The false question remains "Why did Trump win?"

Two examples from today.

Liz Peek of FOX reassured Steve Gruber this morning on his radio program in Michigan that Trump won in 2016 primarily because the voters were most concerned to ensure we had a Supreme Court seat filled by a Scalia clone.

And then Josh Brown assures his readers in the line up at Real Clear Markets that the most important reason was class warfare: a tax cut for the middle class and a big tax increase on rich speculators.

It's been five months since the election and we still can't agree about the political state of the country. Hint: libertarians don't agree about very much.

One could go on. Ann Coulter would tell you it was the promise of The Wall and an end to indiscriminate invasion by illegal aliens. Independent small business owners and self-employed people would tell you it was the promise of repeal of Obamacare. Veterans . . . veterans' affairs. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

These various opinions tell us more about the values of the individual coalitions Trump cobbled together to win, not why he won.

Meanwhile the narrow character of Trump's victory in key states, the result of former Democrat voters boycotting Hillary by the millions, goes underestimated by the winners . . . and the losers.

That's fairly typical, even for otherwise prudent presidents.

George Herbert Walker Bush thought victory in Kuwait made him golden, promptly raised taxes after we read his lips, and was shown the door.

The same will happen to Trump if he doesn't deliver on his program.

And because his program is a Duodetrigintapus, the question is really "How many of my twenty-eight legs can I get away with chopping off and still have enough left to strangle my opponent with in 2020"?

He's already cut off three. Repeal of Obamacare has failed. DACA has not been reversed (what, did they run out of pens in the White House?), and suddenly we have to burn $100 million worth of cruise missiles because someone used a politically incorrect weapon.

What's next, an assault weapon ban?

There's still plenty of time for Trump to prove that he isn't some suicidal sea monster.

But at the rate he's going he'll be a legless jellyfish by Christmas.

Arguably Obama's 2008 Election Caused All The Job Losses, And We Still Have Not Recovered

total nonfarm employees n.s.a. 1/07-2/14

Arguably the response of business to the election of Obama was outright fear, leading to record job losses. And just as arguably, Obama's class warfare rhetoric has justified those fears. The number one enemy of a communist after all, is a climber. You wouldn't know that of course because the socialist fellow travelers who've taught you and your kids since the 1960s conveniently left that out of the narrative. But that is a separate story.

The fact of the matter is, the so-called Great Recession had already been long in the tooth on election day 2008, and total nonfarm had declined just 2.7 million from its zenith in November 2007 at 139,443,000. But there is really nothing out of keeping for such a large decline given that total nonfarm usually falls off at the end of calendar years. A good example which raised no alarms at the time was in December 1998 when total nonfarm fell 2.7 million . . . in one month.

December 2008 was the worst month on record for t.n.f.

But more people lost their jobs in the first full month following the 2008 election than in any other month in the data series. For a country which supposedly saw Obama as a savior, the response of business was clearly otherwise: nearly 30 million Americans went on to make first time claims for unemployment in 2009 because they lost their jobs in his wake, 13.3 million more than in George Bush's best year 2006 when such claims came in just over 16 million. You can call business a bunch of spineless cowards who took the everyman for himself approach. But isn't that what the healthcare industry did when faced with ObamaCare? Play along to get along, or face the consequences. Few are the fighters for principle who sacrifice themselves for a cause. The only people we have who even make a pretence of doing that do it safely atop places like Berkshire Hathaway (taxes), Apple (global warming), Microsoft (birth control), the Oval Office and the well of the US Senate where no man can touch them.

total nonfarm employees, n.s.a., 2/07-2/14, monthly arrows

The data show that the bottom for total nonfarm did not drop out until December 2008. Nearly 3.7 million Americans lost their jobs in December 2008 alone, the most on record. November 2008 had been only a warning of what was coming. By the end of that month, in which the general election had occurred on November 4, just over a million total nonfarm employees lost their jobs. The dust settled at 135,656,000 on December 1st. Then as December unfolded, the bottom fell out with total nonfarm dropping to 131,965,000. And one year later, despite "jobs saved or created", the February 2009 stimulus, cash for clunkers, TARP and the GM, Chrysler and AIG bailouts, scores of big bank failures and trillions of dollars of cheap loans by the Federal Reserve to all and sundry banks and businesses here and abroad, total nonfarm fell another 4.2 million to 127,736,000.

