I’m Mad As Hell And _____ (Fill In Blank)
Feb 7th, 2010 | 29 responses
I’m mad as hell and can’t stand it any longer. I’ve heard conservative and moderate Democrats, Republicans and Independents complain too much taxes, too many regulations and a trend of socialism taking over our lives. President Barack Obama said he’s been accused of being a Bolshevik.
I’m mad as hell because these complainers have failed to offer workable alternatives. And yes, I agree that some proposals by Republican congressmen and Senators fell on Democratic deaf ears in the recent health care debate.
I’m mad as hell at farmers who claim they are being taxed out of their farms. No problem. Let’s eliminate all the farm subsidies they receive for starters.
I’m mad as hell at the white seniors, mostly, who protest new health reform legislation as socialistic when a public option is proposed. Okay. We’ll eliminate Medicare and Medicaid. Yet, what we heard was “But don’t you dare take away our Medicare,” some screamed at the town hall forums last August. Oops.
I’m mad as hell at those who still argue Social Security should be privatized. Right. You just lost half your benefits this year as did your 401ks because the stock market collapsed.
I’m mad as hell at the NIMBYs. These are mostly tree-hugging liberals who vote green but protest any oil rigs, mining excavations or wind turbines in their back yards.
I’m mad as hell at those who vote against local library bonds but remain avid users of the public library.
I’m mad as hell at those who vote against a 1-cent sales tax to improve their police and fire departments. Yet, they still call 911 when Jack The Ripper bursts into their homes or their house catches on fire.
I’m mad as hell at all politicians who promise to cut budgets without a clue where the money comes and goes.
The people I am mad as hell about are those who subscribe to the Ronald Reagan axiom that government is not the solution; it’s the problem. Reagan wanted to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Never happened. I do agree with the Reagan principle when government performs the work of a nanny. I prefer to see government as the arbiter setting down the rules and preventing anarchy in our market places, that dreaded vox populi factor.
But just for fun, let’s look what would happen if Reagan and today’s libertarians were in charge. Here’s some budget cuts that really would reduce the deficit and pay down the national debt.
* Cut the Defense Budget for all humanitarian relief efforts. Those who worship at the feet of conservative/comedian talk radio host Rush Limbaugh would please him mightily that our military kill the enemy rather than perform “meals on wheels” duty.
* Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
* Strip the U.S. Department of Agriculture of all duties except drug testing and meat and fruit inspections. Force farmers to pay private consulting rates when using university’s Ag Extention experts.
* Cut the IRS by 80% and replace the tax code with a flat tax.
* If that fails, eliminate the capital gains and estate (death) tax.
* Place NASA on hold until the budget is balanced.
* Eliminate all farm subsidies.
* Require the health insurance companies to pay back from profits 50% of annual subsidies they receive from the feds to pay for drugs and medical costs for the indigent and Medicare senior advantage plans.
* Establish a bipartisan commission to review all government programs in which their recommendations for cuts carry the weight of law Congress must enact in part if not in whole. Such a commission already exists for military base closures.
* Any new program enacted by Congress must have a sunset clause renewable every five years.
While we’re at it, eliminate earmarks.
So you conservatives and moderates who are serious about cutting spending, don’t bring a scalpel. Bring a chainsaw. That is the challenge I submit for you and the Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party should any of you are swept into Congress in this year’s midterm elections. Hint: Your dreams are only that, I’m afraid you’ll learn. And if you succeed, you might consider hiring personal body guards to protect you from your constituents whose ax you’ve gored.
Until that time, shut up. Your speech is shallow.
And, I’m no longer mad as hell.
29 Responses to “I’m Mad As Hell And _____ (Fill In Blank)”
Your list of chainsaw-inflicted cuts actually has a fair number of good ideas, imo.
You may be
“I’m mad as hell and can’t stand it any longer”
But as a country we have
“Falling, but we can't get up”
Nothing but a hopeless old lady without the political strength to pick ourselves up.
I agree with a lot of what you wrote….but we must get out of this recession before we cut a lot of spending and raise taxes.
Once we get the country back in the right direction we can then cut spending and raise taxes.
You're too big and diverse a democracy, and you are obsessed with the labeling and projected images of things rather than the essence and nature of things. Since everything is marketable in the US, you are becoming more and more alienated, and things are stripped of meaning. Obama is on the street-level, working with tools and the actuality of things. The people might live in that real world when they work, but inside their homes and in their discourse they are high up in the clouds, looking only at the symbolism of things. They are susceptible to every single lie in the book and are ready to forgive any politician who is ready to lie so brazenly that to question the lies they would invariably have to question themselves.
