Why her “argument” isn’t as compelling as the state schtuppers want to imagine it is. Lots of good stuff in comments over there, too.
37 thoughts on “Elizabeth Warren”
Comments are closed.
Why her “argument” isn’t as compelling as the state schtuppers want to imagine it is. Lots of good stuff in comments over there, too.
Comments are closed.
There’s also a good piece over at PJM Tatler on Warren’s stupid statements:
Tone aside, there are two major problems with Warren’s factory parable. The first is the assumption that the factory owner contributed nothing to roads, education, police and fire forces, etc. In Warren’s world, the factory owner is a pure parasite. Warren conveniently forgets that the factory owner pays taxes (hugely more taxes than all those people whom she posits paying for roads, education, etc.); that the factory owner provides work for and pays the salary of those employees who then pay taxes; and that a successful factory owner makes a product that provides a benefit to people.
The second problem with Warren’s statement is actually a much more profound one than her “forgetting” that it’s the employers who provide the goods, services and salaries that make all those useful taxes possible. Warren’s statement turns the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and everything else the Founders stood for upside down.
In Warren’s world, a socialist world, the government owns everything. (And don’t you love it when well paid Harvard professors advocate socialism?) The Founders would have been horrified by Warren’s pronouncement. As their writings demonstrate, they believed that natural rights, the rights that ought to govern any righteous nation, mandate that ownership is vested in the individual. The government is merely a servant of the people. We, the people, pay its salary (taxes) so that it can provide services for us. That’s all.
You don’t have to go very far to understand that the Founders wouldn’t have agreed with Warren that the government allows people to own things, provided that they then make nice with the government. Our seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, spells out the master-servant relationship, and it is the people who are masters and the government the servant, not vice versa:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Warren belongs to the parasite class, not the producers.
The highway (MO hwy 18 running east-west from Clinton, MO to Adrian, MO) that ran past the road that took you to Power Mine (near Montrose, MO) was a beautiful road when that mine was in operation. Extremely well maintained.
These days? Not so much. Turns out that part of the deal that allowed Peabody to operate that mine was that Peabody paid all of the maintenance costs for that highway. The logic being that Peabody was going to be responsible for most of the traffic, including a lot of 18 wheeler traffic, so they should pay for the maintenance.
Also. There is a new Wal-Mart Super Center going up in Butler MO. I’m pretty sure that Wal-Mart is paying for all of the road construction, including the stop lights, taking place at the intersection which will become the entrance to their new store.
Big companies foot a larger portion of our infrastructure costs than most people realize. At least the infrastructure near their places of operation.
I’m glad that the left is now more openly authoritarian and socialistic. Helps to frame the argument more honestly.
Yet another example of either towing the democrat party line or being in favor of apocalypse. It isn’t that people don’t think there should be taxes but about how much the government should be allowed to take in taxation.
What you are not for raising taxes? Why you must be for letting everyone’s house burn down, tearing up all the roads, and closing all the schools. Either raise taxes or everyone will die a horrific death.
This is their core argument and to the unreasoning it sounds so right. The key phrase is, “the rest of us paid for” implying takers and givers and they decide who is which.
The irony being those in their ivory towers think they are the givers. It’s just warmed over Marx… the rich are rich because they are takers of the workers wealth.
This is THE message of the debate. Teach our young the truth and our future is safe from these Marxists.
What you are not for raising taxes? Why you must be for letting everyone’s house burn down, tearing up all the roads, and closing all the schools. Either raise taxes or everyone will die a horrific death.
It’s what Gerrib says most of the time.
Still I wonder why the federal government needs to collect taxes to pay for state functions, like fire, police, schools, and roadway infrastructure. It’s almost like there was an amendment covering this that people tend to forget.
Sucking both thumbs makes it hard for them to count that high.
…and she left out the part about RICH people ‘stealing’ to get rich. It’s just impossible to start a company or work for a company that gives you stocks that make you rich from the income of said company.
The worlds economy is a ZERO Sum Game!! And anyone who doesn’t see it is just ignorant!
Isn’t it ironic that those that do believe it’s zero sum work so hard to make it a negative sum game?
Yes, Limbaugh was all over this today. Warren appears to be honest about her beliefs and this may be her political undoing. I doubt that her pidgin Marxism will play well with voters even in Massachusetts.