And where are we today? On February 1, 2014, after 5 full years of Obama, total nonfarm is 136,183,000, barely 200,000 jobs ahead of where we were at this same point in 2007. While the trend has clearly been positive for total nonfarm, with a consistent pattern of higher, if muted, highs and lower lows alternating summers and winters as is typical of the data series, the profile of total nonfarm remains terribly weak.

usually work full time 2/07-2/14, n.s.a.

Consider that those who work usually full time today are 2.7 million fewer in number than at this same point in 2007, the record year for full time jobs and for total nonfarm jobs, despite adding 15 million to the population.

part time for economic reasons 2/07-2/14, s.a.

And while those who work usually part time are up nearly 2.4 million, those working part time for economic reasons remain up almost 3 million, seasonally adjusted, February 2007 to February 2014.

For the last four full years monthly job growth has averaged barely 167,000 new jobs per month. Compare that to a Clinton or Reagan when job growth clipped along at an average of 235,000-250,000 per month for years.

I predict jobs will come back when Obama goes away, unless of course Hillary Clinton becomes president. Right now I can't think of a better candidate to complete the job of eradicating the middle class. She'll burn through them like she does through jet fuel and vodka.

Rush Limbaugh Adopts The Class Warfare Of Obama/The Wall Street Journal

Today, here:

The middle class still is, in an aggregate sense, where all the money in the country is. That's where all the money is in the economy. The rich do not hold all the money.

This is the voice of a very rich man who is under attack by a leftist president and a leftist consensus which says that the rich do not pay their fair share, the voice of a man who is not reasoning as a conservative but emoting as a rich man. If he reasoned as a conservative, if The Wall Street Journal reasoned as conservatives, we would be seeing something other than the suggestion that the leftists go victimize the middle class. Like the bank robber, this thinking, if it can be called thinking at all, maintains that you should tax the middle class because that's where the money is.

As such what Rush says is not conservative, but purely reactionary in the worst sense of the term: it responds to an historical development in which it finds itself the victim and seeks escape instead of statesmanship. This is what you get from a Rush Limbaugh, who abhors learning. You wouldn't get that from a William F. Buckley, Jr.

It goes without saying that it is absurd to suggest that all the money is in the middle, but apparently we must insist that it is not so.

The middle quintile of households made a median income of almost $50,000 in 2011. Generously speaking, this approximates to every single income in the country in 2011 making between $35,000 and $65,000 annually, 35 million workers, accounting for $1.7 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation, just 27% of the total pie. The bottom end of the richest quintile, on the other hand, begins somewhere just north of $100,000 annually, 10 million workers, accounting for $2.1 trillion out of $6.2 trillion in net compensation in 2011, significantly more at almost 34% of the total pie.

But this is no way for a conservative to look at it.

The founders of the country envisioned equality of contribution from taxation, which the original constitution required to be direct, apportioned according to population. This is why taxation was always very low, because the poor could not afford it. This is also why we have a census in the constitution, not so that we may learn how many Americans are of Italian descent, but simply how many there are, for tax purposes. If it is pleaded that the constitution has been changed to permit indirect taxation, it is still more originally American to insist on equality of treatment under the tax code. The real problem with America is that originalist principles were thrown under the bus in the early 20th century by progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, and enshrined in constitutional amendments under people like Woodrow Wilson.

Equality of treatment under the law is the principle conservatives should be trumpeting. But you will listen for that in vain from Rush Limbaugh.

