SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hey Tea Partiers--You're Leftists!
Time for Progressives to Reclaim Populism
Huey Long would know what to do.
Angry people were the Kingfish's stock in trade. People dispossessed and victimized, pissed off at a government that only cares about them on Tax Day. The populist Louisiana governor channeled the rage of the poor into political support, wielded power on their behalf. And he delivered.
Born of the Great Recession and ongoing economic collapse, the Tea Party movement is America's latest contribution to a long tradition of populist agitation.
The Tea Party doesn't have a platform. Which makes sense, since it isn't a party. The Tea Party movement is a loose, decentralized coalition of radical libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Sarah Palin-loving populists, black-helicopter militia types, nativist Minutemen obsessed with the New World Order, members of the retro John Birch Society, even a group of sheriff's who swear not to obey "stupid laws." Some of them hate Obama. They say they hate his policies, but some use racist rhetoric. They are almost all white.
[The Tea Party also doesn't have a media spokesman. Or one willing to talk to columnists, anyway. I reached out; never heard back. If any major Tea Partiers want to chat, please get in touch.]
What unites the Tea Party, which is more or less symbiotically affiliated with the so-called "Patriot" movement, are three issues. First, they're Constitutional purists. Second, they want the federal government to shrink or go away entirely. Third: they want lower taxes and government spending.
So why is the Tea Party seen as a right-wing movement?
To be sure, many Tea Partiers fiercely deny that they're a branch of the Republican Party. Tea Partiers have declared jihad against Governor Charlie Crist of Florida (because he accepted federal stimulus money), and have forced Senator John McCain of Arizona, no liberal he, to tack right in his reelection bid. But, from the Palin connection to the openly stated goal of "taking over the Republican Party, the GOP-Tea Party overlap is undeniable.
Which makes no sense.
True, America First immigrant-bashing doesn't fit in with the politically-correct Democrats of the 21st century. Liberals find the backwater cultural touchstones of Tea Party—country music, NASCAR, county sheriffs as celebrities, for God's sake—as alien as Muqtada Al-Sadr.
On the big issues, however, the Tea Party belongs on the Left.
Tea Party followers are obsessed with privacy rights. They want the government out of their lives. Worried about creeping totalitarian tyranny, they're against Obama's healthcare reform proposal in part because they believe it would grant the feds access to heretofore private medical records. "In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records," reported The New York Times.
Doesn't she remember who was president after 9/11?
Americans have good cause to fear the Democratic Party on privacy rights. During the 1990s Clinton Administration ramped up the NSA's Echelon system, which supposedly intercepts and automatically analyzes every single email, phone call, fax and wire transmission on the planet. Obama has kept the USA-Patriot Act and Bush's domestic wiretapping program in place.
But on privacy rights Republicans have been at least as bad. The Patriot Act was their idea. They abolished habeas corpus. They created the Total Information Awareness data-mining program; after Congress protested, they canceled it, renamed it, and quietly reestablished it. As much as Tea Partiers hates Democrats on privacy rights, they ought to hate Republicans more.
The same goes for Constitutional purity. Probably the greatest subversion of the Constitution has concerned war. Only Congress has the right to declare war, but one president after another has stolen that right away. Both the Ds and the Rs deserve equal blame. But the Rs deserve it most recently. The three biggest wars of the last two decades, Iraq twice and Afghanistan once, were started by Republican presidents. Surely, when it comes to respect for the Constitution, the Tea Party should look elsewhere than the GOP.
Most baffling is the Tea Party's willingness to look the other way as Bush ran up record deficits between 2001 and 2009. Yes, part of it was the wars—and guess what? Wars count. A real deficit hawk would have called for cuts equal to the cost of the wars or, better yet, not have fought them in the first place (since they were strictly optional and not required for defense).