A commenter at Ace of Spades provided the following quote:
There is nobody in this country who raised their children on their own. Raising children takes a village. You bought a home – good for you. You own your home because the title clerks, city records office, and highway department built roads to it. You used workers the state paid to educate. You are safe in your home because the state employees police and fire-fighters. You paid off your home and raised your children into terrific subjects. God Bless in a non-denominational, inoffensive way that doesn’t imply the state sanctions any religion – especially yours. But from the underlying social fabric you have taken and taken. Now you must pay for the next family who comes along: you owe us your children
I have no particular interest in the question of who pays for infrastructure items, in itself. Someone has to pay for it, and if it’s a private organisation then they will recover the cost of it one way or another. Have to recover it or go under.
IMHO the real problem of government (any government, whether it be town, mid-sized local such as counties in the UK or states in the USA, or national government) paying for anything is that the government pays far too much and builds the items in a grotesquely inefficient manner, and the reason for this is a complete lack of any incentive for keeping costs down. Incidentally, not all the costs are direct ones.
I’ll illustrate this with two UK examples. One is the recent news that a major IT project, producing a national health records database for the NHS (arguably a very good idea) has finally been abandoned before completion having consumed about twelve billion pounds (about $19,000,000,000, and the UK’s economy is smaller) and it was already five years behind schedule.
The other is a purely local one to me. My local town council decided about two years ago that a road junction about 300 yards away from my business premises needed to be resurfaced with fancy block paving – the need for which was extremely dubious in the first place. The total area of paving involved is about 250-300 square yards, which a half-decent drive-laying gang would complete in about a week at most – or ifn they didn’t while working for a private organisation, they would be sacked from the job. Unfortunately for me, the fact that it was a road junction meant the necessity for all sorts of junk (cones and barriers) to be deposited on the road for half a mile around, for public safety reasons – genuine ones.
The job took two months, and I lost about £12,000 in takings (about three weeks’ worth) – enough to torpedo my business, and I’m now unemployed and heavily in debt.
So the real point, IMHO, is the complete lack of any incentive to efficiency for publicly paid for works. It doesn’t really matter whether the “workers” involved work directly for government or not – this bunch of idiots weren’t, for example.
And that’s what needs to be done. Provide incentives for efficiency, and disincentives for inefficiency, for public sector employees. I am at a loss for any idea of how to achieve that.
Wodun, you make a good point regarding the fallacy of the excluded middle. But since Warren said “God bless, keep a big hunk of it”, I think those above who complaining about Marxism are the ones (also) falling for that fallacy.
The real decision is always the same: do we raise taxes a little or lower taxes a little. Eliminating taxes or being Marxist are never actually considered, despite the partisan rhetoric. I think Warren’s mistake was to simply provide a justification for any taxation, and the mistake being made by people on both the left and the right is that they are acting like she said something notable.
You bring up some good points, Fletcher. Believe me, it isn’t any better here. I’ve seen some road construction projects that appear more like lifetime employment than anything else with a 20 mile stretch of road (I-65 bypass around Birmingham, AL comes to mind) taking upwards of 20 years to finish.
One problem with many US government agencies is the “use it or lose it” budgeting. There is a negative incentive for conserving money – if they don’t spend everything in one year’s budget, the money gets returned. So, all sorts of spending happens in the last months of a fiscal year, much of it dubious. Instead, they should give the agency heads a bonus for going under budget, perhaps even a percentage of the underrun. There’s certainly no incentive now.
Second, for the US they need to change the civil service laws to make it easier to get rid of the deadwood. There’s a LOT of deadwood and once they’ve been on the job for a few years, it’s very difficult to get rid of them.
Third, government needs to scrap baseline budgeting and go to zero based budgeting. With baseline budgeting, for the next fiscal year, they take the current FY’s budget and add a percentage. Then, if for any reason they get less than the projected increase, it’s called a budget cut even though they got more money than the previous year. With zero based budgeting, their budget starts at zero and they have to justify getting any money at all. It would actually mean Congress would have to do its job each year and pass a budget.
Also, they need to streamline the procurement process and look at total cost of ownership (TCO) instead of just lowest cost for bids. The US government acquisition process is horribly convoluted and that drives up costs substancially, and going on the cheap for bids very often means higher costs over an extended period of time. For example, instead of hiring the lowest bidder for a road repair project and then have to redo the job in a few years, make the winning contractor provide a warranty for say 10 years. They’ll then have an incentive to use higher grade materials (such as adding ground-up rubber in the asphalt). It’s usually cheaper to do a good job once in 10 years than having to redo a crappy job multiple times over the same timeframe.
Larry, I think you are right. This is the kind of thing Congress should work on in a bipartisan manner.
“The real decision is always the same: do we raise taxes a little or lower taxes a little. Eliminating taxes or being Marxist are never actually considered, despite the partisan rhetoric. I think Warren’s mistake was to simply provide a justification for any taxation, and the mistake being made by people on both the left and the right is that they are acting like she said something notable.”