The progressives like Wilson, a Presbyterian whose grandiose ideas bordered on the fanatical and are reminiscent of no one so much as George W. Bush, misused Christianity by insisting that "to whom much is given, much is required" in arguing for progressive taxation, and forgot that "no one can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he has". The actual price of Christian discipleship was everything you had, whether you were rich or poor. But in the secularized, immanentized bastard version of this under progressivism, the price became distorted so that the richer you were the more you owed, the poorer the less. It is little wonder that for that the rich demanded more, and eventually got it, in special rules in the tax code designed especially for them, which since that time have evolved into the elaborate distortions and complexities of the tax code we face with trepidation and consternation today.

In a very real sense when it comes to the tax code, The American Century has been the most un-American one of all, and the crying need of the time is to reverse it and refound the country anew on the original American principle of equality of treatment.

Rush Limbaugh Repeats The Rich Man's Lies: Middle Class Has "Bulk Of The Money"

Here:

Where this is all going to end up, I'm pretty sure -- we'll see if I'm right; won't be too long, maximum next year sometime, maybe two years -- where this is all going to end up is that the middle class is going to get soaked.  The middle class is going to see their taxes go up, and the reason is, that's where the bulk of the money is. 

You could confiscate all the money the middle class has and run the government for quite a while.  Much longer than if you confiscate all the money the rich have.  There's a reason why the rich are called the top 2%.  There aren't very many of them, folks.  They're only the top two, the top 1%.  And the idea that 98% of the country is not going to have a tax increase under this president is absurd.  Everybody is going to see a tax increase under this president, because his objective is to shrink the private sector and expand the government so that the government becomes the primary source of prosperity and benefits for the vast majority of people.

In 2011, the poorest Americans, those making between $0 and $20K, had total net compensation of $501 billion in the aggregate. The so-called middle class, those making between $20K and $75K per year where net compensation aggregates every $5K up the income ladder constitute piles of cash in excess of $200 billion each, had total compensation of $2.9 trillion in 2011.

The income tranches of the middle are what greedy liberal tax-farmers focus on, as do disingenous rich people, because they stick out like a sore thumb, representing as they do the largest individual tranches for ordinary income purposes and constituting an unbroken line of 11 of them just begging to be ogled. See them here for yourself. You will not find any tranches among the so-called rich in excess of $200 billion. But they make a lot of money nevertheless.

Add it all up and everybody making beyond $75K per year in 2011, which includes the upper middle class, if you piled all their net compensation for Social Security purposes together, would total another $2.8 trillion, just shy of the middle's $2.9 trillion.

If you think this proves Rush's point, you would be wrong. Such net compensation isn't all there is to it, not by a long shot. It's much, much more complicated, and obscure, than that. And that's the way rich people like it. If you can't see their income you can't know how rich they are and they can thus escape becoming a target. That's why so many rich people, and their advocates like Bruce Bartlett who want to tax the middle class and deflect taxes from themselves, insist so strongly that they are middle class just like you.

While net compensation totaled about $6.2 trillion in 2011, personal income was more than twice that. The Bureau of Economic analysis, here, reports that personal income was $12.95 trillion in 2011.

People like Jeffrey Immelt, Jamie Dimon, Mitt Romney, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates receive tons of income from stocks, bonds, capital gains, dividends, rents, royalties, et cetera et cetera et cetera, adding at least another $6.75 trillion to that $6.2 trillion in net compensation for Social Security purposes in 2011.

To be sure, lots of people who aren't the very rich receive such income, too, but there is no way on God's green earth that there are enough of them in the so-called middle receiving it to say that the bulk of the money is in the middle. The middle class would like to be receiving the bulk of its income as unearned income like the investor class does, but it doesn't for the most part. It works for its money (unless you're a government employee).

No matter how much the boob with the microphone and the subscription to The Wall Street Journal tells you otherwise, the bulk of the money is not in the middle, most people know it, and that's why Obama is succeeding with his class warfare rhetoric. He has picked his targets, personalized them, polarized them and frozen them, and all the rich can do, because there aren't enough of them, is surrender (Warren Buffett), create diversions (the home mortgage interest deduction flap) or tell lies (The Wall Street Journal).

