How the "Working Man's Party" Will Betray the American Dream!

In the 60's LBJ kicked off "The Great Society" program. On the heels of badly needed Civil Rights legislation, resisted, often violently by his own party, Johnson offered up what was intended to be the second great equalizer - the so-called "War on Poverty".

They meant well. They really did, but socialism's centrally planned approach has never been a very successful at anything. Central planning cost tens of thousands of American lives in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the War on Poverty was centrally planned too and like Vietnam, it proved to be a miserable quagmire of a failure.

If you were ever on welfare during its heyday in the 70's you will remember how hard it was to get off welfare. If you took any job whatever, your benefits disappeared and you were left worse off than before. How many poor families with kids will take such a risk simply to achieve self-reliance. So, the upshot of the War was to create a permanent poor class, dependent on government largesse, who learned to work the system as though it were a job in order to keep their benefits going. I once did vocational counseling with a kid from a poor background, the victim of abuse and neglect. I asked him what he wanted to do with his life when he grew up. He told me, quite unabashedly, "When I'm 18 I'll get my welfare and the women will take care of me."

What the Great Society did was create a culture that built a wall between the poor and "all the rest of us". It built a virtual ceiling between the poor and the middle class. Then came welfare reform. As a result of efforts to create transitional programs that made the journey to self-reliance easier and made permanent reliance on welfare almost impossible, the classes in this country changed. The ceiling came down and people began moving into the middle class that had never been there before. Yes, the wealthy class grew larger during this time, but the middle class stayed virtually the same and the poor got fewer. That means people as a whole were becoming wealthier. Isn't that a good thing?

Apparently not. They want to tinker with it again.

Now, we have a presidential candidate who says, I want to give something to the middle class. Well, we need to think about that. Every time those guys want to give us something, something bad seems to happen. So, let's think this through.

Obama is only going to increase tax people over $250,000 he says. Hey, I don't make 250K - so why should I care. Let's look at who is going to get clobbered with higher taxes.

THE GREEDY RICH? Nope. Those guys are sitting on piles of money that's already been taxed. They could live for decades and decades on what they already have without paying another dime in taxes by simply spending what they have. Well, we'll get it when they die you say. Nope. The super wealthy have teams of lawyers and they've been dodging the death tax for ages. A good share of them will create foundations in their names and leave it to those - a lot of them don't care much for their lazy kids anyway. THE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT TAX MONEY THAT'S ALREADY BEEN MADE AND TUCKED AWAY. They may get some of the interest, but not enough to matter.

THE MIDDLE CLASS? Not directly, but higher taxes on business does not mean that business is going to take less profits given the risks they take. Business is merely going to increase the prices of things we pay for. Inflation like the late 70's will likely be the result and money to compensate for the increased tax burden on profits will trickle up from the lower and middle classes who buy goods and services. The middle class is still going to pay the burden of taxes one way or another. If they don't, business will slow down drastically and once the working rich have been impoverished and can't pay anymore, somebody is going to have to.

THE POOR? They don't pay taxes, so a tax cut is meaningless to the poor. Their cost of living will rise to pay the tax bills for the grocery stories, gas stations, and department stores. The government is going to need to give them a bigger check to get by on. More and more welfare has been shown to seal the poor into the poverty level. It doesn't move them toward the middle class. It traps them and kills their spirit. Dispirited folks are lots easier to control

THE ENTREPENEURIAL WORKING RICH? You betcha. These are the guys that are powering our economy. They are making money. Now money made is money taxed. These guys aren't sitting on piles of gold, they're pumping piles of gold through the system, creating jobs, powering the economy. The economy is about activity, not about accumulating piles of money. The government runs by siphoning off some of that flow of gold. If they get greedy and take too much, the flow will stop because it's not worth the effort if all you get back is a trickle from your hard work. If activity stops, the piles of gold come to rest and sit where they are and people who don't own the piles don't have money coming to them anymore. People get laid off, business cuts back to whatever level most effectively balances profits and the tax burden instead of doing as much business as they can. There's no longer any point to working full out to grow your business if the tax guy is the only one that will reap the benefits.

The large tax burden on the $250,000 to million dollar earners will effectively discourage middle class folks seeking to expand businesses and create wealth from doing so. If, when you step over the imaginary line between middle class and wealthy, you take such a tax hit that it's not worth it, you are creating the same ceiling for the middle class that you did for the lower class with the Great Society debacle.

You see, if the Democrat Party can figure out how to make the middle AND the lower class dependent on government largesse, then they figure their political power is secure. What better way to do that than to virtually wipe out the entrepeneurial rich folks, the ones who remember what it was like to work their way up from nothing. These guys vote conservative and you need to marginalize them. To do that you tax them into oblivion without harming your wealthy super-rich supporters like George Soros and his ilk. Much better for the central planners to create an elite ruling class and a homogeneous "masses" content with just enough bread and circuses to keep them from causing the fat cats any trouble.

The plan is brilliant and obvious and I fear that maybe we ARE too stupid to understand it. If we let these clowns get away with turning America into Amerika: with talking us into selling our birthright for a bowl of soup; with turning us against ourselves to consolidate their power - then we deserve what we get.

The American Dream is not a house and car and pretty good food. The American Dream is that every individual is free to achieve whatever he or she can achieve. It is not this dismal pictuer of everybody the same, everybody serving the government's needs, really smart people telling us what jobs we should take, how much money is fair for us to make, what we can say and do and believe. The Democrats have sung their little "We are the party of the working man" song over and over and over. The media have provided the musical accompaniement. The Country Club Republicans aren't much better. They keep growing government every bit as fast as the Dems. It's a power struggle now between two evils and we're being forced to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Yes, we got Sarah Palin - a bone thrown to us by McCain because he realized he had no conservative support and another Country Club Republican couldn't help him on the ticket. The truth is most conservatives are voting for McCain/Palin in hopes that he'll either croak or that she'll kick his butt and make him do what's right. Either way we are going to have to fight like the furies if we're going to keep our liberties in the coming years.

Please, for God's sake, read your history books. History is repeating itself and we are marching lock step toward the very thing our ancestors fled Europe and the Old World to escape.

Stand up and vote people. It may be your last chance! Buy us some time and maybe another Ronald Reagan will rise up and provide the leadership we need to save our own fuzzy butts!