Jeff O'Bryant
The 2012 election has made one thing perfectly clear. Americans who strongly identify themselves as individuals, who do not believe that it is better to, as Obama once put it, “spread the wealth around” through enforced government redistribution, and who believe our spending is out of control, are going to have to take matters into their own hands. It is no longer enough to plan for your future, to merely work towards your personal hopes and dreams. You must now start actively defending those hopes and dreams from 61,170,405 irresponsible people who think economic decline is a winning national strategy.
As Nov. 6, 2012 teaches us, over half the electorate are now willing to run roughshod over anyone and anything that is in their way to the “free” stuff. No other explanation of Obama’s election makes any sense at all. And I mean at all. Well, except perhaps one — that somehow Democrats were able to dig up enough dead people to vote for them in the battleground states to cheat their way to victory, which would not surprise me at all. But since it is pointless to pursue that as an option of removing Obama from power, let’s stick to the matter at hand.
First, gas prices. With fuel costs where they are and a president who said “no” to the Keystone pipeline — and who has made little effort to hide his hostility to American energy — Obama should not have had a chance. Unless you like paying from $3-$5 a gallon for gas with the very real specter of even higher prices in the not too distant future, that is. In Obama’s own words, “energy prices must skyrocket” because of his plans. Romney promised to open the Keystone pipeline and further develop America’s energy resources.
Unemployment is officially at 7.9 percent, but the real unemployment rate is really about 15 percent. This is a direct result of Obama's policies that have created uncertainty in the market and understandable caution in future planning by business owners. Romney’s plan (he has a successful record of turning around endeavors headed south) was to not only ease the regulatory burden of government upon business but, even more importantly, to reduce income taxes for all Americans. This action would boost consumer spending power and thus increase the demand for goods and services. In turn, this would create more jobs. If you don’t think this works, you’re ignoring history. And besides, isn’t this what America is based upon, after all? Free enterprise? What Obama calls the “failed” strategies of the past are no such thing; they are exactly what made America great in the first place.
But that greatness is no more. America as we once knew her is gone forever and will continue, unabated, her decline. While words cannot express how lamentable this fact is, history teaches us this shouldn’t be a surprise.
And even if “free” stuff isn’t the actual intent of many voters, it nevertheless is the resulting reality as they side with, for whatever their personal reasons may be, the Democratic Party. And for those who now want to throw roads, infrastructure, national defense, and the other legitimate functions of government up as an argument by lumping them into the "free stuff" category, let me cut you off right here. Those are actually legitimate functions of government. Redistributing what one person earns to another person who did not earn isn’t.
This redistribution, combined with completely out of control spending, has led us to this point. Sadly, the Republicans are little better on that score. Government grew under George W. Bush as well. But the difference is in the degrees. Republicans are irresponsible with taxpayer money like a marksmen chipping away at a target with a .22 rifle fire. They’ll eventually wear the target completely away. Democrats, however, forgo the rifle in favor of a rocket launcher.
As Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French historian, political observer and classical liberal once observed:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”
Right or wrong about the dictatorship, Tocqueville, at least in my opinion, is dead on about the majority of voters going for the candidate promising the most free stuff. Obama “gave” us Obamacare, promised free contraceptives and abortions to women, implemented cash for clunkers, gave large sums in corporate welfare schemes for bailouts, extended individual unemployment benefits, and, perhaps most successfully of all to his re-election, promised to “ask” millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. I do not know when “ask” became a euphemism for “government coercion” but Obama likes to use it. And I suppose it does sound better than saying, “I would like to force millionaires and billionaires to pay more.” Though how Obama can claim that they are not paying their fair share when the top 50 percent of earners pay 97.75 percent of all income taxes collected is a mystery to me.
It becomes even more mystifying to hear Obama claim that this will somehow help the deficit. According to the Wall Street Journal, if we confiscated all the taxable income of the millionaires and billionaires that Obama targets, it would collect “merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25 percent as a share of the economy.” Even expanding it out from the top one percent of taxpayers outlined above and including the whole top 10 percent (those earning $114,000 annually or more). “That’s five times Mr. Obama’s two percent promise. The IRS data are broken down at $100,000, yet taxing all income above that level throws up only $3.4 trillion. And remember, the top 10 percent already pay 69 percent of all total income taxes, while the top five percent pay more than all of the other 95 percent.”
