons. America’s wealthy are its largest beneficiaries. According to the Congressional Budget Office, $33 billion of last year’s $39 billion in total charitable deductions went to the richest 20 percent of Americans, of whom the richest 1 percent reaped the lion’s share.” It goes without saying that he makes no attempt to compare the apportionment of charitable tax deductions with charitable donations — that would only complicate things and invite an unpleasant encounter with reality. 

For a sense of perspective, consider that that $39 billion in tax deductions was associated with $316 billion in charitable donations. Our innumerate class warriors dismiss philanthropy as a complicated tax dodge for the rich, but in fact tax deductions amount to about 12 percent of total charitable donations, meaning that our wily robber barons have figured out a way of beating the taxman by . . . giving away far more money than they receive in related tax benefits. Even if Professor Reich got his way on tax rates and they went up to 90 percent at the top, you still don’t come out ahead by giving away money.

Beyond stealing altar offerings from the almighty god of revenue, our philanthropists offend Professor Reich’s sensibilities in another way: They don’t give to the sort of enterprises he wants them to give to. “A large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s wealthy are for donations to culture palaces — operas, art museums, symphonies, and theaters — where they spend their leisure time hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors. . . . These aren’t really charities as most people understand the term. They’re often investments in the life-styles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have as well. Increasingly, being rich in America means not having to come across anyone who’s not.” Unsurprisingly, Progressive America’s favorite non-economist-who-plays-an-economist-on-TV does not bother to document what he means by “a large share.” Giving to art-and-culture organizations amounted to just over $14 billion in 2012, or about 4.5 percent of charitable contributions, far less than was given to health, human-services, or public-benefit organizations. There are a fair number of single organizations that run into the billions per year, including YMCA ($6.24 billion), Goodwill Industries ($5 billion), Catholic Charities ($4.4 billion), and the Red Cross ($3.12 billion).

Williamson points out two very ironic facts about charitable giving in America: guys like Reich may ry to characterize arts-and-culture giving as acts of snobbery, but they get downright self-congratulatory when the government puts up tax money for such things, and the much-despised Koch brothers give one hell of a lot to the nation's arts-and-culture sector:

If spending on art, music, and culture is self-serving when private citizens do it, what is it when government does it? Essential, necessary, crucial — of course. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs by itself spends some $150 million a year on precisely that sort of thing. The state spends dozens of millions more. A good deal of that money goes to subsidizing theater, including big-ticket theater. In my role as a theater critic, I am constantly surprised by how many shows selling tickets for north of $100 are publicly subsidized. It isn’t huge money — without public support for the Manhattan Theater Club, that $120 ticket to see Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place (excellent, be sorry if you missed it) might have been $125 instead. But it adds up: a few dozen millions from the state, a hundred million from the city, a billion and a half from Washington.

Try cutting a piece of that and you’ll hear howls about how vital every farthing spent in the service of culture is. Unless you’re David Koch, in which case it’s “Thanks for giving the New York ballet a nice place to perform, now please die.” I wonder how many New York balletomanes know that the David Koch in the David Koch Theater is that David Koch. Perhaps it is the urge to put one’s name on things that so offends Professor Reich and his colleagues at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy.

Begrudging others their wealth is pretty much the long and the short of One-Note Robert's putrid career.

 

The enemy

We have always known that the Most Equal Comrade was steeped in the class-warfare strategies of Michael Harrington and Cloward and Piven.  What we are seeing now is the accelerated enactment of such a vision.

Your freedom is in grave danger.  Options for preserving it are dwindling.

It's really kind of a binary set of ways to proceed that is available to us: fight or despair.  Breezing through life whistling a carefree tune is not an option avaliable to us.  That is escapism, and is tantamount to surrender.  One might as well despair.

I guess I have chosen to fight.  I wouldn't bother to blog if I'd chosen otherwise.

Blackmailing the nation that just elected him to a second term

The MEC's presser yesterday removed any doubt what his hill to die on is: tax increases on the most successful Americans.  Never mind that the $66 billion raised over ten years by such a confiscation would be dwarfed by the kinds of deficits - over $1 trillion a year - we've been running since the MEC became our overlord.

What's going on here is cultural at its root.  The idea is to reinforce the meme that most Americans want to see "the wealthy" taxed more.  It's raw class warfare.  The only reason for doing it that is of any use to anybody is the gratification that the Freedom-Haters can gin up among the indoctrinated for seeing those more successful get it stuck to them.  It is one of the Left's most effective tools in its great societal leveling enterprise.

It will also cause small business to pull in their horns even more than they are currently doing.  In short, it doesn't avert the fiscal cliff.  It merely aggrandizes the Most Equal Comrade, and there is probably nothing in the world more important to him.

Yet another damning video of the Most Equal Comrade in full class warfare mode

Not only is he an America-hating race baiter, he clearly doesn't care that a University of Chicago audience can see plainly that he knows nothing about business or economics, as indicated by his vulgar and cartoonish depiction of "executives in some faraway place" arbitrarily decreeing plant closings.

There has never been such a dangerous and poisonous figure in American history.

And just remember, the only reason a solution is not happening is that the Freedom-Haters want to keep their base energized with class envy

Rather chilling AP article on just what the fiscal cliff will mean for middle-class households.  It doesn't have to be that way.  We could extend the tax rates we've had in place since 2003 and avoid the catastrophe.  But then how would the regime demagogue against successful Americans?

(And, of course, to fully climb out of our situation, we'll need yet deeper cuts, along with prying the state's regulatory fingers off of people's freely-engaged-in economic activity.  And then it's time to dismantle most cabinet-level departments.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

Why the H-word Creature would have been at least every bit as bad as the Most Equal Comrade

Now she's pushing for a global tax on "elites."

Another one of those off-teleprompter utterings, like "you didn't build that" or "I have to deal with him every day," that the MEC will probably come to regret

Tells a Council Bluffs,Iowa crowd that the 2 % most successful Americans got where they are through luck.

And you can be sure they'll go even lower before it's over

The new pro-MEC ad by super-PAC Priorities USA features a guy named Joe Soptic, who was laid off from the steel company GST and whose wife later died of cancer. 

There are several important facts to know about this situation, some of which, such as the time frame in which Romney's leaving Bain Capital, the plant closing, and the discover of the cancer.  It's about seven years from Event A to Event C. A lot of this has been discussed on blogs and talk radio today.

What I haven't seen was any discussion of why Bain Capital might have closed the plant (beyond Bob Beckel's silly rant on The Five about how Bain somehow milked it for a bunch of assets).

I herewith reprint a post from this blog from May that tells the story:

1.) Romney left Bain capital in 1999. The shutdown was in 2001.

2.) Here's who was still at Bain, though, and oversaw the outsourcing of the jobs: a major MEC campaign-fund bundler.

3.) The mill that was shut down was on the skids anyway, in no small part because it was busting its ass to try to comply with EPA standards.

4.) That mill was unionized. GTS's other mill, in Ft. Wayne, IN, is non-union and still making steel today

SUPREMELY IMPORTANT UPDATE: Soptic's wife continued to have a job and health insurance after he got laid off.

You can still find people who buy this dog vomit

The MEC characterizes the fact that lowering taxes for everybody - including the most successful among us - engenders job creation as "fairy dust."  Says last decade's tax policies were "failed.  Well, when the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were fully implemented, job creation took off.