The Nation's Economic Chaos

I don't believe everything in this nation must trickle down. The middle class is under direct attack, as is Americans' accustomed standard of living. We're giving away the store to foreign nations, and in this country we are disadvantaged by the hemorrhages of NAFTA and CAFTA, the drug companies, insurance companies, medical costs, rising utilities, union busting, underemployment, and unemployment.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with passing some legislation to fix the problem and to deliver direct relief to the shameful circumstance of a shrinking middle class in the United States of America.

I use the word class advisedly, since we as a nation disdain the notion of classes. We believe in equality of the people and should always act like it. There is no higher type of human being in the United States of America than "American." The common man rules, and insists on ruling, this republic, and it is the common man's generous heart that shares our bounty with the rest of the world. But we can't take care of the world if we can't take care of ourselves first.

I don't mind the idea of giving up bad jobs for a new nation of "individual entrepreneurs" -- but why is all the seed money and other benefits going only to the big corporations so far, while all us new entrepreneurs are left to languish, as if we were the worker mob of Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" or Lang's "Metropolis?" This isn't what we bargained for.

I assure you, Americans do not consider themselves a worker mob -- particularly if they had good jobs before all this strategic bankruptcy and outsourcing to India and Mexico. They watch incompetent management preside over the demise of the company they work for, and they have good reason to conclude that THEY were the smarter half of the staff all along.

Our people consider themselves, accurately, the grass roots American majority, the backbone of the nation. They know they have the vote and the raw power, and they are feeling screwed lately -- by unkept promises of a strong standard of living based on a new individual entrepreneurship. They're underemployed, they're bankrupt, they're making less money while the cost of energy skyrockets. They're wondering if some immoral corporations are under the delusion that America can work without Americans. The current economy seems to imply a notion that there can be a strong America and thriving capitalism while the population languishes.

Such a development could not be hidden, and the people would bring it ALL down before allowing such a thing to occur -- thriving capitalism without thriving Americans. If America's managers are to abandon their own employees, dump their benefits, break their unions, reduce their salaries, declare a strategic bankruptcy, and create for themselves a golden parachute when they go -- then the balance of productive Americans are going to demand a red, white and blue parachute.

As a Republican, it's my view that the last election reflected NOT a rise of a die-hard Republican majority, certainly not a suddenly larger radical right, but something far more subtle and fascinating -- a taking back of the controls by our fed-up grass roots majority, who have decided to vote in larger numbers and declare their own agenda for a change. Politicians who get this are going to be the most successful in the near future.

I think whoever is talking sense in the next election will win regardless of party. The guy who is telling the middle class of America to tough it out, or to have sympathy for the rich, or to normalize radical lifestyles, or to "reform" the Constitution will find no friendly ear. We voted to let Bush try jump-starting the economy from the top down last time, but Americans are not going to put up with working at Wal-Mart for more than a heartbeat or two. They are not going to put up with gasoline that rivals the price of Sterling silver while their underemployment paychecks grow smaller.

About 200 million Americans are EXPECTING the promised results of all these choices we've let our administration make for us. I hope the White House is listening... Because I'm a Republican (for now), and I'm sounding the alarm.

Fair Tax, Flat Tax

I like the concept of a sales tax to replace income tax, as long as there isn't a stampede by wealthy congressmen to pass new legislation to create loopholes for their cronies in big business to avoid paying the same rates on their materials as the rest of us have to pay for our goods. The government would have to lean harder on us if it gave corporations new breaks, and that would not be a "fair" tax.

Even saying this, I just can't help suspecting that the code for such a federal tax, on sales rather than income, would be written so that business paid some "wholesale" sales tax rate on their goods while consumers are forced to pay a higher, "retail" sales tax rate.

A fair tax would have to be utterly fair, or the rioting would be near-instantaneous. A fair tax would be all too easy to ridicule and reject if it were exposed as not truly fair. And you can bet the media would dig fiercely to find any hidden breaks for the wealthy. There would be a predictable temptation, which would have to squashed, for manufacturers to pass along their supposed "increased cost of materials" to the consumers in a way that they didn't necessarily do when they were filling out tax forms. Of course, this tax would not be an increased cost of a material. It would simply be a repositioned way of paying the taxes due. If they used to have loopholes that the rest of us don't, then such a flat tax would be MORE fair.