Put simply, sticking it to the man, which was Obama’s re-election strategy and remains his philosophy, plan, and dream, just won’t work.
So I propose we turn the tables on him.
Next week, part two and what you, as an individual, can do to protect yourself and defend your future. I will outline specific strategies to protect your wealth and freedoms as much as possible in Obama’s America. And I welcome readers’ strategies as well. I can be e-mailed at the below address with your comments and your own ideas for surviving America’s decline.
Jeff O’Bryant is the author of “Up into the Hills – A Brief History of Catoosa County” and holds two degrees: a bachelor’s in education and a bachelor’s with honors in history. He can be contacted at jeffobryant@catt.com.
One last thing, may you, your spouse, kids, grandkids never be unemployed. I hope no one you know ever has a disease (that govt research has cured, or is working on a cure for) and can't fully pay their doctor bills. May you never have your home strewn across 3 states and have to live in a trailer from FEMA. No, none of these things will ever happen to you because to hear the bullshit you spout, you and everyone in your family are independantly wealthy and will never ever fear what most of us do. And we don't fear these things out of lack of foresight or planning, through our own shortfalls or faults. I will be blunt, because I have a point to make, shit happens. But not to you, oh no. You have it all under control!
...except that the quote in question was NOT, in fact, written by Alexis de Tocqueville,[*] nor does it even remotely reflect his views, which you would know if you knew anything about Tocqueville at all. Your use of it is a perfect microcosmic representation of everything else you've written, here, though: totally phony, totally divorced from reality, impotently flailing away at a world you can't understand because you've chosen to cut yourself off from it.
One can't help but be remembered of your own endorsement of Hermain Cain, a race-baiting fascist half-wit who said Muslims who exercise their religion are somehow violating the 1st Amendment rights of Christians, wanted to "solve" immigration by building a Berlin Wall on the southern border with electrified barbed wire on top and a moat full of crocodiles on both sides, who was asked about Libya and clearly had no idea what a "libya" even was, and who, of course, preached "traditional values" while indulging in extra-marital dalliances and sexually predatory behavior.
The reaction of those on the right to having their heads forcibly pulled from the orifices in which they've increasingly kept them stuffed has been far more entertaining that anything that happened in this dreary election (the conclusion of which was a foregone conclusion months ago to literally everyone who was paying any real attention).
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[*] It was apparently fabricated, in its earliest form, by an op-ed writer for the Daily Oklahoman in 1951 and attributed, at that time, to Alexander Tytler. In reality, it doesn't exist in any of Tytler's surviving writings. Right-wing commentators, over the years, apparently decided one Alex was as good as another, and the Tocqueville attribution was invented.
Everything he writes, above, is as phony as the phony Tocqueville "quotation" he uses, a consequence of his joining much of the rest of the American right inside a sealed bubble, totally cut off from the real world.
Example: At a time of high deficits, O'Bryant calls, with presumably straight face, for even MORE tax cuts.
FACT: The U.S. has, for the last three years, paid less in taxes than it has since the Truman administration.
That factoid is a bit misleading, insofar as, during the Truman administration (and unlike today), the wealthy and Big Business actually had to pay taxes. That gets to the next stage of this, the standard-issue rightist howls, mindlessly parroted above, against "redistribution of wealth." It's something to which the American conservative elite is very much opposed, but only when the redistribution is theoretically directed downward.
FACT: Functionally, that hasn't been the case in the lifetime of most of the people reading these words. Rather, government, directed by the very people offering those howls, has, for over three decades, been tooled to redistribute wealth upward.
It has proven remarkably effective.
FACT: Wealth concentration in the U.S. was flat or declining for decades after the Great Depression, a sign of a healthy economy and society. Various policy changes, starting in the mid-'70s and, particularly, in the '80s, reversed this--wealth, in the U.S., is nearly 3 times more concentrated now than in the 1970s, and is, in fact, more concentrated than at any time since the Gilded Age.
I've repeatedly cited figures, here, developed by Edward Wolff at New York University (who has worked on this problem longer than anyone). The top 20% of Americans, as of 2007, own an incredible 85.1% of the wealth in the U.S. When it comes to total financial wealth, the top 20% has an even more incredible 94% of it.
FACT: The 400 wealthiest Americans you mention now have as much wealth as the bottom 48% of Americans.
