Elimination of the Entitlement State - Part II

A staunch right winger sends us this:

Top 100 Teacher Salaries for 2011: Phys. Ed Teacher Heads List with $203,154

In 2011 an amazing 14,866 public school employees made more than $100,000, up 18% from 2010’s 12,588. And then? Our brainwashed Naybob natters...

"This is the broken State of Affairs that Barrack Obama and Rahm Emmanuel brought to The White House, and want to bring to the rest of The US.

Yep, the same broken political system of payback that is threatening to bring ruin and collapse to all the cradle-to-grave Socialist entitlement nations of Europe."

We Natter Back...

From 2009: Wall Street banks Citigroup and Merrill Lynch paid 1,400 staff bonuses of $1m or more each, despite being kept afloat by US government money.

From 2011: Big bank compensation, which includes salaries, benefits and bonuses, will likely total $156 billion -- a 3.7 percent boost from 2010 -- and a record breaking number.

Goldman Sachs, which in October recorded its second loss ever as a public company. Still, Goldman employees will take home $362,862 in compensation on average, compared with the U.S. median income of $26,364.

Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1%

The top 1 percent of taxpayers in the U.S. made at least $343,927 in 2009, the last year data is available, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

While average household income increased 62 percent from 1979 through 2007, the top 1 percent’s more than tripled, an October Congressional Budget Office report showed.

As a result, the U.S. had greater income inequality (The Grand Canyon) in 2007 than China or Iran, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, 81, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has called for increasing taxes on the wealthy, as has Patriotic Millionaires,

a group whose supporters include Ask.com co-founder Garrett Gruener and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google Inc., according to its website.

“Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs,” Nick Hanauer, co-founder of aQuantive Inc., an online advertising company he sold to Microsoft Corp.

for about $6 billion, wrote in a Dec. 1 Bloomberg View article. “Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth.”

Two out of three Americans support raising taxes on households with incomes of at least $250,000,

according to a Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted in October.

The Nattering One muses: This is the capitalist way, bonus paid with our tax dollars.

Witness the new NAZI group think that feeble minded right wingers spew...

Non Christians, Homosexuals, Immigrants, Government Workers, Unions and Pensions... what do they have in common?

They are THE PROBLEM. If you eliminate them, you eliminate THE PROBLEM.

They are the NEW JEW. And nothing could be further from the truth.

This is political divisiveness and Goebbels NAZI credo at its best.

Divide and conquer the masses through propaganda. Tell a big enough lie enough times and the feeble minded will believe it.

If this behavior continues, what will it get us in the end? The rich attacking the poor and vice versa. Oh no, far, far more, baby ducks.

The rich own the lobbyists and the whores on the hill, aka the prostitutes in congress. How do you control the hill?

The rich employ their whores to start initiatives that deal with problems that aren't really problems.

Trying to solve problems that don`t exist is the specialty of the right wingers in congress.

And that is a way to serve some other agenda that is unspoken to by the fake problems.

Examples? Measures to combat voter fraud without instances of actual voter fraud.

Elimination of a proposed EPA farm dust regulation, when the EPA has no proposed farm dust regulation.

A resolution to affirm `In God we trust` as the national motto, when `In God we trust` is already the national motto.

And the latest is, blocking millionaires from receiving unemployment insurance or food stamps. (For those with ADD, refer to our previous post.)

Yeah just eliminate all the entitlements, the Non Christians, Homosexuals, Immigrants, Government Workers, Unions and Pensions, no more problems right?

Wrong. In fact, DEAD wrong. This diviseness over the last 50 years has us rapidly becoming a second class power and well on our way to being a third world country.

The eradication of the middle class, the widening of the Grand Canyon aka the Great Divide (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer) has the ultra rich upper 1% vs the rest of the serfs.

Occupy Wall Street is just the beginning, of the end. This is the end, my friend.

In South America, the Eastern bloc and most third world countries, kidnappings of the elitist rich are a common occurance.

MLB baseball player Wilson Ramos, of the Washington Nationals, had his Venezuelan ordeal and says he is thankful to be alive. In the near term, many here may be chiming the same.

