Agreed. The Yippies nominated the pig Pigasus for president. The Teabaggers want Sarah Palin. Makes the Pigasus campaign look serious and dignified by comparison.
You are pretty good at pointing out the problems, although you tend to miss the fine points that show where to assign blame, and when, but this in no way means that libertarians are the solution. I could see that the company computer system has crashed and tell everyone about it, but this in no way qualifies me to either diagnose the problem or provide a solution.
I have pointed out THE problem, assigned blame and suggested a solution. And if I see someone unplug the computer system, I don’t need an expert to tell me why it’s down.
You have merely pointed out that “The computer is down!” without opening it up to see that it is composed of many different parts that work together in many different ways, and your solution is to toss it out the window and buy another computer that has never been burned in or tested on a large scale.
Public funding of elections, anyone?
Not possible until you solve the “money = free speech” problem.
It’s not a problem. It’s an absurd leap of logic that Carl Lewis couldn’t make.
Yeah campaign funding reform would help too. But damn is there any problem, created over the last 50 years, you’re not looking at this guy to fix overnight?
It’s only a problem because corporations, according to SCOTUS, are people. Only a Constitutional amendment will be able to undo 110 years of egregious judicial legislation.
Then it will be a problem forever. Such an amendment will never see the light of day, because it would have to be proposed and supported by the same congress that took the money in the first place.
LOL. The funny part is that is actually somewhat true.
Plus liberalism is associated with higher scores on openness on the factor 5 personality test, and openness is associated with curiosity and novelty.
So that was a joke, but there is some truth to it.
Opposing citizens united is something that has bipartisan support.
I think more and more people are waking up that supply side economics is a sham. Obama ran on a platform of higher taxes on the wealthy and he won. Polls show a strong majority support progressive taxes. Progressive taxes and corporate regulation are pretty popular opinions right now. Many people are more afraid of corporate hegemony than they are of ‘socialism’.
So it isn’t the public, it is political leaders. Politicians are to the right of the public on economic issues.
The number of states that have passed bills calling for a new Constitutional Convention, a process for throwing the whole thing out and starting over under the terms of the Constitution itself, is worrisomely close to the magic number.
Even more worrying when you consider how inept state legislatures are.
OK, now that the anarchists, Libertarians, and Liberal Democrats have explained the Tea Party Movement, let me (a TPM supporter) give it a try.
First of all, I do not see anyone in the movement that is against a progressive tax code. The wealthy should be taxed at higher rates. When we talk about progressivism we are not talking about the tax code, but about the Fabian, progressive march toward socialism that we see. This goes to two basic approaches to achieve the Socialist utopia, the Marxist revolution, and the Progressive frog-in-a-pot model. So I’m not sure how much study the OP did on the TPM.
What motivates most of the TPM people I know is their fear that our deficits are unsustainable, their disgust with the waste and crony capitalism that has corrupted the free market, their revulsion that they have to continue sending money to DC so that corrupt government, corporations, and unions can basically steal it.
We are not against government but against government waste. A lot of us are conservatives because, I think, most conservatives believe that we are all crooked timber and as such can not be trusted to control large sums of other people’s money (OPM). The only way to reduce corruption is SMALL GOVERNMENT.
The OP seems to agree with a lot of what I have said, so it’s a shame he does not know more about the movement.
The way you describe it here, a flat tax would be “progressive”. It would have someone who makes $500,000 pay ten times the amount someone making $50,000 pays.
Are you okay with that? I know I am.
Everyone is against “waste”. The problem is, what some see as waste, others see as essential government spending.
I consider corporate ‘personhood’ the core issue facing us today.
Elitist entitlement document that it is, our Constitution says nothing about corporations other than, by implication, leaving their regulation to the states in which they are chartered. In 1889, SCOTUS read corporate personhood into the Constitution. It’s been all down hill from there.
I will not try here, I’ve done it many times elsewhere on these boards, to trace the pernicious advance of corporate personhoodery and its effects on govt policy thru the 20th century. Anyone genuinely interested should check this out. http://www.ratical.org/corporations/ToPRaP.html
Obama is a Harvard trained Constitutional lawyer. He knows that the idea of corporate personhood is pure bullshit and lies at the heart of our darkness. Wow! He even decried SCOTUS’s recent ruling which officially declared the US Treasury a corporate slush fund! But words are cheap.
If Obama ever gets off his fat tan ass and takes to his bully pulpit the one idea that what really ails us is corporate personhood and presents us with a SCOTUS nominee free of corporate taint, I’ll suck his dick on CNN.
I predict that my (almost) pure heterosexuality will remain in tact.
Notice I said net worth, not income. I propose that net worth over $10M be annually taxed progressively. No federal taxes on income but share what you’ve manged to steal in tax free “unearned income” to date.
So what are the solutions adhay. A call for folks to “take back their government” in some sort of amorphous way that isn’t exactly outlined? Becasue I will be honest those kind of platitudes, whcih is rife in your OP, are not soutions, they are problems, but until you can tell me a systematic, practical way to meet the problems you are disussing, it is pissing in the wind.
When I am sitting in business class and don’t have a Forbes, or Beck disk handy, I sometimes write down my thought on tax rates. My ideal tax would not be flat, but progressive with NO deductions. Say 0% for first 30K, 10% (marginal) up to 100K, 15% up to 200K, and topped out at 20%. (again everything marginal)
The key is to lose all the deductions since they are nothing more than payoffs to special interests. We can’t all get a deduction and they do a lot of harm to the economy.