It really is quite pathetic that we do this to rich people in America and pat ourselves on the back for it. It's actually disgraceful in a country which claims to believe in equal treatment under the law that a wealthier earner is discriminated against because we say he must pay taxes at a higher percentage rate on his ordinary income than a poorer earner must pay. And we feel guilty enough about it that we then turn around and create exceptions to these unjust tax rules when taxing income which is not ordinary. Is it any wonder then that more than half of the personal income in the country has fled for refuge to be classified as other than ordinary? The founders thought a tax was equal only if everyone in the country paid the same amount. This consensus necessarily kept federal taxation low and infrequent because the great masses of people could not afford to pay very much.

The least we could do in homage to that old idea of America would be to tax everyone's income in the country in similar fashion, at one low rate, making no distinctions between the income from a job and the income from an investment. Of course, that would mean a pretty low rate compared to what's exacted today, and would necessitate some pretty drastic cuts to spending. A 10% tax on the personal income of the country of $13 trillion in 2011 would have yielded only $1.3 trillion in revenues, far short of the $3.8 trillion or so we spent.

And that, as we on the right keep saying, is where the real problem lies. Unless we slay the spending monster, there will never be taxation equality in America.

Joel Kotkin Urges Republicans To Join The Class War

"It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?"

Egging on the Republicans to embrace Marxist class categories and methods and pretending that's not an appeal to ideology, Joel Kotkin here thinks Republicans could win again if only they gave stuff to the yeoman class and took away stuff from the clerisy. You know, like his hero Pres. Abraham Lincoln did when he signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave away 160 acres out west to anyone who would improve the land, and when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which took away the property of slaveholders without compensation. Like all good dictators, Lincoln made notions of property and its value even more arbitrary than they had been before.

It is little appreciated how the Homestead Act basically destroyed the flexibility of the federal revenue system, causing the federal government to rely increasingly on tariffs and also excises which up until The War Between The States had fluctuated up and down as revenues from federal land sales did the same.

So Anderson and Martin, here, who emphasize the substitutability of tariff and land sales revenues:


"Coinciding with the rapid increase in land grants to homesteaders, railroads, and the states after 1862, the federal revenue derived from land sales fell rapidly as a proportion of total receipts. Further, the general decline in tariff rates that had occurred until the Civil War was reversed, and tariff rates began to rise rapidly. Import duty rates, which had reached their lowest level in the century in 1857, increased sharply during the Civil War and remained high for the remainder of the century (Baack and Ray 1983, p. 73). Tariffs continued to be the single most important source of federal revenue after the war ended."

So in an important sense, Lincoln and the Republicans are to blame not just for the development of Our Enemy, The State, they are also to blame for setting the untenable conditions to fund it as it henceforth and inevitably grew large. In the end, the price of Union and black emancipation would be universal bondage to Leviathan with the coming of the Income Tax in 1913.

Kotkin completely misses the significance of what's going on on the right. Conservatives in America are rediscovering the meaning of the constitution, and how people like Lincoln ruined it. Mitt Romney with his incessant talk of American supremacy in the world simply reminded them too much of him.

Kotkin's correct about one thing, though, that the socialism of Obama is misunderstood. But Kotkin doesn't call it the fascism that it is, because Kotkin himself actually advocates it himself, only that it's the good kind which helps grow the middle class.

From the comments section, Kotkin says as much:

"i am an old-style democrat who favors using government when necessary to create an ever-larger property owning class. neither party today has this as its main focus. instead both are neo-feudalist as I will explain in the coming months."

Old style democrat? You know, the FDR kind, which admired and imitated the strong men of Europe, who eventually plunged the world into a war far bloodier than, but no less reminiscent of, Lincoln's.

Conservatives want to get rid of the imperial presidency, not just get one friendly to its interests.

Joel Kotkin's "New Geography" isn't old enough.

