This argument worked SO WELL for the Romney campaign!Let’s keep it going:
“Today, more people than ever before — 69.5 million Americans, from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries — depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions,” Demint wrote in the letter. “The United States must reverse the direction of these trends or face economic and social collapse.”
A.
Pffft. Obama is trying his best to kick the old and the poor, and he gets no credit from the wingnutbars.
So sad.
Let’s see…Jim DeMint (just typo’ed DeNit, which might be more appropriate)…Wikipedia and Google say he owned a “market research” firm before entering Congress and now he works for the Heritage Foundation.
Hmm…quasi-government to actual government to quasi-government again. Nice welfare if you can get it. Gotta love how anti-government types can usually be found with their hand if not both hands, both feet, and a gaping maw in the public till. They stop shoveling money into their pockets by the bucketful only long enough to lecture the rest of us on “market values.”
…
why can’t they find their bootstraps? their INITIATIVE!
Michael Parenti makes the point, repeatedly, that poverty is an integral feature of capitalism. So, it’s not an unreasonable leap to say that the more successful capitalism is (especially the predatory, rent-seeking type we have today), the more poverty there is.
And, lawdamighty, the facts seem to confirm that hypothesis. The wealthy are doing great–just five years after major economic meltdown caused by them–while poverty is increasing. Wealth and income inequality are increasing apace.
There are no God-given rules in this, contrary to the opinions of the Friedmanites and the Lloyd Blankfeins. We are quite capable of creating a set of rules of governance that order society in whatever fashion we choose, for whatever purposes we choose. “Efficiency” (which has always been secretly defined as forcing others to pay for externalities, and which is itself becoming a false idol to be worshipped), will likely be the undoing of us all.
Over the last thirty years, we’ve been propagandized into believing a set of right-wing economic rules that purport to work for the benefit of all, when, in fact, they were always designed to work for the tiniest sliver of the population, to move wealth upwards and to concentrate it in the hands of a very few. Now, we have more and more evidence that following the rules has done precisely that–and has caused incalculable harm to our future prospects, but, there’s no public media suggestion to abandon those rules and propose new ones, nor even to ignore them. That’s the definition of capture. It’s why the Sunday shows are largely populated by fatuous idiots. It’s why Presidents take the advice of ideologues and those whom Teddy Roosevelt called “the malefactors of great wealth.”