If the Left were smart—hell, if it existed—it would talk to the Tea Party folks. "To hell with the Republicans," they'd say, "and to hell with the Democrats too. We might not like the same music, and we might talk a little different, and we sure don't believe 9/11 was an inside job or that the Bilderbergs control everything, but we're all tired of getting ripped off and lied to by a bunch of government scumbags and their dirtbag pals on Wall Street and corporate America. And we're going to stop them."
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL
Huey Long would know what to do.
Angry people were the Kingfish's stock in trade. People dispossessed and victimized, pissed off at a government that only cares about them on Tax Day. The populist Louisiana governor channeled the rage of the poor into political support, wielded power on their behalf. And he delivered.
Born of the Great Recession and ongoing economic collapse, the Tea Party movement is America's latest contribution to a long tradition of populist agitation.
The Tea Party doesn't have a platform. Which makes sense, since it isn't a party. The Tea Party movement is a loose, decentralized coalition of radical libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Sarah Palin-loving populists, black-helicopter militia types, nativist Minutemen obsessed with the New World Order, members of the retro John Birch Society, even a group of sheriff's who swear not to obey "stupid laws." Some of them hate Obama. They say they hate his policies, but some use racist rhetoric. They are almost all white.
[The Tea Party also doesn't have a media spokesman. Or one willing to talk to columnists, anyway. I reached out; never heard back. If any major Tea Partiers want to chat, please get in touch.]
What unites the Tea Party, which is more or less symbiotically affiliated with the so-called "Patriot" movement, are three issues. First, they're Constitutional purists. Second, they want the federal government to shrink or go away entirely. Third: they want lower taxes and government spending.
So why is the Tea Party seen as a right-wing movement?
To be sure, many Tea Partiers fiercely deny that they're a branch of the Republican Party. Tea Partiers have declared jihad against Governor Charlie Crist of Florida (because he accepted federal stimulus money), and have forced Senator John McCain of Arizona, no liberal he, to tack right in his reelection bid. But, from the Palin connection to the openly stated goal of "taking over the Republican Party, the GOP-Tea Party overlap is undeniable.
Which makes no sense.
True, America First immigrant-bashing doesn't fit in with the politically-correct Democrats of the 21st century. Liberals find the backwater cultural touchstones of Tea Party—country music, NASCAR, county sheriffs as celebrities, for God's sake—as alien as Muqtada Al-Sadr.
On the big issues, however, the Tea Party belongs on the Left.
Tea Party followers are obsessed with privacy rights. They want the government out of their lives. Worried about creeping totalitarian tyranny, they're against Obama's healthcare reform proposal in part because they believe it would grant the feds access to heretofore private medical records. "In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records," reported The New York Times.
Doesn't she remember who was president after 9/11?
Americans have good cause to fear the Democratic Party on privacy rights. During the 1990s Clinton Administration ramped up the NSA's Echelon system, which supposedly intercepts and automatically analyzes every single email, phone call, fax and wire transmission on the planet. Obama has kept the USA-Patriot Act and Bush's domestic wiretapping program in place.
But on privacy rights Republicans have been at least as bad. The Patriot Act was their idea. They abolished habeas corpus. They created the Total Information Awareness data-mining program; after Congress protested, they canceled it, renamed it, and quietly reestablished it. As much as Tea Partiers hates Democrats on privacy rights, they ought to hate Republicans more.
The same goes for Constitutional purity. Probably the greatest subversion of the Constitution has concerned war. Only Congress has the right to declare war, but one president after another has stolen that right away. Both the Ds and the Rs deserve equal blame. But the Rs deserve it most recently. The three biggest wars of the last two decades, Iraq twice and Afghanistan once, were started by Republican presidents. Surely, when it comes to respect for the Constitution, the Tea Party should look elsewhere than the GOP.
Most baffling is the Tea Party's willingness to look the other way as Bush ran up record deficits between 2001 and 2009. Yes, part of it was the wars—and guess what? Wars count. A real deficit hawk would have called for cuts equal to the cost of the wars or, better yet, not have fought them in the first place (since they were strictly optional and not required for defense).