Raising taxes a little shouldn’t be considered socialism but when the people advocating the tax increases use the rhetoric of socialism, it is hard not to think of it that way.
If you go down some master check list of what it means to be socialist, Obama and the Democrats probably don’t meet every one of the criteria but without a doubt the two political philosophies share many commonalities. Maybe they need a term like neo-marxist or neo-socialist.
Wodun, talk to a Canadian member of the NDP. Or talk to a typical person from a small Western European nation. They’ll find Obama’s Democratic party far to the right of socialism, and they’ll assume that when you refer to socialism, you’re referring to something far to the right of Marxism. Socialism — one of the practical choices for Europe; Marxism, not so much.
No need for new terms: the Democrats are just one of the two right-wing parties which dominate American politics. 🙂
Maybe more seriously: ” when the people advocating the tax increases use the rhetoric of socialism”
Is there a way to advocate taxation (any taxation) that doesn’t sound like socialism at its core? You can focus less on “factory owners” and focus more on “We the people” but it is still pretty easy to portray any argument for the government taking even one thin dime of your wealth as an argument for socialism.
There is certainly a way to advocate a tax system as a way to pay for government without sounding like a socialist. One simply acknowledges that the taxee is giving up what is rightfully his (or hers). The socialist assumes that everyone’s money belongs to the government, and whatever the taxee is allowed to keep is a cost to the government.
The latter attitude is the origin of the term “tax expenditures,” first used by Ted Kennedy (bless him, 2 years and 29 days sober today). It is a criminal mentality, IMHO.
from the underlying social fabric you have taken and taken
This is the sleight of hand. I didn’t take a damned thing from anyone, but that’s the justification to take from me or anybody else. Very convenient.
This is why the government should have claim to nothing. They may have what they need to defend this country and nothing more.
The government has debt? Sell it’s assets to American citizens.
Wodun, talk to a Canadian member of the NDP. Or talk to a typical person from a small Western European nation.
So what? The party line tomorrow might be that Obama is pure liberal. For example, in very conservative countries such as Iran or the former USSR, politicians were often cast as “liberal” even though they weren’t remotely close. They were relatively liberal. Same goes for Obama.
The real decision is always the same: do we raise taxes a little or lower taxes a little.
If it were, then the answer would be obvious, lower taxes to zero. Government is far more than a taxation scheme. Instead, it is the extent of government power, its fiscal health, and determining what services this government should provide and not provide.
Agree with Karl, it’s not a matter of taxes, but the extent of government power. What Warren misses is that the business owner paid construction workers, employers, utility bills, and taxes all along the way. Those expenditures were agreements with those people, who claimed at the time it was sufficient for their services. If the business owner, after paying their due, ended up making a profit; then they took nothing from nobody.
What Warren wants is the ability to renegotiate the deal, because she didn’t make enough off the business person. She thinks its shameful that the businessman ran a company efficiently and made extra money. I guess in her world, the business owner must write in a royalty clause (sort of like George Lucas did for Return of the Jedi).
Here’s the real problem with Elizabeth Warren’s of the world. She wants to punish success. If you handle your money well and manage to save it, shame on you. If you spend it such that you live paycheck to paycheck (or worse); then you deserve government’s pity. Obama takes it a step further. If you save your money, and then decide to invest it in business; then shame on you for taking advantage of a tax law designed to encourage business growth. Obama wants to punish both the investor, and take money out of business investment. It’s a strategy that will hurt the economy even more.
It’s worse than that. Demagoguery for power. Lies and misinformation to get idiots to support more of the same.
Saying something this stupid should result in a credibility problem. It doesn’t except to a few like those here. The credibility issue is not just that of the person making these statements but the media not calling them on it.
It is a subtle sleight of hand, but notice that everybody got the fact that the business paid taxes yet that doesn’t stop the lie from being said.
Others have pointed out problems that go beyond that simple sleight of hand. All of which should discredit her and her fellow travelers… yet it doesn’t. This is a serious problem when voters lack critical reasoning skills.
…and lied about her pay…
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/64306.html
Leland, except for the first three words of the following quote, you’re right, and you said it very well: ” What Warren misses is that the business owner paid construction workers, employers, utility bills, and taxes all along the way. Those expenditures were agreements with those people, who claimed at the time it was sufficient for their services.”
I don’t see where Warren misses that.
You then said:
“What Warren wants is the ability to renegotiate the deal, because she didn’t make enough off the business person.”
I don’t see where she is saying that at all.