FACT: This trend, if allowed to go unchecked, will be the END of America (a process already well underway). A society begins to collapse when something like this happens, devolving into a two-tiered plutocracy. Joseph Stiglitz wrote a piece, last year, in Vanity Fair, going through some examples of how (one I've referenced here a few times):
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/05/joseph-stiglitz-the-price-on-inequality
There are no middle- and lower-classes growing fat off the wealth of the rich. Exactly the opposite is true. This is the world in which O'Bryant raves against downward wealth redistribution--one in which wealth has, in reality, been redistributed upward for decades by the policies his own faction advocates, to the point that wealth is dangerously concentrated, and the problem is only getting worse every year. It isn't just sound fiscal policy to tax those who have so much money; redistributing wealth downward is a social good in and of itself.
Not that ANYONE is going to actually DO that. Obama certainly hasn't advocated any such grand project, nor will he. He even extended the Bush income tax cuts for the wealthy. All he talks about--and only talks, and only on the campaign trail--is the rich paying a little more in taxes, and he doesn't even do anything to THAT end. In another example of how much of American conservatism has chosen to isolate itself from the real world, his administration, which, from a policy standpoint, would have been uncontroversially regarded, only a few years ago, as conservative Republican, is routinely labeled "socialist."
Facts:
36% say abortion should be illegal. 59% want it kept legal.
Romney/Ryan lost all their homestates.
Obama won the electoral college by 126.
He won the popular vote by 3 mil. Despite widespread R disenfranchisement efforts.
Massive victories for LGBT issues and candidates signal an end to marriage inequality. The religious right is now and forever an impotent non-player.
The author of this article comes at this election like he still stands on the majority. He doesn't. He's a baby. Uneducated, or wilfully stupid. Dead people voting. Keep beating that dead horse genius. Be a man for once.
And finally, I mention women barefoot and pregnant not from any specific comment in the article, but from the right's horrific, wrong-headed, short-sighted war on women. Please pretend that ther eisn't one, I love to watch old white men defend their stance on women's rights. LOVE IT!
Sadly, you are right about one thing. Reasonable, mature people are in the minority now. Which is, it seems, the point of this column. O'Bryant isn't talking to people like you. He's talking to people who want to do all they can to fight the freeloaders and protect themselves and their future - inasmuch is as possible, from the Obama agenda.
Like most Libs, I see you change the facts to suit your narrative.
"36% say abortion should be illegal. 59% want it kept legal." Source? Besides the voices in your head? Gallup says otherwise:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/154838/pro-choice-americans-record-low.aspx
"Romney/Ryan lost all their homestates." MA has always been blue, and WI just went through a bruising recall election that kept a Republican Governor, but fired up the Democrat base. Not a big surprise they both went Dem.
"He won the popular vote by 3 mil. Despite widespread R disenfranchisement efforts." 3 Mill = a rip-roaring 1% of the population. Hardly a mandate. And explain to me, exactly, how requiring ID to prove citizenship and residency (when you need it to buy booze, cigarettes, etc.) is such a hardship.
"Massive victories for LGBT issues and candidates signal an end to marriage inequality. The religious right is now and forever an impotent non-player." You mean the same people that got marriage defined as one man-one woman in 31 out of 50 states? Those non-players?
As for your last comment on the "War on Women," on that we agree. There IS a war on women--and it's being waged by the LEFT. How DARE you pat us on our heads and tell us not to worry, our Big Male Goevernment Betters will protect us from that nasty baby-making, so we can better service you sexually without you having to make child support payments!
About abortion, let's call it a draw. ANYONE can find polls to support their position.
MA, WI and MI all voting against their "native" sons seems a bit more monentous than you are willing to concede. That hasn't happened since 72. Seems like a big deal to me.
3% of voters is still not a landslide, but it is a winner. Better than comparing the number of residents (many of whom can't vote) to the margin of victory.
Marriage equality just did what it has never done, won the popular vote. Momentum is on their side, history will look on this time as the beginning of a renaissance for America. The ugliness from the right about gay marriage, secession, and racism will be told like stories of the holocaust are told now. In grave tones of regret and aching sorrow and ended in the refrain of "never again". These citizens, or "non players" that voted to stop discrimination are not isolated pockets of freaks as you may be led to believe.
