[BRIGADE] PJB: Socialist America Sinking
Published: Fri, 07/17/09
by Patrick J. Buchanan
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in
America, journalist Garet Garrett published "The People's Pottage."
A year later, in 1954, he died. "The People's Pottage" opens thus:
"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against
a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in
the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in
the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."
Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly
America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that
was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before
the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far
we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.
Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic,
liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least
is an Americanism. When "Silent Cal" Coolidge went home in 1929,
the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic
product.
And today? Obama's first budget will consume 28 percent of the
entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While
there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent
of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.
The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole
economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon
emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike
consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is
opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.
Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax
rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates
can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up
to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers.
Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are
the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes,
gas taxes, excise taxes, and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes and,
soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.
Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi's House. A
surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1
percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal
income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8
percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to
provide health insurance for employees.
Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that
businesses provide their employees.
The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a
combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George
III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and
sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out
their substance."
What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea
tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of
Americans by their own government?
While the hardest working and most productive are bled, a third of
all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free
almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of
millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food
stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned
Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.
Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.
Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the
world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal,
arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education
than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute
by three to one.
Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do
in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they
qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and
admissions to college over the children of Americans
All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers,
who after all, created America -- as they declared loud and clear
in the Constitution -- "for ourselves and our posterity."
China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in
debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted
industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and
a money supply that's swollen to double its size in a year. The
20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows
another pattern.
"The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with
mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event," writes Les
Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in
CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. "Astonishingly, some people do not
appear to realize that the situation is all that serious."
Even the establishment is starting to get the message.
SOURCE: http://www.buchanan.org