One obvious advantage of collecting tax via goods and services is that a person could perhaps control his gross annual taxation -- by buying cheaper goods, or fewer consumables, during lean times, or when saving for something big. You'd get nearly your whole paycheck (for a change), and you'd control your tax cost depending on how much or how little you chose to spend or save.

Of course, the cost of goods WILL be significantly higher for all of us, with federal sales tax hung on every price tag, so if you buy the same as always your effective tax could be the same or even higher, I suspect (but without the 1040s, if that helps any). One assumes that even our utilities might be included in this type of tax. And insurance premiums and medical costs, etc. Everything could go up from rent to car payments and that sort of thing would not be adjustable. People with high medical bills, who get a deduction now, might find that they were taxed on all of it, if we aren't careful.

The income tax has seemed a real burden for years now, involuntarily taking way too much of a middle class person's income -- changing his economic status every April. With a "shrinking middle class" as we have now, fattening the average American's paycheck by 25% or more will seem like a great deal at first. I assume any such bill will be scrutinized to the last comma before passage, at the insistence of all of us.

Having said all this, I rush to add that it's too soon to make up one's mind on such a concept. I'm only able to discuss the most rudimentary possibilities here. We should see the details first, and chew on them a while to be sure we understand all the consequences.

We'll have to be satisfied that fair is really fair, and that the new system will be better for all Americans -- most particularly the majority which is the grass roots/middle class. This should not be passed over the average man's objections because some politicians think their version of the scheme is "the right thing" in spite of everybody else.

Illegal Aliens -- Messy Order at the Border

I'm not 100% sure the immediate outcome of tight security at our southern border will be "the end of illegal aliens" as some suggest. Things have gone so far downhill now, it could be that some stubborn border jumpers, who by now may feel ENTITLED to break our laws and sneak in and out of our country, would start arming themselves and skirmishing with Americans along the border, perhaps even ambushing peaceful residents. Wouldn't THAT be an interesting development...?

Is vigilante justice still justice? Yes. It is imperfect justice, but it can, in the defense of good Americans, be vastly better than no justice at all. Not always, not even frequently, but at least on rare occasions.

In a case when citizens, like the Minutemen, are defending both themselves AND the law of the land, I wouldn't be too quick to call them vigilantes anyhow. "Vigilante" is a word carefully chosen by opponents of the Minutemen to attempt to characterize concerned citizens in a negative way. They could have simply called these people volunteers, but they chose not to. They also should be calling the Mexicans in question "illegal aliens" rather than "immigrants," but they choose not to. Apparently there's too much law on the books already covering illegal aliens for their comfort.

And that's the point -- the complainers are politically opposed to enforcement of our law, as recent protests prove. Most of them seem to prefer that we look the other way and ignore the law, but that way lies madness. (I'm guessing these abetters of crime think they are championing "progressive reform" -- sound familiar?) A few of the critics are anarchist crackpots, in favor of cancelling the US-Mexican border altogether, if you can believe that.

But of course Vicente Fox and his illegal aliens are a secondary priority now, and the push to relax the borders couldn't come at a worse time. If we don't sew up our borders with Mexico and Canada, I don't think there's ANY reasonable doubt that it's only a matter of time until terrorists begin using those gaping holes to ship in tools of mass destruction.

Faulty Thimking -- Liberal Poll "Analysis"

Here's another bit of nonsense that annoys me lately --

Liberal pollsters erroneously conclude that if we've answered a poll by saying we're not delighted with the way Iraq is going right now, or not happy with George W. Bush, we must be "against the war" or "disillusioned," or "moving to the Democrats."

Hardly.

The poll questions are poorly written, if these are the kinds of answers some social scientist is looking for. I would answer a poll question like "do you think the war in Iraq is going well?" the same way as everybody else, but my support of the effort in the middle east remains unaltered. I'm not giving up, or abandoning the Republicans. And that's not what the polls asked me. They only asked if I thought the war was going well at the moment.

