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Thomas Sowell helpfully explains why it’s so terribly unfair to accuse the right’s Serious Budget Grownups of trying to destroy Medicare and Social Security:
When someone gives you a check and the bank informs you that there are insufficient funds, who do you get mad at? In your own life, you get mad at the guy who gave you a check that bounced, not at the bank. But in politics, you get mad at whoever tells you that there is no money.
Well, that certainly is some lovely and poetic imagery there, but perhaps a better analogy would be if the bank informs you that it has no money for withdrawals because it blew it all on freebies and giveaways for its most valued wealthy and corporate customers, expensive hunting trips overseas, and maybe losing big at Vegas.
Not only that, but that it intends to siphon off your savings and/or garnish your wages so that it can lavish even more money on rich people, gambling and bloodshed.
So yeah, I’m pretty sure I’d be mad at the bank.
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well said eli — recommended and tweeted
Superb, eli.
x2 what the lady said above.
ELI!
recc’d
Yes, or steal your house. After all, it’s their government.
Wisdom from the Book of Eli: Well said.
I fear that the only way they are able to pull off this paradigm shift is the cover provided to them by the corporate media.
Paul Ryan is being put forth to play the “extreme” way out there wild man which moves the center right off the scale and makes Boehner seem reasonable. I wonder if I make a right turn into Bizarro world when I hear the unions (and the Democrats) brag about caving into Scott Walker during negotiations and “giving him everything he asked for (excluding collective bargaining). It kinda reminded me of how Obama negocated with the Drug and Insurance companies over health care. Now, those slick Democrates have agreed only to cut 33 billion more from what is left of our social safety net.
What a clueless understanding of how most check bouncing happens. He has no understanding of how people are manipulated into bouncing checks.
Probably half of the bounced checks occur because bank’s algorithms prey on people with low balances.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/11/wells-fargo-overdraft-law_n_679178.html
“I’m pretty sure I’d be mad at the bank”
Me, too. So, who’s running the bank?
“Uncle” Thomas Sowell does it again…
That would count as a racist remark if made by anyone but a lib
Thanks for that helpful correction in perspective.
Another one would be that this “bank”, the government, is the only one in town that can print its own currency and raise revenues regardless of whether its customers want to pay or not. It can actually use the law to collect them, regardless of the Randian canyon or dry gulch the rich hide in.
Congress is choosing not to pay benefits that have already been contracted for, benefits that are already too small and should be raised, not lowered. It wouldn’t take much to do that and manage our way out of a paper bag. It’s also choosing to cut other aspects of a hard-won safety net because the wealthy don’t need it and can get away without helping to pay for it, while still enjoying all the best government benefits (tax breaks, legal immunities, regulation-free mergers and business operations) their money can buy.
The only thing missing is the political will. Barring the topic of his re-election, that’s totally absent in our Mr. Obama. His phobia for conflict with his opponents would be laughable if he weren’t president. As for the GOP and a goodly bunch of Democrats, they’re happy to be or to be courtiers for millionaires and billionaires. Everybody else can make like a tree and leaf.