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Liberal Talking Points

The below is a response to me regarding an exchange over a post I placed on my Facebook page that showed my support for the Tea Party Movement.

I’ll attempt to analyze  his argument and show where he is following the talking points of the Liberal Socialist currently in control of our country.

Dude, this thing that I admittedly started was starting to get a little ugly so I thought I should email you to calm it down a bit.

I’m really wasn’t trying to pick a fight. I was being a little bit of a smart-ass but I really was trying to provoke a conversation. It’s just that I don’t fully understand where all this anger on the right is coming from and I am trying to figure it out.

First of all – this is not coming from the “Right”.  This is coming from a broad spectrum of Americans who believe this current administration is overstepping their Constitutional power.  This movement is for smaller government, lower taxes and economic freedom.  When I went to Searchlight – Sure, there were a few people who were a little off the wall in their views, but the super majority of the folks were just like me, my parents and my friends – normal everyday Americans.

I mean, I am not terribly happy about the state of union right now either but I don’t hurl racial epithets, threaten members of Congress or plot to murder policemen (not that you do either but you have to admit that much of this type of behavior is currently coming out of some of the more right-leaning elements)

Of course, this is the way the Liberals are “demonizing” the Tea Party Movement.  Everything turns to the race card, the rich/poor card, the male/female card etc.  This is just their way of dividing the country.  It is obvious this administration is using an “us vs. them” philosophy in order to create a divide in our country.  If we do not think their way, then we are not included in the so called “debate” over the issues.  Its their way or the highway.

1. The charges of Racial Epithets and Spitting are not proven and no one has been arrested for these allegations.  And let me be clear – I personally find anyone who uses this method to show their discontent for anyone – appalling.
2. Murder policemen?  Where in the word does this come from?

While there have been threats to Democratic Leaders.  What you are not seeing or hearing about are threats to Republican and Tea Party Activist.  With any “movement” or “party” or even “religion” there are extreme members – unfortunately, the media and the liberals are reporting that this is everyone in the Tea Party Movement.

Here are a few examples:

Man arrested for Eric Cantor death threat – Federal authorities have arrested a Philadelphia man and charged him with threatening to kill House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his family.  Read more

Racist, hate filled voicemail over healthcare controversy

Here’s a message that was left on the voicemail of Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt – WARNING – Not Very Nice Language

Below is something that you probably didn’t hear about.  Students were arrested and people were blocked from getting to and from work.  Why isn’t this being demonized?  This is totally uncalled for and if I remember correctly – there were zero arrests with the Tea Party folks in DC.

March 4th “Day of Action” Students Rally Nationwide

Provost David Kliger warned students to keep the protests peaceful after protesters reportedly prevented a resident of faculty/student housing from leaving the campus and blocked a health care worker from getting to work.The protesters’ behavior is “disruptive, intimidating and destructive,” Kliger said. “Behavior that degrades into violence, personal intimidation and disrespect for the rights of others is reprehensible, and does nothing to aid efforts to restore funding to the university,” he said. “These actions should cease.”  Read More

150 Arrested In March 4th Actions

Today’s March 4^th Day of Action in Oakland was called and attended to defend public education. As working students and/or people of color, we believe that peaceful protest and civil disobedience are powerful forces for change in a democratic society, and we defend the rights of individuals and organizations to practice them.  Read More

While these people are marching for “no more cuts” to eduction – a good cause.  What they fail to realize, is that everyone has become too dependent on US and State Governments unnecessary programs.  This nation is about equal rights and opportunity.  With the freedoms that America has given it’s “true” citizens, everyone has the opportunity to be successful; as success is earned, not given.

Like you, I certainly do not agree with everything the current administration is doing, although I would guess that we disagree with them for different reasons. But, if you want to talk about transparency, back room deals and overspending then I think you need to be a little more critical of the last administration. Were you raising these same concerns when the Bush administration would not release lists of who it was having meetings with in the energy industry, when they were giving no-bid contracts to Haliburton, when they cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans while simultaneously fighting two wars? If you were then good for you and please accept my apologies.