If the Left were smart—hell, if it existed—it would talk to the Tea Party folks. "To hell with the Republicans," they'd say, "and to hell with the Democrats too. We might not like the same music, and we might talk a little different, and we sure don't believe 9/11 was an inside job or that the Bilderbergs control everything, but we're all tired of getting ripped off and lied to by a bunch of government scumbags and their dirtbag pals on Wall Street and corporate America. And we're going to stop them."
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL
posted by Ted Rall at
2:59 PM
37 Comments:
YES TED!! You are the first person I have read that is describing the only solution to the problem.
I had an idea recently that takes its core principle from a quote attributed to Ahmed Shah Massoud in the 80's "First we kill the Russians. Then we kill each other."
The left and the right MUST come together temporarily to oust corporations from the government. That is the only hope. "First we fight the corporations. Then we fight each other."
We need to drop all the wedge issues for now: abortion, guns, immigration, etc ... so we can focus on the cancer that is affecting us all: the corporate infestation of our government. Once we oust the corporations and lobbyists we can move forward with other agenda items - like health care. If we don't take this approach, we're doomed. Just look at the health care fiasco.
My dream scenario likely won't happen. Why? Two reasons:
1. American minds are completely controlled. Once left/right converged as a serious threat, the media onslaught would be relentless to break it up.
2. If somehow left/right did converge as a serious threat, corporations and Wall Street would fight back with such ferocity it would make the current economic climate look tame. Americans don't have the stomach to make the sacrifices to enact serious changes.
We can dream though.
Ted,
You missed the mark in this one. The tea party is neither liberitarian nor a true consevative movement.
The tea party leadership are corporatists through and through.
They are doing from the right what Obama did from the left which is to channel the public anger to their agenda through a bait and switch scheme.
Now after it is glaringly obvious that Obama turned out to be an outright fraud and he did almost exactly the opposite of what he said he will do except esclating the war in Afghanistan, it is the turn of the Tea Party to do the same.
Actually the Tea Party rhetoric is serving the corporations very well, from the call to low taxes and no business regulations, and the call for a small government which translate to destroying the social safety net and chnnel the taxes saved to the super-rich.
Nothing is said about the wars and regulating Wall St to avoid more of its shenanigans.!! Nothing is said about the attack on civil liberties and the patriot act!
It is all mostly contiuous attacks on "big" government and "socialist!" Obama.
Ha. Obama is a "socialis"!! That is really a bold nonsense.!
hahahaha, you are going to drive your statist readers apesh%t Rall.
Ted read the same NYT article on the Teabaggers that I did. Most of the Tea Partiers interviewed had recently lost their jobs.
Sure, I'll talk to the Tea Partiers. But I have this to say to them:
I want every one you to get down on your knees and apologize for putting that dumb, murderous fuck in the White House for 8 years. I'm talking about George Walker Bush the Second. Yes, YOU put HIM in there. You say you're concerned about privacy rights and the Constitution? Since when? Since Obama became president. Apparently the thought of a black man shoving your lily-white asses into Guantanamo Bay is what finally made you sit up and take notice that somebody could do that to you. Guess what? It's your fault! You didn't speak about it when you had the chance to do so years ago. When we on the Left protested against the Iraq War in 2003, we were dismissed as a "focus group". All ten million of us. Well, now it's your turn to stew in your own impotence, because you don't even come close to ten million. Because whatever of the Tea Party that cannot be co-opted by the Republicans is either going to be crushed or marginalized. Get used to it, sweethearts. And once you've swallowed that bitter pill, that's the day when you'll realize that Limbaugh and Hannity don't give a rat's ass about you and are lying through their teeth to you. The are corporate tools, nothing else. But you haven't reached that point yet. When you have, let me know, and then we can start the revolution.
Like Ted Rall, I've been struck by how much of what the Tea Baggers beleive is actually leftist.