Now for the war on women comment, I must admit I can't follow your sentiments. So I will just reiterate that it is the right waging a war on women, to their detriment. With Akin, Mourdock, Rush Limbaugh, and all the right wingers wanting to remove a woman's right to have any say over her body, it is a bad time to be a female with all the old white men coming after them with torches and pitchforks. Talk of transvaginal ultrasounds before abortions, keeping aspirin between their knees to prevent pregnancy, having birth control panels of only men, cutting Planned Parenthood funding, "personhood" law attempts. These are unprecidented, infuriating, hate BS against women. I am ashamed to be a white man. But I can hold up my head when I can at least say I am NOT a RWNJ that wants a 15 year old rape victim to have a machine JAMMED into her vagina so she can see the result of that humiliating devastating act in the hope she will then be burdened with a hate-child the rest of her live through no fault of her own.
Oh, but since I am a liberal I get a bunch of free stuff for voting Obama!! Yay me.
1. It's WestCoUSA, not LeftCoastUSA. As if I needed more proof that your reading comprehension isn't where it needs to be.
2. Native sons losing hasn't happened since 1972? Excuse me? In 1992, GHWB came in 3rd in Maine. Again, a red candidate losing in a historically and predominantly blue state really isn't a surprise.
3. I wouldn't say three states vs. 31 is "momentum," but whatever. Time will tell. I am far more concerned with the racism shown by the Left, both in holding Obama to a much lower standard of leadership and statesmanship than any of his predecessors, as well as the horrific, insulting name-calling (and yes, death threats) for any prominent black or Hispanic who supported Romney. I dare you to justify that.
4. As for the Left's War on Women, maybe I spoke over your head. Let me simplify. People are allowed to be pro-like. That is their RIGHT, and it is spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Granted, what Akin and Mourdock said was inartful, but keep in mind, ONE out of every FOUR pregnancies in this country end in abortion. Birth control is as close as the nearest drugstore, and in fact you can order a year's supply of condoms on Amazon for <$100. Given that 98% of all pregnancies resulting in abortion are conceived by two people making love--NOT rape, NOT incest, NOT life of the mother, NOT health of the baby, this is UNCONSCIONABLE. Now, maybe you as a white, privileged male feel morally superior by saying that it's a woman's choice (although it is probably more correct that you wouldn't want to pay child support if the kid was yours, nor would you want to pay higher taxes to support somebody else's kid until age 18). But this is a Constitutional Republic, and if my tax dollars you better believe I will speak up about how those dollars are spent. You want us out of women's wombs? Fine, get out of our wallets and finance your killing PRIVATELY.
5. This is OLD news, can't believe you didn't get the memo. For the record, Planned Parenthood REQUIRES two visits for an abortion. One for an ultrasound (which, contrary to popular belief, is at the discretion of the center, and is usually a function of whatever machine they have, not necessarily the transvaginal), and the other for the abortion itself. The ONLY change, therefore, is that the screen is turned slightly. So, if the ultrasound didn't get your dander up before, why are you so hot and bothered now, when this is only the law in 2 states and 98% of the women getting an abortion were not the victims of rape/incest? Let me guess: momentum???
I have never seen such WHINING!! Sour grapes! Liberals are doody heads for not thinking like me!! Suck it up princess, and get to work fixing the Bush mistakes, or go get your blankie and let the real Americans do their job.
Hey, let me know where you got your 2 degrees, I ned to know where NOT to send my son.
http://media.beta.photobucket.com/user/misschay/media/obama_halo.jpg.html?filters[term]=obama halo&filters[primary]=images&filters[secondary]=videos&sort=1&o=10#/user/misschay/media/obama_halo.jpg.html?filters[term]=obama halo&filters[primary]=images&filters[secondary]=videos&sort=1&o=10&_suid=135300475639108506779339427968
Really? You're sticking to that tired old line, huh? What about Governor Susana Martinez, Mayor Mia Love, Senator-Elect Ted Cruz, Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senator Marco Rubio, Congressman Allen West, economist Thomas Sowell, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, blogger Michelle Malkin...? No rich white guys there, and all proud conservatives. But they don't count in your twisted estimation, right?
And I must ask: why are you doling out advice to a party you so obviously hate; and furthermore, why do you expect us to actually use your advice? Nonsense. Our message appeals to anyone with any common sense, love of country (not REVENGE as your guy put it). But sadly, as was proven last week, it's hard to beat Santa Claus.
I'll stop now since I know I'm wasting my time talking to someone who allows their decisions to be made by their "ladyparts," but your stupid talking points compelled me to at least try to get through a bit of the sludge.