This is how you make Americans forgive breaches of the constitution – by stupidly reiterating that you are doing what you do to *defend* the constitution (towards which your allegiance is unquestionable), you make the prospect of standing up against you so daunting and difficult that they would rather identify themselves with you and your image. Questioning Sarah is more of a hassle than going along with her infantile spiel.
This is also why a terrorist attack strengthened the last administration and why a new one would destroy Obama's – because Obama doesn't respect the importance of semiotics in the American “mind”. As a democrat, he must prove that he isn't a homo in the same sense that some women has to prove that she didn't get a job by sleeping with the boss. Imagery, symbolism, narrative and projection – Obama never understood any of that.
Your list of chainsaw-inflicted cuts actually has a fair number of good ideas, imo.
I had the same thought. Are we at the point where any significant reforms will be characterized as hacking with a chainsaw?
[...] About This News Article or Informative Resource The article I’m Mad As Hell And _____ (Fill In Blank) – The Moderate Voice is syndicated for use on our Wind Farm and Wind Energy Blog. The original content can be found here. [...]
Funny enough, I watched Network last night. Great flick. Seems things really don't change all that much after all no matter how mad we get!
Even if we implemented all of the reforms listed above, we wouldn't make any meaningful impact on the national debt. The large projected deficits going into the future come from mandatory spending (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which together make up 50% of the budget), and to a lesser extent military spending (which makes up about 30% of the budget).
With the exception of foreign aid cuts (<1% of the budget), everything else you listed are changes to subsets of the remaining non-defense discretionary part of the budget, which only make up 17% of its total size. If we were to eliminate ALL of that spending, we would reduce the deficit by about $700 billion, which wouldn't even come close to balancing the budget. It wouldn't be enough, and it would involve denying people benefits and firing millions of workers at a time when the unemployment rate is already too high.
The only way to balance the budget is to cut military spending, reform entitlements (mostly Medicare; SS is doing fine, contrary to popular belief), and enact health care reform with meaningful cost-containment measures (since the best way to reduce Medicare costs is to cut general health costs). Or of course we could raise taxes.
No matter what, many people are going to suffer from deficit-reducing policies, whether it be taxpayers, the elderly, or military weapons manufacturers. There's no easy answer, and any politician or tea partier who says different is either an idiot or a liar.
Apparently so. Various interests are completely rigid about their pet programs — and all the interest groups have huge numbers of supporters, no matter which side of the aisle one views things from. From the highest profile and most expensive (like Medicare) to the stealth programs with extreme but not-well understood impacts (like Ag policies), positions are entrenched.
I'm starting to despair.
“I'm starting to despair.”
Meh, a lot of the problem is going to go away when people just die of old age, and then there is the pretty unknown hispanic factor for the future.
My point exactly. That's why I noted these Draconian cuts would require body guards for Congressmen when they return home.
I inferred but did a lousy job articulating that the timing of these cuts would be disastrous to any rebounding of the economy.
abc85iu4 made a salient point of the percentage of budget expenditures involved to make a dent in the deficit. Wish I had said that.
All said and done, I'm continually outraged at the lack of thought these low-tax, deep budget-cut advocates espouse. The purpose of the column was to challenge the bastards.
Jer
So… you see the main problem as the baby-boomer pig in the python?
Might as well, I don't see much evidence of people in this country getting any smarter (TMV inhabitants excepted… of course
By “smart”, I mean the ability of people to think, as opposed to letting others do the thinking for them – including those people who think they are doing their own thinking, but only end up reflecting talking points and worn out prejudices.
That, and the imprint they have made on your infrastructure, economy, culture, polity and collective unconscious.
And Europe isn't dealing with a similarly large, aging pig?
Re: the cultural impact: the boomers in this country are a full generation (or two) closer to the Great Depression. I wish their impact had been much different, at least in terms of understanding how important it is to live within one's means. For the last couple decades, unfortunately, that value has been sadly exposed as superficial.
The point of the Tea Party crowd and the current talking points of the Republicans is that we shouldn't wait for the recession to end before cutting those programs and taxes.
Sure it is, which is why I plan to move away from the Western world entirely when I can.