And like Susan Stark, I also realize that they ain't there yet. They've figured out that the Democratic Party is a tool of corproations and doesn't do squat for them. But they haven't yet figured out that the Republicans - ALL OF THEM - are just as bad, if not worse.
When they figure out that the right-wing "populists" aren't populist, don't give a shit about them, and are just using them to further their own agenda, THEN they'll belong on the left.
There's always hope, but I'm not holding my breath.
First off Ted, they're "tea baggers" and second, they're a lost cause. Supporting the Constitution, less spending, and less government are just covers, they are really fascists who don't give a levitating crap about that stuff. These tea baggers are equivalent to the brown shirts in Germany. Fuck them, they are a vocal minority. The "left" needs its own movement and leaders, we don't need to join some racist asshole right-wing fascists.
lol And if the left had continued the anti-war protests after Dear Leader was elected they might actually have some credibility left to demand something from anyone. But just as the tea party types were silent then, the supposedly anti-statist left is keeping quiet -except when they complain that the government hasn't interfered enough.
Susan Snark,
The war in Iraq was started by congress, with heavy support from Democrats.
I talked to a probable TP last year in Pueblo, CO. It was the highlight of my summer. I asked him (he had two anti-Obama stickers on his car, and was attending a church group social [at the zoo]) what he had against Obama and he talked about how government just keeps on getting bigger.
I agreed with him on this point, but tried to argue that American federal government has been increasing since the New Deal, and that the restrictive forms of bigger government (non-regulated wiretaps, for example) are what we should be worried about.
I also tried to argue that if he thought that wealth transfer is socialism, then the Iraq War has been one big socialist investment of all of our tax dollars into the pockets of international oil companies.
...the conversation then got lost on technicalities like whether or not the people running Abu Ghraib actually used power drills to torture detainees. (to his credit, I think I was wrong, I think that happened at Bagram?)
I think that most TPs are stuck in supporting conservatives and the Republicans for two main reasons.
Firstly, they are primarily foreign policy hawks, and will support the troops even when the troops are conducting an illegal war that is being conducted for the benefit of the oligarchy and no one else.
Secondly, they are pro-lifers, who refuse to see that that logic (embryos are human beings and should be protected) and their libertarian logic (the government should stay out of our lives) contradict each other (all potentially pregnant women should not be allowed to do many actions that could harm an embryo).
When it comes down to it TPs are libertarian Republicans, who, much like progressive Democrats, complain about the party they usually vote for but think that third parties are doomed and thus keep supporting a party whom they despise. The best democracy money can buy.
I'm somewhat with Susan on this one, the Teabaggers can go f*ck themselves. The only reason they are protesting and complaining now is a Democrat is in the White (whore) House. ALL of the issues they are protesting against were severe problems under Reagan, King George I, and King George II, but they ONLY whine when a Democrat is running things.
They aren't liberals anymore than the mindless hippies I'm surrounded by, because a real liberal thinks for themselves and isn't hog tied by corporate packaged ideological crap. These people are somewhere between reactionary and mindless cattle herd, being led around so completely by a propaganda machine that has them so deep they don't know their asses from a hole in the ground.
No....no sympathy for these morons, and I'm not going to buy for a second that they're liberal, populist, progressive, or independently minded, because they aren't -not a single one knows anything beyond jingoistic soundbites, and I hope their livers explode from all the HFCS they suck down.
I like Garry Wills because he appears to be one of the fairest researchers who ever published a non-fiction work.
I did not know about one of Harry Truman's favorite ideas: Universal Military Training. 'Universal' clearly didn't include the universe of women of military age, because the program called for "a year of military training for EVERY MALE on completion of high school, followed by six years in the General Reserve." -- "Bomb Power" by Garry Wills (2010)
Suddenly, NOW, our military leaders and members of Congress and P-Obama feel less reluctance to allow gays to function in military service without having to LIE. I wonder why, in the same way, with the same sick logic, the government didn't tell women, in WWII, that they can serve in the military as long as they didn't SAY they were women?