When "our boys" were on the Normandy beaches, Bataan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, nobody was concluding that Americans were ready to give up and go home because it wasn't a cakewalk.

The Sheehan Show

It's a bit embarrassing watching these aging hippies attempt to relive their glory days on a rural easement near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Ms. Sheehan, now thoroughly discredited as a radical kook, is spouting the old, old liberal line. Liberals have had the Iraq war stuck in their craw since the day the Senate voted to go to war, and their main disappointment seems to be that their plan to use that war to unseat Bush in 2004 didn't work out.

Now these anti-war types are stuck with a war they voted for, and their rationalization is that Bush lied to them. (Of course, all the intelligence everyone had access to at the time did not originate in the White House.) Yet the American people side with the hawks, and Democrats can't embrace the medusa Sheehan without assuring their own political demise. So they will "sympthize" with her little faction, but only the most foolish will risk a photo op.

Sheehan, off-topic of her dead hero son, thinks our current effort in Iraq is "not about bringing democracy to Iraqis," but rather to "have a permanent base" there. (She also says, wide-eyed, that Syria's occupation of Lebanon is the very same thing as the U.S. effort in Iraq -- go figure.) Despite the fact that NO American claims to want to conquer or annex Iraq, she insists we are a bunch of no-good "imperialists" (including her son, one supposes). That's delusional thinking by all non-partisan accounts, but it's not news -- liberals have claimed their homeland is "imperialist" for one thing or another since long before 9/11. I really think they would have preferred America seek no justice, drain no swamp, in the wake of the attacks on Manhattan and Washington. Just hold Al-Qaeda's hands and find out why the poor dears are upset -- then "negotiate" at the U.N., and apologize to the French for our recent impolitenesses. And, one imagines, settle in with "Reds" on the DVD player at the end of their exhausting day. This, to a liberal, is a reasonable course.

One also can't help but wonder whether Ms. Sheehan was this controlling of her son when he was alive. He was a grown-up, and clearly making his own decisions. Having his mother belittling his choices after he's died for his country seems downright bitchy. The son would no doubt disagree with EVERYTHING the mother is saying as she pursues her own leftist agenda using her dead son's fame to do so. Personally, I think she should go to her son's grave and apologize, but maybe their relationship wasn't that good.

These days, liberals including Ms. Sheehan are stuck in the past, constantly "reminding" everyone within earshot of the supposed invalidity of the war in Iraq. Of course, at the time of the original debate, we all knew there were various reasons for going to Iraq -- back issues of news magazines will be found discussing a variety of points besides WMDs -- WMDs were highlighted as the item most likely to persuade nations at the U.N. of the necessity to finally take some action. But now, liberals claim WMDs were the only item ever discussed, in an effort, one supposes, to deflect their own embarrassment for ALSO believing at the time that there were plenty of WMDs under Saddam Hussein's control. And for agreeing to Bush's concept of "draining the swamp."

Draining the swamp where terrorists are born and raised was bound to require lancing the boil at its center, and Iraq is, after all, centrally located in the middle east, and convenient to the whole swamp. I'm not sure anymore that liberals understood what "drain the swamp" meant, or even where the swamp is. If you typed "the swamp" into your GPS unit, you might just get a big red "X" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, with spokes leading out to Syria, Iran and various other West-hating, Islamist-radical nations.

Let's never forget, since WMDs matter so much to liberals, that it is Saddam's fault that all the world's intelligence agencies as well as most of its citizens believed he had WMDs. Saddam ran U.N. inspectors out of his country rather than allow them to inspect his facilities because he was determined to foster the impression that he did indeed have lots of prohibited weapons programs. The fact that he and Tariq Aziz may have been playing a high-risk-for-them game of "let's pretend" (assuming they didn't transport their WMDs to Syria as the war approached) certainly can't be laid at Bush's door.

And don't forget those 17 flaunted U.N. resolutions for which Saddam was owed punishment. Saddam tried to make a mockery of his own deal to stop the first gulf war. He badly miscalculated, again. He was hoist on his own petard.