Only wealth redistribution is noble to the Left
Jerry
Common Sense and Wonder
Noxious vapors & smoke
(Colin McNickle-Pittsbugh TRIBUNE-REVIEW)
Liberal opinion scriveners like to say their conservative counterparts can’t see the reality for the ideology. But it is a far, far better thing to be a principled conservative who knows the facts, and knows they are on his side, than it is to be a pimp for the prevarication that is liberalism.
Bald-tire and blank-minded liberal editorialists, desperate to gain traction in the war of ideas they lost long ago, have given up trying to argue their case based on the facts. Obfuscation and polemics have become these pimps’ preferred tools as they practice their sociopolitical proctology.
Take, for instance, a Toledo, Ohio, Block Bugler editorial last week that said President Bush had
<<< “dropped another limp and cowardly budget on the American people.” >>>
Purposeful misrepresentation and intellectual vapidity never have crawled so low.
The Bugler says the $2.77 trillion fiscal 2007 blueprint raises spending for defense and homeland security while cutting spending for domestic programs.
<<< “In short, (the president) wants to spend more on items that have been manipulated to play on people’s fears and less on help to those who are vulnerable, powerless and silent — a politically easy road to take.” >>>
All of this supposedly is indicative of a growing “fend-for-yourself nation,” The Bugler blows.
It’s a curious and incendiary charge given the Bush budget cuts total defense spending by about $8 billion from fiscal 2006, according to an analysis by former USA Today editorial writer John Merline. Homeland security spending is cut by about $200 million in the new budget, he calculates.
The Bugler extends the deception to the Medicare budget — “the old” must absorb “cuts,” it claims. “Cuts”?
Since when is a projected $100 billion increase in spending (through 2011) a “cut”? (This must be part of the liberals’ New Math program that goes with what Mr. Merline says will be a federal education budget 80 percent larger in 2007 than in 2001.)
And the simple fact is that the $36 billion that will be saved by decreasing the rate of Medicare’s growth will be made up not by “the old” — a term liberals use in the same way they use “it’s for the children” — but by, in part, “expanding a requirement for better-off seniors to pay higher premiums,” as The Washington Post notes.
Gee, isn’t “soaking the rich” a Bugler standard?
The Bugler then proceeds to misrepresent the tax cuts the administration seeks to make permanent as a cost,
<<< “a populist measure that will only fuel annual deficits and raise the national debt on America’s next generation.” >>>
If Congress doesn’t stop spending and the president doesn’t unsheathe his veto pen, sure. But the reality is that the tax cuts have meant an increase in tax receipts. Writing in The Washington Times, Donald Lambro reminds that the federal deficit “fell by nearly $100 billion two years ago because of increased tax revenue due to higher economic growth.” (It rose last year because of Hurricane Katrina and Iraq war costs, he says.)
That growth was triggered, in no small measure, by the tax cuts The Bugler’s editorialists want to scuttle. And by any other name, that would be a tax increase, the very thing that ends up reducing federal tax receipts because it reduces consumer spending at most income levels and robs capital from higher income levels that’s used for new investment that, in turn, creates jobs that create higher tax receipts.
And it’s spending of the kind The Bugler usually advocates for every reform-defying, black-hole social program there is that’s leaving that much-feared skyscraper-high bill for future generations. Remember, this is the same newspaper that derides efforts to privatize part of Social Security (which would provide better returns even in the stock market’s last worst downturn) and thinks the massive and unworkable mess of the blank entitlement that is the Medicare prescription drug program isn’t large enough.
Unchecked, these programs will shake down taxpayers for an ever larger and obscenely usurious percentage of their income, eventually leaving most of the folks who pay everybody else’s bills with no money to care for themselves. Liberty has become an antiquated notion; this is the creeping crud of socialism. A “fend-for-yourself nation,” indeed.
Differences of opinion are one thing. Reasonable people can disagree. Honest debate is healthy. But the anti-conservative, pro-socialist screeds routinely spouted by liberal editorialists have few facts to support them. They are based on the dogmatic shibboleths of a bygone era and kept alive by a Democratic Party that has few new ideas and a compliant liberal media mouthpiece that has fewer still.
Once said Thomas Jefferson: “Newspapers serve to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.” Today’s liberal editorial calumniators ill-serve that mission by only creating both.
commonsensewonder.com |