The point I struggle to make, because words no longer seem to matter, especially after the first eight years of the new century in the USA, the point is that our leaders, our lawmakers, all LIE through their teeth. No one freely admits to being afraid of Black Americans, women, gays, immigrants, even though most of us came from the same beginnings.
Was there EVER, in the old days of open discrimination, of institutional bigotry and discrimination, ever ONE person in the ladder of power who said, in a formal meeting or closed session, "Why don't you guys GROW THE FUCK UP?! Where the hell did you get the idea, and the BALLS to give this shit shelf life, that Black Americans can't do the same thing as White Americans? Have you EVER met some of our White Americans from the mountains and the Deep South? Or members of the Bush family?
For all the bullshit surrounding the campaign and election of Jesse Ventura for Governor of Minnesota, he believed in, promised, and carried out his pledge to serve only ONE TERM. And no politician ought to be able to serve more than ONE TERM. If any politician got the idea he/she could just skate through one term for the post-term benefits, or fucked up the job royally, the citizens and legislature could waive every single benefit to the malingerer. What's so difficult to understand about that? You fuck up, you lose. You work hard for your constituents for 2, 4, 6 years, you win.
And throw away the paranoid, bigoted, ignorant baggage that went before. Say to your constituents, I, as your elected leader, will not tolerate such nonsense. If citizen-voters need to be babied, then do so, but not as a brain-washing, compromised lackey for corporate interests and war profiteers.
Now I and the ghost of Frank Capra will cede the floor, because none of this windmill shit is going to happen. P-Obama wants two terms, and THAT is the most important goal of P and his Demnecrotic Party.
Susan, the thing to remember about the the tea baggers is that most of them aren't really actively engaged with ideas or knowledgeable about what's actually happening. Their ideology appears flimsy, but it's sincere because logic doesn't have to factor into their choice about what they believe.
Right now, the tea baggers are mad as hell, and they're not going to take it any more. They've been whipped into a frenzy by media demagogues--real life Howard Beales. (The thing to remember about Network is that it wasn't just a stab at television, but a vicious attack on television viewers.)
As Ted and others have said, if we had a real Left, it would be easily rounding the rabble into it's camp. The middle class has been losing ground for 3 or 4 decades, and there's certainly plenty to be about angry about.
The problem is we don't have a Left. On economic issues, the Democratic party is akin to the Republicans in that it serves the interests of big business. The only way the "two" parties can differentiate themselves to the public mind is to play the insidious "culture war" game.
Such a large segment of the population is depoliticized, uneducated and completely lacking "media literacy," that to ask them to be consistent or understand what they're talking about is too much.
This isn't country like Germany or France, where a well reasoned argument will pretty much find its own legs...
"Most baffling is the Tea Party's willingness to look the other way ..."
Not baffling to me ... it's not that the Tea Partiers are looking the other way, but that they are blind, deaf and ignorant ... anyone who thinks that a beauty-pageant-contestant-turned-small-town-sportscaster-turned-small-town-mayor-turned-"populist" governor (of one of the least-populated states) is the shining light for America is either an imbecile or believes that most of America consists of imbeciles ...
There are (too) many Americans who believe that Dubya won in 2000, that al-Qaeda is on our doorstep ready to kill us all, that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are keeping us safe, and that government can create jobs (not as long as Wall Street CEOs can outsource to Bangalore) ... these are the imbeciles that are being manipulated by the 10 percent of Americans who control 90 percent of the wealth, and those 10 percent don't care about anything other than stuffing more wealth into their already bulging bank accounts ...
Want true reform? Start with taxes ... repeal every tax "reform" since JFK's administration, and set up a tax system that charges 90 percent of the taxes to the wealthiest 10 percent of the population who control 90 percent of the wealth ...
Sounds like "fair-share" to me!!!