CA Governor Jerry Brown Invokes Bible To Justify Higher Taxes On Rich

Quoted here:

To further promote Prop 30 and appeal to religious voters, Brown cited the bible. "Luke 12:48 says: 'For those of whom much has been given, much is required.' Those at the high end can brace themselves for seven years and lend school kids a helping hand. I appeal to their sense of loyalty and fairness," he told the FT.

Christian theology is convenient to liberals only when it plays the grandmother of Bolshevism. At that point suddenly the wall separating church and state disappears.

The problem for such interpretation is that it is completely one-sided and ahistorical. Luke's Gospel goes on to state that whether much or little is given to this one or that one, it is all required from each regardless:

"So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." -- Luke 14:33

The liberals never tell the poor they want all of what little the poor have, too. That would be fine, perhaps, if the world were really coming to an end and the kingdom of God were about to appear, as Jesus once thought. It's the kind of thinking, injected into temporal affairs, which goes a long way to explain the alarums of liberalism, the latest of which has been that global warming will be the end of us all.

Yeah right.

If we could just agree that Christianity taught that the cost of discipleship is the same outrageous demand on everybody, we could dispense with the class warfare once and for all, and with such unseemly appeals to theocratic reasoning.

Rush Limbaugh Indicts George Bush As A Panderer

I can't believe he left in the transcript, but here it is:

"But tax policy leading up to Obama... You know, politicians have pandered to the middle class forever, and there's a whole boatload of Americans not paying income tax right now. I think the numbers, depending who you talk to, is 47% or 49%. The top 5% number you're talking about, it's 59% of all tax revenue is paid by the top 5%."

Nice of you to pit your working class listeners against the middle, Rush.

Now what was that class warfare Obama engages in that you were complaining about?

Leave It To Forbes To Offer The SOCIALIST Thought Of The Day

There's nothing like the smell of class warfare in the morning.

Romney Views Republican Base As Angry Mob With A Beef Against Obama

Except he's not going there.

Remarks quoted here:

“It’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments,” he told reporters. “We’ve seen throughout the campaign that if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusatory and attacking President Obama, that you’re going to jump up in the polls. You know, I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support.”

But you already knew that:

O’Reilly: Is he a socialist?
Romney: You know, I prefer to use the term that he’s just over his head.
O’Reilly: Yeah, but you got to look at his economic plan. An economic plan that’s top down, federal leadership, getting us out of the recession--- he spent trillions of dollars on that. And people say, Listen, the guy’s a socialist — it’s class warfare that’s what he’s gonna wage against you if you get the nomination: You’re a rich guy, you’re out of touch. Is he a socialist?
Romney: Uh, you know, I consider him a big-government liberal Democrat. I think as you look at his policies, you conclude that he thinks Europe got it right and we got it wrong. I think Europe got it wrong. I think Europe is not working in Europe. And I’ll battle him on that day in and day out. But I’m probably not going to be calling him names so much as calling him a failure.


Like John McCain before him, who refused to criticize Obama or even question his political beliefs, Romney is out of step with the American people, the majority of whom believe "socialist" is a fitting moniker for President Obama:

The Rich Should Answer Obama's Class Warfare With A Prosperous Middle Class

As recognized long ago by Aristotle:

Now a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view.

Tyranny, the worst excess imaginable, [is] a government the most contrary possible to a free state.

Tyranny arises from a headstrong democracy or an oligarchy, but very seldom when the members of the community are nearly on an equality with each other. When there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end.

A tyrant is chosen out of the meanest populace; an enemy to the better sort, that the common people may not be oppressed by [the better sort].

Warren Buffett's 2010 Tax Bill Was $6.9 Million. Was That 'At Least As Much As His Secretary's'?

The details of Warren Buffett's taxes for 2010 were only partially revealed last August and became the subject of critical examination, as for example here:

Buffett also said his federal income tax bill came to $6,923,494, or 17.4% of his taxable income -- two points he revealed in a New York Times op-ed in August urging Congress to tax the wealthy more. ... [But t]he current tax system already satisfies the Buffett Rule. Americans on average pay 16% of their total income in federal income and payroll taxes, while millionaires pay an average of 20.1%, according to the Tax Policy Center.

