Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

 

Re-Burying the Budget

Losing a family pet is difficult…losing the same pet over and over again is a different animal entirely. Let me explain. My two little girls, Meagan and Chelsie, were both under six when we owned two Golden Retrievers, Coke and Pepsi. All that changed the day Pepsi was smashed by a car. Not that I could have done anything, but I was out of town the day Pepsi was killed, so graveside services were delayed until my return. Once I was home, all the family gathered in the far corner of our lot as I dug a hole to lay Pepsi to rest. It was an emotional time as the little girls placed what each thought was Pepsi’s favorite chew toy in with her. “I don’t want to go through that again,” I thought to myself as I covered the grave. End of story—well, not exactly.

Ten days later I glanced out the kitchen window and saw Pepsi, or what was left of her, lying next to the shed. Apparently, Coke had dug her up and dragged her body back to the yard. Before anyone noticed, I sprinted out of the house and re-buried her. The next week Pepsi shows up once again, so I buried her again. Coke made this a weekly ritual and the 6th, 7th, and 8th burials were not nearly as emotional as the first. By the 9th resurrection I had had enough, so I tossed the shrinking and now unrecognizable dried mass of hair and bone into the garbage—Pepsi went to the landfill. (It is entirely possible that after three burials I wasn’t burying Pepsi at all and instead it was just some other brown haired road kill Coke had dragged home. I guess it really didn’t make much difference.)

For as long as I kept burying Pepsi, Coke kept digging her up so this would have continued through perpetuity unless I did something different. So I did, and this is my point: If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got. When confronted with repeated problems you must fundamentally change your approach to reach a different outcome. Such is the exact case with politics.

The groundwork to transform American free-market capitalism into a nation based on Marxists principles began with the 16th Amendment allowing the confiscation of citizens’ wealth via income tax. In 1913, the political slogan “Soak the Rich” was coined and Americans earning over $500,000 were taxed 7 percent. By 1936, the top marginal rate hit a whopping 77 percent and this was the year the first of a series of three shoes dropped.

In 1936, by a vote of five to four in the Butler case, the US Supreme Court ruled Congress could tax and spend money for any cause it considered beneficial. This was the first shoe. Prior to Butler, constitutional scholars had held all revenues must be spent equally among the populace, so this was a monumental leap advancing Karl Marx’s theory of “from each according to his deeds; to each according to his needs.”

The year after the Butler ruling, the second shoe dropped—President Roosevelt’s massive wealth redistribution program called Social Security. The third shoe came in the form of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965. Incrementally, these massive wealth redistribution programs soon permeated every corner of American society. With complete disregard to the impossibility inherent in every Ponzi scheme, citizens demanded benefits to which they felt entitled. To be a hero, all politicians continued soaking the rich and giving to the poor, even though conservatives like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned “eventually we would run out of other people’s money.” Perhaps we have.

By next year, 2012, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the interest payments on our national debt will consume 100 percent of all tax revenues. If government were to “Soak the Rich” by confiscating 100 percent of all income above $100,000 they would collect $3.4 trillion which is still $330 billion less than President Obama is planning to spend. Obviously, “Soaking the Rich” is failing.

If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got. It is time for a fundamental change of government away from the Marxist principles introduced in 1913 and back to the free-market principles outlined by our founding fathers. It took us nearly a century to bankrupt the country so it will take nearly as long to restore it—yet restore America we must.


 
 
 
 
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