Wow, I agree totally with Susan.
The Tea Partiers are a bunch of fascists, literally paid for by the corporations.
All that's left is for them to jump into bed with the terrorist fanboy "anti-zionists" of the extreme left and you've got an instant neo-Nazi party. Mark my words.
What good is it to be "dead right"?
Peck away at your keyboards, losers!
Whine your way off while you slap ted's back - He's hoping that you will give him money. If he had any real guts he'd get off his ass and do something - but wait, if you send him momey immediately, you'll get a set of steak knives.......
People, it doesn't matter which wing of the DemRepublofacists in in power... George the 1st gave it to you in the missionary position with hie eyes closed, Clinton rammed us doggie style, George the 2nd got confused and mastubated on us all and Obama is giving us all the Belmont Transfer...wake up, this isn't a football game.
Bravo, Ted! I don't much care for the terms left-wing/right-wing (I actually abhor both), but I would definitely march with the Left on all these issues, if I were in America.
I don't get the "we might not like the same music" bit, though. I mean, are all leftists supposed to like lousy punk rock and hate, gasp!, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger on account of banjos?
Yeah, unfortunately I agree with other commenters who say that it's ridiculous to imagine the Left has any common ground with Teabaggers with respect to "Constitutional purity" as you put it. Anyone outside the Teabaggers who helps these people gain access to power is going to be rather surprised and dismayed to find out what their interpretation of "Constitutional purity" is like.
Remember that the biggest applause lines at Teabagger rallies and Sarah Palin speeches are when they bring up the Underpants Bomber. "They let him 'lawyer up'! He shoulda been hung without a trial! Hanging's too good for him, he shoulda been waterboarded to death and then hang him!" Rather than, y'know, actually reading the Constitution, which says that Constitutional rights are guaranteed to anyone under U.S. jurisdiction, not just citizens; and that crimes which occur in U.S. territory must be tried in civil courts.
It will make your head spin to see just how fast these people discard the Constitution once a candidate of theirs gets into actual power. Not that I'm trying to argue either of the mainstream parties are any better about preserving the Constitution; they're not. Not even the one with a "Constitutional Lawyer" on their side. But still, anyone who thinks we have common ground with the Teabaggers is only falling for propaganda.
Susan Snark,
The war in Iraq was started by congress, with heavy support from Democrats.
I know this. That was the point I was trying to make. The Teabaggers are going to have to come to the same realization that I did.
And if the left had continued the anti-war protests after Dear Leader was elected they might actually have some credibility left to demand something from anyone.
There aren't any major anti-war protests now because they're redundant, and the media doesn't bother to show up for them.
In my opinion, nothing less than a sit-down protest in Washington (on a weekday) by millions of people will have any effect whatsoever. But there isn't any leadership with the guts to do something like that. They all feel they "have" to have a permit to gather in one place and open their mouths.
I see them as brown shirts. The level of paranoia present in their belief system makes compromise impossible.
Alexander Cockburn, I'm afraid, beat Ted to the punch with this one... by a factor of years. A lefty provocateur, Cockburn has been making the rounds of reichwing conferences for a while - mostly using a gun-toting libertarian angle. Cockburn will also take some sly digs at abortion (it's the result of a eugenics movement) and affirmative action (only helps the bourgie-black talented tenthers), and prove himself to be an independent, free-thinking radical... while the reichwingers in the audience congratulate themselves on their open minds. Recall that Cockburn wrote for the Wall Street Journal.
It looks edgy, doesn't it? So clever is this potential cross-pollination among the disaffected. But... not much organizing has come of this, however. And why?
Because Tea Baggers in the US (like the BNP and EDL in Britain) are the corporate shill vanguard for Nazism. They are white male hetero Christian supremacists who carry water for megacorporations. They are relentlessly promoted by the capitalist media to show that there is no REAL humane alternative to war, genocide, bigotry, surveillance, ecocide, and capitalist exploitation. It's either RAINBOW-COLORED NEOLIBERAL fascism under Obama or (toss some scapegoatism and flag-fetishism in and get) ANGRY WHITE NEOLIBERAL nazism under the GOP. That's the choice, the change, the hope we have - according to the capitalist media.