The Tax Policy Center is a generally more liberal think tank than The Tax Foundation.

The president's statement in last night's State of the Union deliberately suggests Buffett's secretary paid more in taxes than Buffett did when you know that that is completely disingenuous as well as inconceivable:

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

Common nonsense.

Homeownership Under Obama Hits a New All-Time Low of 59.2 Percent

Even a broken clock is right twice a day:

"This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement."

-- President Obama, quoted here, Dec. 6, 2011

The fact is the moment has already broken against the middle class.

Nobody is fighting to get into the middle class. The middle class is fighting to stay middle class, and is losing.

The president, who only now protests that he would rescue the middle class as the election season heats up, has actually presided over its demise, turning the middle class into the working class renters of yesteryear, and worse, according to this story from August 5, 2011 at CNN Money (link):

Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters.

Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter -- its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.

Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.

In fact, once they factored in delinquent mortgage borrowers (the ones who are likely to lose their homes at some point), Morgan Stanley calculated that the home ownership rate is more like 59.2%.

That's the lowest level since the Census Bureau started keeping quarterly records back in 1965 (before that, it recorded home ownership rates once a decade). The Census Bureau's statistics, however, do not factor in mortgage delinquencies.


When it comes to savings, the president speaks of modest savings and secure retirement as his goals for us, when the actual picture is a grim present and a worse future.

A survey using 2009 data and making the rounds in May 2011 said nearly half of Americans couldn't come up with $2,000 for an emergency within 30 days (link).

And just two days ago a story (link) reported on a different survey which suggests that over half of the 151 million American workers have less than $25,000 saved while over half of the already retired are in the same boat:

More than half of all workers, 56%, say they have less than $25,000 in savings, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. ...

More than half of retirees, 54%, report they have less than $25,000 saved. That's up dramatically from 2006, when 42% said they had less than that.


The most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (link) confirms that there has been a steady decline in the personal savings rate under Obama from 5.3 percent in 2010 to an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, a nearly 30 percent decline from what was already an inadequate level.

Some unemployed and now homeless families in hardest hit states like Florida are reduced to living in their cars, trucks and vans because shelters are already full. Their plight was the subject of a recent story (link) on 60 Minutes.

The American middle class is under siege on every front, from jobs, to homeownership, to family formation, to savings, to retirement. All this has unfolded under Obama's watch, who vacations, golfs, parties, fund-raises and speechifies, railing against business and the rich at every opportunity. But it is the middle class which is disappearing as he speaks, and he's done nothing to stop it.

The true meaning of class warfare.

Of Course It's Class Warfare!

And of course he's an ideologue, and of course Obamacare is a Bolshevik plot.

And of course whatever he says is not something, is that, and of course whatever he says something is, is not that.

Here's the video.

YOU LIE!

Our Enemy, David Stockman, Wants Higher Taxes on the Middle Class

We already know David Stockman wants to turn home owners into renters.

Now his first words out of the box for The New York Times, here, call for raising taxes on the middle class, as if the middle class had any money:

IT is obvious that the nation’s desperate fiscal condition requires higher taxes on the middle class, not just the richest 2 percent.

Mr. Stockman affects displeasure with class warfare in others while himself engaging in it, on behalf of the speculators who enriched themselves for years at the expense of Americans' primary store of wealth: their homes.

But our world is not shaped by the top 2 percent of earners, and everyone else below them "the middle class." This sort of nonsense plays as well at a White House prayer breakfast as it does at the country club, where everyone is middle class for purposes of public discussion, which is why The Times is happy to put up a former (was he ever one?) conservative to say what it doesn't have the courage to say openly.

Having screwed us out of our housing wealth, they're next target is our declining American paycheck.