Someday soon, in this country, holding the elite for ransom, will be commonplace. The rich will not venture far from their fortress compounds, without an armed entourage and escort.

Recently in Italy, letter bombs exploded in the tax collectors office. In the middle East public terrorist bombings are an every day occurance.

It would not surprise, if Corporate and government bombings (such as Oklahoma City) start to become commonplace here.

And unfortunately, in our lifetime, if they don't change their greedy, divisive and naughty ways...

You better watch out, You better not cry, Better not pout, I'm telling you why, the people's revolution is coming to town.

Their making a list, And checking it twice; Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice. The people's revolution is coming to town.

The elitist, sexist, racist, anti-humanist throats will be slit, and they will be hung, as they and their assets are bled out, like the greedy pigs they are.

They can't hide and they know who they are, so better to be on the good list, than the naughty list.

Some food for thought and a peak into a potentially bleak alternative future, in the Naybob Zone. Remember, its never too late and never, say never.

Season's Greeting, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Elimination of The Entitlement State

We have certain entitlements in this country that have been around for generations and remained intact -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance.

These are programs that work politically in part because they apply to all of us. They are for all Americans.

When you`re 65, you get Medicare. You get Social Security. When you lose your job, if you have paid into the unemployment insurance program, you get unemployment insurance.

You are by definition entitled to these things, and these things have been a huge success in the story of America.

They are our social safety net. They have kept people out of poverty. They have kept food on the table. They`ve allowed us to retire one day instead of working our entire lives until we die.

But the thing about them is that they are entitlements. And that is as important to what they mean to us as Americans as it is to their political survival.

You get these things if you`re rich or if you`re poor. We do not discriminate by class. As Americans we get them.

The idea of ending unemployment benefits for millionaires is that you fundamentally change a program in order to eventually break it apart.

Making the unemployment insurance program a program that is not for everybody. It`s not for everybody anymore. Instead, it`s just for poor people.

When people with not very many resources are the beneficiaries of a particular program, those people don`t have many resources and that also means they don`t have much political power to protect that program once politicians try to tear it apart.

It`s also because when a program is seen as just being for poor people, that program is susceptible to losing broad public support when it inevitably gets attacked from the right as waste.

When you try to change entitlement programs so instead of benefiting everybody, they just benefit, say, poorer Americans, you set the stage to break those programs apart because the right has come up with really great politics for making the rest of the country resent programs that only serve poor people.

So, suddenly this means drug testing for unemployment insurance. That may seem like a throw-away line in a Republican proposal. That`s not a real problem, why are they working on that?

Well, it is a way to dismantle that as an entitlement. To make us think of unemployment insurance that only applies to poor people.

And that`s why the Paul Ryan kill Medicare thing really isn`t a lie.

But make no mistake. What the Republicans have proposed is actually ending Medicare. I mean, the whole idea of Medicare is that everybody gets it. It`s not something that divides America.

It doesn`t matter if you`re rich or poor. You as an American citizen are entitled to Medicare once you turn 65.

The Paul Ryan plan would end Medicare. It would make Medicare something that not all Americans get anymore, which means it`s not Medicare.

This is about changing the social safety net to make its politics more like welfare politics, and less like Social Security and Medicare politics.

Ask Americans how they feel about Social Security and Medicare. Those programs are more popular than a cold drink on a hot day. Look at that.

Now, if you make those programs just for some people, see how popular they become. Right now, House Republicans are playing chicken again. This time it`s not the debt ceiling or looming government shutdown.

This time it`s almost every adult American getting substantially less money in their paycheck as of January 1st, courtesy of a Republican tax hike on working people. Merry Christmas.

And Republicans are willing to bear the political cost of doing that for the prize of starting to rip our social safety net around the edges.

For the prize of making the American people see the social safety net not as something that we all have...

but instead seeing it as something that other people might need some day. Something that other people might use some day, but never us.

From the : Dec 20th Rachel Maddow Show

The Nattering One muses: more to come on the right wing divisiveness in our next post.