Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Daily Kos :: FDR's Economic Bill of Rights could be our Democratic Platform every American needs to hear again

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/17/1285432/-FDR-s-Economic-Bill-of-Rights-could-be-our-Democratic-Platform-every-American-needs-to-hear-again?detail=email

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1 comment:

  1. There is no such thing as a "perfect President," and there never will be. They are all human beings and politicians. There will be a mix of good and bad.

    While rights are separate from entitlements, and require a sound legal methodology to be implemented, that doesn't necessary make enritlements a bad thing. Remember why we're entitled to Social Security and Medicare; we have paid a separate tax for each of them our entire lives. They are insurance policies designed to be collected from. Since they are a separate tax from the income tax, they bear no direct relationship to the federal deficit. If anything, they lessen the federal deficit, both through having their trust funds raided by asshats in Congress, and by keeping additional money flowing tbrough the economy while the extremely wealthy park their funds offshore, taking tbem out of economic circulation and depressing overal economic activity thereby. Entitlements are a good thing in that regard. A game of Monopoly ends when one person gets all the money. It has no choice but to end because no one else has the money to buy diddly squat. That is the lesson and the point of the game. You don't want a national economy to reach game-over status, because "game over" = "violent revolution begins" in real life. Nobody wins. So do not expect me to sympathize with an antagonistic attitude towards entitlements, or a pro-corporate-elite tax and trade policy that concentrates wealth in far too few hands. That is bad juju. That is where good nations go to die. I don't care to see that happen. We were far more prosperous throughout the general population in the 50's through the 70's, when we had a good blend of well-regulated capitalism, progressive tax and trade policies, solid infrastructure and R&D investments, and decent servicing of the national commons and civil services. The country has become a raggedy, indebted caricature of its former self under Reaganite trickledownonics, and life has become far more stressful for the average citizen. There is such a thing as taking "efficiency" to such extremes that your skeleton crew can't handle emergencies or sudden surges in demand, and we have been taken there, too. This shit has to stop, and we need to become a decent nation where people work to live while still doing a world-class job, instead of living to work while slapping everything together in haphazard fashion while chumping record-keeping and housekeeping, and basic maintenance. We have become a nation of sleep-deprived stress zombies who are fed incredible amounts of obfustication and lies by ommission by the bullshit corporate media that doesn't tell you anything the big dogs want under the rug. Entitlements. A word attacked by the greedy few and entirely misunderstood by the wool-pulled masses. I will not stand idly by with the status quo, and I will not join an argument against entitlements at the expense of human beings who mostly go to work every day and get paid such shit wages that they need government assistance just to maintain the most basic necessities of life. That is the government subsidizing corprations' paying below-poverty wages.

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