Why is reform in some minds always about cutting spending and lowering taxes? If you look at the long run it won't do any good. We live in a complex modern society in a very large nation. What if we had the commission to really thoroughly scrutinize programs for utility and eliminate those that have none, consolidate ones that could benefit from it and be honest about situations where there are no real easy answers? For one thing, eliminating the state contributions to Medicaid would be a big boost to lots of states now when they really need it. Then consolidate Medicaid and Medicare. Let them negotiate prices like any other insurer instead of simply mandating a rate that makes providers hesitant to serve those on the program. Look for ways to do things more efficiently and streamline procedures.
Sadly they bought into the acquisitive part of the American dream considerably more enthusiastically than they did the sensibility part of the American dream. That, in part, has contributed to my own profound feeling of disappointment in the boomer generation… of which I am a part.
This silly post was given by the same people who only protested wars when a Republican was in office. I'd believe you, but you are one of those people who mocked the protests last 4/15 and 9/12, so your ranting and raving has fallen upon deaf ears.
At least you write original thoughts at TMV, not like Kathy Katttenberg.
That's something I've always had a problem with. It's the spending that counts. Whether it's taxed, borrowed, or inflated is more of a minor point.
Does anyone have any real statistics on whether it is the boomers or Gen X who were doing the majority of the living beyond their means?
That's a great question! I've never seen a break down demographically, myself. Googling the term “baby boomers living beyond their means”, though, brought any number of articles, dating back to the early 2000's (when this whole mess was in very high gear). Many of them support the supposition that the boomers have been living high on the hog (and in denial) for some time.
I think statistics would be interesting!
” Are we at the point where any significant reforms will be characterized as hacking with a chainsaw?”
All good reforms are typically mischaracterized that way by their critics. At this point, however, it is accurate to say that the size and scope of reforms are described in such bold terms.
I prefer Rothbard's prose that is so much more appropriate now than ever:
“'But where would you cut?' asks the cunning critic, hoping to get us all bogged down in the numbing minutiae of whether $50,000 should be cut from a grant to some New Jersey avant-garde theater group.
The proper answer is: anywhere and everywhere; only wholesale flailing away with a meat axe could possibly do justice to the task. An immediate 50% across-the-board slash in literally everything; abolishing every other government agency at random; a line-by-line reduction of the budget to some previous president's–the further back in time the better; all these will do nicely for openers.”
No stats, just personal observations, Polimom. I'm Depression born. Pay as you go. My youngest brother a boomer. Big on playing the stock market. But Gen X? My son and his peers used their homes as personal ATM machines. Big mistake. — Jer
Look at http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss2/200…
Data over time on debt by age (table 18) among other things. I'm looking at it but don't see any clear pattern. Looks like 35-45 yr. olds consistently have the most debt in relation to their income, but that makes sense – they're building families and getting established – and the next younger and older decades aren't far behind. From mortgage debt in the same source, might be that the younger boomers and Gen-Xers were the ones that fueled the giant house market.
“That's something I've always had a problem with. It's the spending that counts.”
That and the size and scope of the federal government.
It's wrong simply to prattle that times are modern now and that modern communications and transportation have “destroyed distance,” and helped make the states and the regions moot, just as it's wrong to say that people want Washington to grow and thrive because the states haven't become overly large and expensive themselves (“not done their jobs” [sic]). We're a largely suburban nation centered mainly around major metro areas. (At least the metropolitan area unification advocating liberals, some of whom want to the areas extend across multiple states or abolish state territorial boundaries where they would be affected by unification, aren't preoccupied with centralization in Washington.)
Regrettably, so much of what truly needs to be done — eliminating the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, much of Commerce, without expecting the state governments or local governments necessarily to continue the “work,” for example, not to mention divestiture of excess resources held by the feds, notably in the West — will never be done because of all the entrenched as well as established interests in Washington. Reducing staff sizes of members of Congress? Don't count on it. Reducing federal employee pay? No. Reforming federal employee retirement? Don't count on it (at least, not for another decade).
All the budget cuts in the world will not make a dent in this debt.
Taxes must go up and the working class cannot afford it this time.
It is time for the rich to pay.
Obama Looks to Pump $3 Billion More Into Education, Get your share get Medical Assistant Degree from http://bit.ly/a80qrv
There is no magic pill, we have to make some tough decisions as a nation and the sooner the better. We need to redefine our goals as a nation and work towards them in a realistic manner and stop passing the buck to the future. Expect tough times ahead and start preparing the American people for them so they can buckle down and start laying the groundwork, not hide their heads in denial and blame others. There is much we can do….if we really try to.