“…the bogeyman government is like the bogeyman under the bed. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist.”
—Elizabeth Warren
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Tag: Elizabeth Warren
We have nothing to fear from BIG GOVERNMENT!
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Every writer can count among his loyal readers at least one curmudgeon. I have several. Today we consider the criticism of one special curmudgeon.
Let’s call him “Mr. C.”
Mr. C. agrees with my last several invokings of Common Sense. But he wonders, “Sure the [insert expletive here] of Republican presidential candidates are annoying, but never forget: the best Democratic candidate is worse than the worst Republican candidate.”
Mr. C. doesn’t mind ridiculing Trump, or questioning the savvy of Santorum. But, he tells me, “the very existence of a self-professed ‘socialist’ on the Democratic side suggests just how bad things have gotten.”
I don’t disagree. But should I agree with Mr. C. when he insists that “to call oneself a ‘socialist’ at this point in time is worse than calling oneself a ‘Ku Kluxer’”?
Further, Mr. C. informs me, it’s not just the candidate whose initials are “B.S.” who says outrageously commie, er, socialistic things.
“Hillary C.,” he insists, “trumps both Elizabeth Warren [who isn’t running] and B.S. with a whole wheelbarrow load of b.s. She just came out for ‘encouraging’ profit sharing by a business with its workers.”
What could be wrong with that?
Mr. C. has an answer: “All sorts of businesses engage in employee profit-sharing, aiming to encourage the proverbial ‘skin in the game.’ But forcing this is bad for many reasons.”
Again I agree. Mrs. Clinton’s proposal is just a sneaky way to play Robin Hood, without addressing the real issue behind all other issues, a lagging, red-tape bound economy.
Or, as was told to another Mr. C. years ago, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
While running for the Senate, Elizabeth Warren informed Lawrence O’Donnell and his MSNBC audience that she didn’t understand how Congressfolk could keep playing the stock market while in office. She trotted out the notion of stock management via blind trusts.
She and O’Donnell understand that members of Congress have apparently irresistible opportunity to leverage for their private benefit insider information and their power to change policy. It’s no secret: many a pol enters Congress as moderately upper middle class only to leave lining his coffin in gold.
“I realize there are some wealthy individuals — I’m not one of them — but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios,” she insisted.
Her clumsy, folksy “lot of stock portfolios” statement let her pretend not to be rich, when, in truth, she’s a multimillionaire living in a $5 million house … but with stock only in one company.
Politic precision.
In the Washington Examiner recently, Byron York explained her nuanced answer to the question of whether she was “going to run for president”:
Warren’s response was, “I’m not running for president.”
That’s the oldest lawyerly evasion in the book. Warren, a former law professor, did not say, “I am not going to run for president.” Instead, she said she is “not running,” which could, in some sense, be true when she spoke the words but no longer true by, say, later this year.
How Clintonian. She pretends not to be wealthy while running on “inequality,” and then — while pitching a campaign book — pretends not to be running for the presidency at all.
And misses the obvious anti-corruption planks: complete, minute-by-minute Web-based congressional investment transparency. And term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“The political problems of liberal populism are bad enough,” Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of the “centrist” group Third Way wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. “Worse are the actual policies proposed by left-wing populists.”
They’re warning Democrats not to push policies promoted by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and newly elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Cowan and Kessler aren’t exactly Tea Party activists. Before Third Way, Cowan was Democrat Andrew Cuomo’s chief of staff at both Housing and Urban Development and then as Governor of New York. Kessler worked for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D‑NY) and as director of policy and research for Americans for Gun Safety.
Still, Warren and de Blasio are faulted for having a “‘we can have it all’ fantasy,” believing that, “If we force the wealthy to pay higher taxes (there are 300,000 tax filers who earn more than $1 million), close a few corporate tax loopholes, and break up some big banks then — presto! — we can pay for, and even expand, existing entitlements. Meanwhile, we can invest more deeply in K‑12 education, infrastructure, health research, clean energy and more.”
It’s “reckless” to ignore the looming financial insolvency of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (which is being dramatically expanded) warn these Third Way authors: “Sen. Warren and her acolytes are irresponsibly pushing off budget decisions that will guarantee huge benefit cuts and further tax hikes … in a few decades.”
In response, groups like Social Security Works, Progressives United and Progressive Change Campaign Committee are threatening any politician associated with Third Way not to dare challenge their hankering for unlimited entitlements forever.
Delusions die hard.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren really worked up “progressives” with a rant about “fair taxation.”
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”
As A. Barton Hinkle points out, no one suggests otherwise. But the real meat of her argument is worth studying … for a peculiar pathology in logic:
You built a factory out there? … You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
Upon this rests her case for ramped-up progressive tax rates.
Apparently, according to Ms. Warren, successful businessfolk are takers only. But all along the way, businesses pay for the services they hire. Indeed, they pay for roads, too. Truckers, for instance, pay special weight-rate taxes and licenses for carrying heavy loads across roadways.
Her “argument” no more justifies government taxing truckers or factories more than a similar argument, mutatis mutandis, would allow the kid who mows your lawn to reach into your wallet when you aren’t looking.
The social contract doesn’t originate the way Warren specifies. Her logic establishes only that she’s not thinking clearly about obligations and lacks an appreciation for making a business succeed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.