"Why Democrats Scare Me to Death"
Drama queen hysterics are hardly necessary. If those of us who proudly call ourselves Democrats scare you to death, you should put on a fedora and go live in Switzerland.
VARNEY: If this kind of help goes through, then a poor and moderate income people will indeed get help with their home heating. They'll get help with rent. They'll get help with their healthcare. They'll get help with their food through food stamps. I mean, if you put it altogether, are you comfortable with the kind of redistribution and the level of income transfer that will represent? are you comfortable with that?
SEN. KERRY: No, and I'm equally uncomfortable with the income transfer that's taken place in the last 15 years in America to the wealthiest people in the country, myself among them. It's simply not fair. It's not the way that it's traditionally worked in America and we've seen, you know in the 1980's top 1% of income earn earns in America took home 8 or 9% of America's income. in the '90s the top 1% went up to about 16% of America's income and now the top 1% takes home about 22% of America's income. so, there's been an enormous redistribution of wealth from average Americans to the wealthiest people in the country. And they just can't make it. They can't pay their tuitions, they can't pay their healthcare costs, they can't pay for gasoline tank. You've got people who can't even pay to fill up a full gasoline tank today because their credit cards get cut off. So, what we need to do is obviously, make our economy work more effectively for everybody and that means you're going to get back to a system where when you work hard your wages can go up and you can actually live off the wage you earn.
Sounds to me like Kerry is just making it clear that a system that redistributes wealth upwards is just as unhealthy as a system that would redistribute wealth downward. What we have right now is a form of the robber baron economy of the late 1800s--and if we made more crap in this country it might actually be worse because they would be able to control prices on manufactured goods. The wags say that the Republicans are leading us all back to serfdom; I think they're trying to turn this country into Mexico.
Karl Rove wanted one dominant political party; the policies he enacted created an enormous income gap that squeezed the middle class and allowed the mega-rich to increase their holdings. Bankruptcy reform made it harder for the people on the bottom to reorganize their debt and stay afloat, driving more and more people into what was intended to be a large single underclass. In Mexico, you're either mega-rich or just like everyone else, and you either have your gated compound and segregated area from the poor or you don't. Political and economic reform is long overdue in Mexico, and if it happens, look for a drastic reduction in so-called illegal immigration.
All John Kerry is saying is that the current trend destroys our middle class and all the wingnuts want to do is apologize for Karl Rove's insane economic theories. Now that the American people have had a healthy dose of being soaked, they're going to reject, en masse, the insanity of Republican economic theory. The people at the top were moving their wealth overseas anyway--witness the UBS bank scandal that is going to engulf quite a few patriotic mega-rich people who likely broke the law and avoided US taxes. Arguing that raising taxes will cause them to take their money overseas is a joke--they already have. We must cut entitlements and spending and live within our means. And, we have to stop the handouts to the mega-rich.
--WS