And unless the Fed wants to ruin the value of the dollar . . . Mr. Stockman tellingly opines later in the piece, revealing how miserable is his grasp of the utter failure of The Federal Reserve since its inception. What do you mean, "unless?" The 1913 dollar is today worth about 4 cents. I'm sure Americans will be happy to surrender 100 percent of their paychecks to the government when the dollar goes to zero.

No, the middle income quintile in America is just 35 million tax returns strong, with a paltry $1.7 trillion in adjusted gross income. To eliminate our annual budget deficits under the big spending liberals like Obama, Pelosi and Reid, Mr. Stockman would have to confiscate 100 percent of this middle class money. Comrade David Stalin might as well starve us all to death, or line us up against the wall and shoot us.

Is there enough money below them?

Where the two lowest income quintiles dwell there are 70 million tax returns with even less money: $1.1 trillion in AGI.

At the top in America are 35 million tax returns with $5.6 trillion in AGI resting on these 105 million with $2.8 trillion in AGI. The 105 million are getting crushed.

The very top 14 million carry the most weight, with $3.8 trillion in AGI.

Even if we imagined raising taxes on the middle class meant we increased taxes on the 21 million tax returns in the upper middle and lower upper class, the pile of money available there for Mr. Stockman's extraction efforts barely beats that available in the real middle class at $1.8 trillion in AGI.

The big money is concentrated at the top, for a multitude of reasons, despite the on-going lies from The Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and now David Stockman. That's why President Obama's rhetoric about increasing taxes on the wealthy plays so well with the American people. It's the secret of his success.

By overwhelming numbers Americans support increasing taxes on "the rich." Despite all the success of the Tea Party in the US House, the American people obviously still haven't made the connection between the president and the Democrats and the massive revenue shortfalls. The shortfalls exist not because taxes aren't high enough. They exist because of massive new overspending.

That Mr. Stockman attempts to exploit the failed connection, perceiving that an opening yet remains, to confuse, obfuscate and lie, tells you all you need to know about him. Like the rest of our elites, he hates the Tea Party.

Right back atcha, David.

  

"The Sons of Liberty and Nullification of State Power"

The nullification of the power of the British state during the American "Revolution" actually prevented a revolution as far as the founders were concerned. The only thing revolutionary going on was Britain's attempt to deny the colonies their chartered rights as Englishmen.

(Click here for the source)

In 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act. This act was applicable to Britain's North American colonies. The act called for a one cent tax on all newspapers, wills, codicils, manifests, contracts, paper, glass, lead and paint. The act was part of a larger plan of the British government to tighten its hold on its American colonies after the Seven Years War with France, which ended in 1763. The object of this essay is to give a history lesson. This lesson has been lost, but provides an excellent example of what an oppressed and determined people can do to resist tyrannical government power and actions.

What did the colonists do? They did two very important things. They formed into secret organizations like the Sons of Liberty, and they forcibly resisted and nullified the Stamp Act. Yes, I said "nullify". This word makes statists the world over gasp with trepidation. Through the actions of the Sons of Liberty, protests, mass meetings, inflammatory news articles, and sometimes violence were employed to thoroughly disable and nullify the act. Many conspiracy theorists will also gasp and fret that the birth of the American Revolution was started by a secret society. Yes, the Sons eventually came out publicly, but even today we do not know their full membership. Let's examine some of their tactics.

Secret Meetings

In Boston, Newport, New York, New Haven, Ct, Savannah, Ga, Philadelphia and Charleston men calling themselves "Sons of Liberty" (after the name given to the colonists by Colonel Issac Barre in the British Parliament) organized themselves to resist the hated Stamp Act. Many of these men came from the upper classes, but a large section of them came from the colonial middle and lower classes. In these meetings they vowed to oppose the Stamp Act and prevent it from being enforced in America, effectively nullifying it. Stamp collectors were threatened, beaten, tarred and feathered, harrassed, and in some cases had their property destroyed. Many were made to sign pledges to refuse to collect the tax, and were threatened to be labeled "enemies to their country" if they didn't reject their new positions. Many Marxist historians, while praising the resistance of the Sons of Liberty, condemn them as rich white men who only cared about their own liberty. Of course in any mass movement there will be people who are myopic and concerned only with their own interests. To broadly paint the leaders of these secret societies as selfish only furthers the Marxist myth of class warfare. The fact is, no revolution can survive without leadership. This leadership generally comes from the upper and middle classes, and all revolutions up to our day have proven this. What revolutionary leaders cannot do is continue any revolution without the mass support of the populace. Let's examine this further.