Maybe by "chatting" you can peel some of the VERY few principled baggers off. But organize with nazis? I'm queer. I'm socialist. No thanks.
Perhaps you should talk to Hugo Chavez. Just read a book called VENEZUELA SPEAKS!, published by PM Press - this is where grassroots action should be headed, in my humble opinion.
I disagree with this column, a "tea party" member got elected to office in Long Island and he identifies himself with the Republican party. He even ran as a Republican.
"Most baffling is the Tea Party's willingness to look the other way as Bush ran up record deficits between 2001 and 2009. Yes, part of it was the wars—and guess what?"
Of course they look the other way, they are Republicans just like a bunch of liberals look the other way on Obama. It's their bias.
Tea party members are Fox News loving, George Bush loving, Rush Limbaugh loving crazies.
Albert,
Look in the mirror. the nazi party had more in common with racist leftits who supported slavery and eugenics.
Said Patrick:
Want true reform? Start with taxes ... repeal every tax "reform" since JFK's administration, and set up a tax system that charges 90 percent of the taxes to the wealthiest 10 percent of the population who control 90 percent of the wealth ...
That sounds suspiciously like a flat tax rate to me...
That sounds suspiciously like a flat tax rate to me...
The idea of the flat tax, as it exists in the US, is basically a scheme to eliminate progressive taxation.
Personally, I'd like to see the income tax abolished (at least for non-capitol-gains, and for people making less than $100k).
If we were concerned about humanity's future, we'd be moving to a consumption based tax system--but, unlike many of these "flat tax" schemes, targeting luxury items and fossil fuels.
This will not happen anytime soon.
the reason why no Tea Partiers will chat to you is that they think you'll distort there views to make them look like idiots, and the Tea Partiers who will chat to you will probably call you a commu-facist
Perhaps you should talk to Hugo Chavez. Just read a book called VENEZUELA SPEAKS!,
Esteban,
I don't know in which parallel reality Chavez' followers in their guayaberas rojas are anything other than modern day brownshirts. And you be sure to let us know what the Clown-in-chief in Venezuela thinks about your sexual preferences.
If we were concerned about humanity's future, we'd be moving to a consumption based tax system--but, unlike many of these "flat tax" schemes, targeting luxury items and fossil fuels.
BJ Bill tried a luxury tax. It was repealed because it hurt the people who build yachts.
Esteban,
Why don't you go live under Chavez for awhile and let us know how it goes.
BJ Bill tried a luxury tax. It was repealed because it hurt the people who build yachts.
You framed the issue perfectly. Thank you for illustrating why our social/economic system is completely unable to address the world's ecological problems.
Grouchy,
You don't need to tax the hell out of people to solve ecological problems. Richer countries have cleaner environments. I traveled to your nirvana, the USSR and East Germany back in the late 80's and they were ecological disasters.
You don't need to tax the hell out of people to solve ecological problems.
Not necessarily, but you've got to stop consumption--somehow.
Richer countries have cleaner environments.
This is stupidest thing I've read in a while. Rich countries are cleaner becaues they outsource all the nastiness to the "3rd World."
I traveled to your nirvana, the USSR and East Germany back in the late 80's and they were ecological disasters.
Why do all you trolls want to talk about Cuba, the USSR and the GDR? When have I referenced these places? I talk about Denmark and Scandinavia, and you fucktards just don't have anything to say...
OK Grouchy, so why don't you move to Denmark or Scandinavia?
OK Grouchy, so why don't you move to Denmark or Scandinavia?
I don't have EU citizenship, you anonymous troll fucktard.
All you idiots will go up against the wall when the Revolution comes!
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