Yesterday at a stump speech, the calculatedly pretty yet highly unlikely prospective veep made her way on to the stage bearing her down-syndrome child like a football before a handoff to an aide. Before I rant on, let me just comment that exploiting her child like that just sickens me. SICKENS me. “Look at me! Baby on hip, I’m just like you!” Unforgiveable. But I digress.
The reason for my post today is one of her statements during that speech. She said, “Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism” in response to Obama’s comment to not-really-Joe the not-really-a-plumber about spreading the wealth around. First off, let’s be clear: Obama’s plan is to simply have people that NET PROFIT more than 250K/year back to the same tax levels they were at during the Reagan administration. And if that’s socialistic, then our entire progressive tax system is socialistic and we’re all socialists.
(And for those of you bad with math, for you to hit that number, with a modest home mortgage write off and the standard deduction and NOTHING ELSE you’d need to be making about 450K/year for that to occur. You’d also need to be really, really shitty at your taxes. It is arguable, that anyone in that tax bracket with even a modest amount of understanding of their taxes would more likely need to be making 550-600K at a minimum to hit that number. Trust me on this one, I know it well.)
But wait! Didn’t our Commander in Thief just propose and help push through the nationalization of our banking industry? Don’t We The People now own banks, insurance companies amongst a fantastic new array of companies? So…. Is this a bad time to experiment with socialism or what? So I guess what you’re saying, Ms. Palin, is that it’s OK to bail out anyone on Wall Street, but to give a tax break to the middle class (about 95% of the nation) that’s socialistic. Ms. Palin, you’re pathetic.
But more importantly, Ms. Palin, please correct me if I’m wrong: You preside over a state that practices collective ownership of oil and other natural resources, distributing the state’s cut of revenues to every citizen. STATE OWNED NATURAL RESOURCES AND YOU DISTRIBUTE THE REVENUES TO EVERY CITIZEN. You even got a lobbyist to get another 1K per person in Alaska from the federal government last year. I submit that you’ve been a socialist for your entire career – except for the times you’ve simply been a bad business person, having with all of that, STILL left your little town of Misery (or whatever) millions of dollars in debt.
But actually, I just get pissed off at the American people here, because this is easy stuff to figure out – and yet they don’t listen, learn or understand. Hmm. They probably all come from states where “Civics” was cut from the curriculum because of budget shortfalls.
haha lol
It never occurred to me that the collective ownership of oil in alaska is socialism. DUH, of course it is.
I constantly argue that America is already a socialist country, and has been for a very very very long time.
Public Schools
Public Safety -fire/police/ambu
Public Assistance
Social Security
Medicare/aid
The public works projects
Libraries
And then you have the things you don’t realize, that you buy into. Like health insurance, which you buy, so you can get the exact same care/coverage as everyone else in your “collective”. So why not just go that extra step?
To me, healthcare is the last real big item that should be socialized. Not government run health care, but single-payer socialism, so that the essential tenets of capitalism still remain within a framework that makes sure that everyone is healthy.
We are just too big and rich a nation to make the idea of health a capitalized item. And the way it works incentivizes health care the focuses on symptoms rather than causalities. If the system could be reframed to actually focus on health rather than the hiding of symptoms, we’d all be better off.