This goes both ways – this is the basis for the Tea Party Movement.  We are tired of back room deals within both the Republican and Democrat Parties.  Today’s method of Politics has gotten out of control and when they use the the American tax payers dollars to bribe and influence agendas, it is time to change the way things are accomplished in DC.

However, the Obama administration has a hell of a mess to clean up  – in fairness this mess was not completely caused by Bush, 30 plus years of questionable governance from both sides of the aisle are to blame – and I think by and large they are doing an okay job. Health care is mess in this country and something had to be done to address it. It is not a government takeover. It leaves the private insurance market completely intact and even provides them with a some new competitive incentives as well as a ka-jillion new customers. I would think this would please most capitalists.

Here, he is absolutely correct – this is caused by our corrupt system of Government favoritism on both sides of the isle.  However, while this Health Care Bill does leave the Insurance Companies “in tact”, he fails to mention how the mandates on coverage are going to significantly increase the cost of health insurance across America.  This is just common sense.

This is evident by looking at New York and then Massachusetts:

1. New York has one of the highest quantity of state mandates and they are the most expensive  in the country.  Read More
2. Massachusetts health care program is the main cause for their budget woes.  Read More

Lets look at some of the health insurance premium increase estimates that Obamacare is going to cause:

1. Costs will rise for the younger people with Obamacare – as much as 17%.  Read More
2. Get your wallet out if you are ready to retire under Obamacare.  Read More

Bottom line folks – this is a take over of the health insurance companies.  What else do we call federal mandates? The below mandates are required to be put in place by October of this year:

• No lifetime caps on policies
• No pre-existing exclusions for children
• $250 tax rebate for Medicare Part D Doughnut hole cost
• Dependent coverage up to age 26 is mandated

While these are good things for the American insured, they were put in place to do two things:

1. Give Americans a benefit they do not want to give up – will be hard to repeal.  It also created a political talking point for the 2010 election season.
2. Increase the costs of health insurance across the country so more discontent will be created for the Health Insurance companies.  Ultimately leading to the feds stepping in with a costly government option.

Wellpoint shows these measure will increase the cost significantly.  The impact of guaranteed issue will increase premiums by 50% alone (this is just for Nevada).  While the link is just for Nevada – it is relative to the rest of the United States.  Polices are not currently actuarially budgeted for these types of mandates.

The stimulus did not fail. Its effects were modest (again but were sufficient in pulling the economy back from the brink. Would you rather the federal government sit idly by and let the economy tank, when it had both the means to save millions of Americans from immeasurable hardship?

Oh my – lets look at some of the stimulus programs and evaluated them for yourself.

1. Cash 4 Clunkers – all  this program did was accelerate demand and falsely impact sales numbers.  These types of government programs interfere on the laws of Supply and Demand.  In addition, because this is a government run program it wasted a ton of money – estimates of cost are at $24,000 per vehicle?  Just look at Senator Grassley’s inquiry and his attempt to get real answers.
2. Stimulus Money Going Overseas – This is a result of when the “Buy American” clause was pulled out of the Stimulus Bill – recommended by good ole’ Republican Senator Mitch McConnell.  I find this appalling, this was an American Stimulus Package – the “Buy American”  clause would have significantly helped the American worker.  Look at how it has affected “Green Stimulus Money“.  This is a Republican and Democratic issue and I feel it is a result of pushing the bill through as quickly as possible – and not fully understanding everything that is in the bill.
3. $75 Billion More Expensive – As with any government program the stimulus bill has proven to be more expensive than originally anticipated – I am sure we’ll have the same thing with the Healthcare Bill as well.
4. Unemployment – Was not supposed to go above 8%?

Lastly – let me look at “CNN’s Big Bang” – the total cost of Stimulus.

The Stimulus Tracker FAQ

The government’s efforts to rescue the economy were bold and complex. Here is an explanation of our methodology to break down stimulus into its component parts.

(Q) What is the difference between “Stimulus 1″ and “Stimulus 2?”

Stimulus 1 is the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law in February 2009. It contains a combination of grants, loans, direct spending and tax cuts aimed at creating jobs and alleviating the economic stresses caused by the recession.

Stimulus 2 is a group of extensions of programs enacted by stimulus 1 that were about to expire. It also includes other economic stimulus that was not in the ARRA bill.

