Who Gets To Have Nice Things?

DAVID GREGORY: All right. We're gonna come back to the question of obstacles to the nomination, but let me get to policy, Governor Huntsman. This is, by all accounts, an age of austerity for this country. A jobs crisis. Also a spending crisis in Washington. I wonder what specifically you would do to say to Americans, "These are cuts I'm going to make in federal spending that cause pain, that will require sacrifice?"

From the MTP "debate" transcript.

By all accounts... Age Of Austerity... Jobs Crisis... Spending Crisis... Sacrifice.

Hmmm. You know, if you took all those themes and addressed them as regarding working and poor Americans you might really have something. They are not, of course, regarding working/poor Americans other than the SACRIFICE. Every one of the people this horseshit question was addressed to has a tax plan up that would cut the taxes on wealth and increase the taxes on work and cut programs designed to keep people out of abject poverty.

If you were to read the comments on the MTP Debate transcript you'd find a whole lot of them attacking Gregory for being a LIBERAL trying to stir up trouble and - by the way - shorting Ron Paul's time to be a Confederate.

You would think that from the time of St Ronnie the Raygun there'd be enough data laying around to make something like a coherent case for something in regard to tax policy and the state of the economy. Well - it happens there is. The really big problem is that it doesn't support Clinton era tax rates much less StRR or GWB. The case that gets made in regard to the overall economic health is that StRR screwed things up and pretty much everybody made things worse and Bill Clinton only managed to mildly stem the tide in some regards.

Working/poor Americans have been sacrificing every damn day from StRR on in one way or another. Some of them tried to avoid that sacrifice and used their houses as a credit card or profit center but most just kept working harder for less while watching their betters rake in more of the scraps that might have fallen off the banquet table.

Now you have - no shit - the kid of Geo Romney talking about being "unemployed" and having to worry "about getting a pink slip," as if he had a worry about falling into the lap of luxury instead of off the face of the freaking earth. This is the kind of crap that gets served up as a goddam question by the goddam liberal elite media by talking head that has about as much to worry about or goddam sacrifice as Willard Mitt Romney does.

Mittens seems to make about $15M per year for doing nothing for Bain Capital (numbers vary - mostly up) which sounds like a bit of money, but probably ought to get taken in the context of $43K/yr median income family of four which works out to be 349 of them. Yes you suckers, Mittens makes that much money being un-damned-employed. Taken another way, he virtually makes DAILY that median income.

How it could be made much clearer to the rubes that these guys want to give themselves and their pals a big break while cutting your throat is way the hell beyond me. I don't begrudge these bastards their wealth... but I'm not hot on the idea of being their human sacrifice.