Or maybe I do: Do you mean she is in favor of raising taxes? During all the years that the business owner built his business, taxes went up and down, as the voters (including the business owner) saw fit. The business owner got to argue his case just like everyone else. But the business owner was never party to a deal that tied the voters’ hands on tax schemes. He just has to hope that democracy works well with capitalism, just as you and I hope it does too. So far, it has worked quite well!
But I’ll say this: it WAS dumb of Warren to emphasize everyone else’s tax contribution without acknowledging the factory owner’s contribution. There certainly are better ways to advocate for a progressive tax scheme.
I don’t see where Warren misses that.
Then you’re blind:
There certainly are better ways to advocate for a progressive tax scheme.
Yeah. She should study your contributions to ttm. That would do the trick.
By saying “the rest of us”, she isn’t denying the business owner’s contribution, although as I have said, I think she was foolish to not even mention it. The fact remains that the business owner’s contribution was miniscule. Leland is right: the business owner gave everything required of him, but that contribution was sufficient only because of a much larger collective effort to build & sustain a country.
She was saying something non-controversial and obvious, but partisans on both the left and the right want to pretend she said something notable. The left started the fuss, so shame on them, but the right’s reaction should have been a yawn, not cries of Marxism.
Excellent response Curt. I can do no better, as “rest of us” is a very clear statement.
And I noticed something else from your quoted section, Curt:
You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
I can’t think of a business I have worked for that didn’t hire private security guards. And I’m not talking about security monitoring like many home buyers hire, but actual hired guards on the premise specifically there to protect the business property. She lives in a fantasy world if she thinks that doesn’t happen.
She was saying something both stupid and illuminating. Stupid because while implying that the business owner didn’t contribute, she is clueless about the fact that some of her “rest of us” WOULDN’T EVEN BE THERE in the absence of the business. She’s stuck in a zero-sum universe. If she had mime skills she might at least be able to provide entertainment.
Illuminating because she includes an item with “marauding bands”. The bloody-hell that’s going on in her head is somewhat less mysterious as a result.
Bob-1 seems really rattled by the prospect that more people might look behind the “kumbaya” curtain and see the bludgeon-wielding authoritarian on the other side.
She was saying something non-controversial and obvious
Not only is this a false assertion (false assertions are not fact Bob, that’s one of the tricks of the left… it’s called the BIG LIE and it’s one of the things the left does have in common with a number of notable historical mass murdering leaders.) It is obviously an obvious one since almost everybody commenting on it on the web comes to the same conclusion. One you yourself come to. She was leaving out somebodies contribution to assert they weren’t paying their fair share.
miniscule vs. larger collective
Part of the BIG LIE. You said the business owner gave everything required of him Then why suggest they aren’t paying their fair share? He’s a greedy bastard taking advantage of his workers and customers or he’s a contributing member of society? Which is it?
In every large group the individuals general contribute a miniscule amount. If they didn’t, THAT would be an indication that something is not fair.
cries of Marxism
She is spouting pure Marxism and you’re swallowing it in total. Your defense of it is a silly as the concept of marxism itself. It’s the idea that just won’t die regardless of the truth. It is absolutely amazing that a person such as yourself who demonstrates sufficient mental capacity would continue to hold on to such nonsense.
She and those she goes with are Marxist. She and her allies are spouting the ideas of Marxism. I don’t like labels, but this one fits her well.
Why would an intelligent person accept Marxist nonsense? It’s the same today as when the manifesto was written. ENVY. Instead of looking at someone rich and saying, I’d like to do that myself. They look at the rich and say, I’d like to have that myself.
It’s wrong. It’s juvenile thinking. Frankly, we should be much more harsh in dealing with those that hold these thoughts. I’m against thought crimes, but I might look away if ENVY ever becomes a punishable offense.
What I really despise about this speech is the open-ended obligation. Because business uses infrastructure supplied by modern society (even if modern society totally screws up the infrastructure in the process or if the business in question doesn’t use much), there’s no limit to their bill. She gets to decide how big the “hunk” that business owes as a debt to the rest of society. It doesn’t matter how much the rich or the businesses pay because it’ll never be enough.
Bob-1 Says:
“But I’ll say this: it WAS dumb of Warren to emphasize everyone else’s tax contribution without acknowledging the factory owner’s contribution.”
Maybe she actually believes what she said?
“By saying “the rest of us”, she isn’t denying the business owner’s contribution”
Actually, I think that phrase, “the rest of us” really was intended to mean that the business didn’t pay for anything.
Bob-1, I’m going with wodun on this one. The 2008 election should have taught you the folly of ignoring what a politician actually says and how they say it.