Support of the Masses

When one truly examines the American Revolution it is apparent that it was a mass movement of the colonial population. Murray Rothbard, in his four volume history of the American colonies, Conceived in Liberty, details this in full. Men in the Sons of Liberty, Masonic Lodges, and colonial churches lead the charge, but it was the people who made the Revolution possible. From 1765 through 1776 the American people were subjected to increasing tyranny from the British establishment in America. Higher taxes, impressment of sailors, nepotism in the colonial governments, dual officeholding, enforcement of mercantilist laws, like the Navigation Acts, suspension of several legislatures, particularly New York and Massachusetts, and the keeping of a standing military in the midst of the civilian population all contributed to the restiveness of the colonial population. The Boston Tea Party, the burning of the British warship Gaspee in Rhode Island, tarring and feathering of royal officials, threats and protests against Stamp agents, are just a few examples of the actions of the people. The people were lead by men like Samuel Adams, Charles Thomson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Warren, John Adams, most of whom were members of secret societies like the Masons and Sons of Liberty. These men lead the populace in nullifying the power of the British government in America.

The Nullification of British Power

Throughout the period of the American Revolution, royal governors and officials routinely complained about the violence of the populace and how their authority was threatened by the revolutionaries. They recognized that their power was slowly evaporating. They saw laws like the Stamp Act repealed due to pressure and threats, the Townshend duties resisted by nonimportation agreements, mass meetings in defiance of law, and confrontations with soliders, like the Boston Massacre, and colonial assemblies asserting their power. This nullification movement was lead by secret societies like the Sons of Liberty, behind closed doors. Masonic lodges met and developed plans and agreements for their members to utilize for resistance. Leaders met in taverns and coffeehouses to discuss resistance measures and plot, yes plot, future actions. These combinations effectively nullified and eviscerated British power. We could learn from their examples. Americans should use non violent means to resist the following:

1) Any attempt to submerge the USA into a North American Union with Canada and Mexico

2) A war with Iran

3) Increased power for the UN or WTO

4) Continued abuse of eminent domain

5) Fascistic measures destroying American liberties

6) Any gun control legislation

7) Any attempt to increase the power of the federal government

8)Any attempt to institute a draft or civilian conscription

9) Any law or act that further restricts liberty

10)Any attempt by the federal government to suppress a secession movement within the USA

11) Further evisceration of our constitutional rights and liberties (particularly the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments). The Bush Administration's attack on attorney-client privilege is particularly appalling.

I am in no way advocating any violence. I do not believe that we are at that stage. Non violent protest and action should always be a first step.

The New Stasi

The Stasi was the feared and ruthless secret police of the German Democratic Republic, or more appropriately, Communist East Germany. In America today the neocon rightwing and leftist groups are building a new despotism in our nation of liberty. In the growing power of the Federal government are the building blocks of a new Stasi, so to speak. The FBI, DIA, ATF, and DOJ are amassing great power through laws like the PATRIOT Act, The Real ID Act, and the definition of some American prisoners as "enemy combatants". People may laugh, joke or wave my comments aside as paranoia, but the building of this massive power structure is real. A new "Sons of Liberty" type movement is needed.

Liberty and freedom are not free. Both are typically destroyed by the overpowering hand of the state. It doesn't matter if you are rightwing, leftwing or libertarian. Our freedoms are ours to have, not government's to grant.

POSTED BY DL AT 7:58 AM

FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2008