Q) What was included in “Stealth Stimulus?”

A) Since the credit crisis erupted in 2008, the government launched several dozen programs aimed at rescuing the financial sector, the housing market and the overall economy. We included only programs that were launched by the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department or Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. since 2008.

Q) I have seen other values assigned to stimulus categories. How did you arrive at these numbers?

A) The Recovery Act is by far the largest stimulus bill ever enacted, and there are many ways to divide the thousands of different programs into groupings. We chose to follow the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the bill, since CBO is an independent evaluator.

CBO grouped the bill’s contents into 47 categories, and we further condensed CBO’s groupings to seven main categories and 31 smaller parts.

Q) I thought some of these programs have yet to be funded, are winding down or have been paid back. What do the dollar amounts represent?

A) For the Recovery Act and its extensions, we listed the total appropriations for each category. For the Stealth Stimulus section, many of the programs were assigned credit caps that are unlikely to be reached, so we listed the highest value of government support during the life of each program.

Many of those programs are currently at their funding peaks, while others have been fully repaid.

Reference

With the above being said – personally, I did not and would never support this type of bail out – we would have been better off to let things run their course and get through the mess quicker.  The government blew a bunch of dough and we do not have much to show for it.

And let us not confuse the TARP with the stimulus bill. TARP was Bush’s doing. A necessary evil I would argue but it is one that seems to get blamed on Obama and provoke a lot of populist rage.

Completely false: Not Bush’s 100% doing – this was discussed and agreed upon by the powers to be – the above picture shows all who were involved in the decision.   When McCain supported TARP – my support for McCain diminished, on that day, he proved to me that he did not have the best interest of the country in mind – and this is when it became evident that Obama was going to be our next president.

One of my main beefs with modern American conservatism is that it constantly complains about how ineffective government is while simultaneously doing everything it can to make government ineffective. It’s easy enough to bitch and moan, but the hard work is in actual governing.

No facts here – pointless gibberish.

I too am down with minimal government intrusion in people’s lives. This does not mean that government does not have a role (one role it does not have is turning a profit, to address your final point). One of the popular misconceptions about liberalism is that it is somehow it is in favor of government control over everything. This demonstrably untrue. I don’t want government in my books, in my music, in my bedroom etc. but there are things that they need to do and things I expect them to do: police the streets, fight fires, build roads, educate our children, protect our environment just to name a few. But these things don’t come free. Somebody gotta pay for them. Like Oliver Wendell Homes said, “I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.” Maybe I wouldn’t go so far as to say I like it, but damn dude, modern society is expensive and we have to pull together in order to afford it.

The problem here is that we as a country can not afford everything for everyone.  The inefficiencies of government are evident and politicians on both the right and left are to blame for program after program that is either failed, failing or prevents job growth.  Do you realize that if the Hoover Damn would have been built today, it would spend over 10 years in environmental litigation.  The special interest groups are stifling our economy and unless we do “something” soon, we will have exported every middle class paying job overseas.

It’s not big government I want. Like you, I simply want government that is truly responsive to the needs of its citizens – all its citizens – including the weak, the needy, and the sick (for what kind of a nation are we if we cannot collectively decide to protect the most vulnerable among us?). I want a government that recognizes there is more to governing than tax breaks and Social Security checks. I want a government that upholds the right of everyone to believe in whatever religion they see fit, or to not believe at all. I want a government that realizes workers should have just as strong a voice as the corporations they work for. I want a government that helps ensure freedom of opportunity for all, not just the wealthy and well-connected. I want a government that works to protect all Americans from privation, starvation, violence and exploitation. We can do this. We have the means. What we often lack is the will. It is not enough to say, “Here’s a $600 tax refund – good luck with that!” That isn’t governing. That isn’t building a society. That’s a cop-out. And Americans (usually) deserve better.

I agree with what you want – however, to use a talking point of a $600 check is of no value.  At least that program was overwhelmingly bipartisan.

It passed the Senate by a vote of 81 to 16 and, just hours later, by a House vote of 380 to 34.

And THAT my friend, is what the Tea Party Movement is upset about.

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