Leftist Stupidity Is Like Nuclear Power

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…It can be used for good or evil. And you don’t want to get any on you. Hat Tip to Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt newsletter for this gem:

Morning Jolt reader Glen notices that one group of progressives has decided another group of progressives’ proposal to forgive student-loan debt is bad, because it wouldn’t help racial groups equally:

 A new report, however, shows that calls to ease the student-loan debt load, including plans unveiled by all three Democratic presidential candidates, could have a significant effect on the racial wealth divide—and not necessarily in a good way.

The joint report by Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, two progressive think tanks, found that getting rid of all student-loan debt — writing off the amount college grads borrowed to get a bachelor’s degree or to complete graduate school — would help white households far more than African American ones and would actually increase wealth disparities between the two groups.

 

So we’re scrapping the idea, right? Are we all agreed?

And this sums up everything that is wrong with an ideology that is based on anger and envy. If a leftist sees that a policy, action, event that will help someone who they favor but helps someone else from a non-aggrieved group by a greater magnitude the idea must die. Here is the “Sharing pizza with your roommate” analogy that I used three years ago to illustrate the stupidity of the income inequality argument:

You’re living on your own for the first time, and money is tight. So you find a guy with a room to rent in his house (who we’ll call Bob) and you go to live with your new roommate. Bob has far more money than you do and knows this, and it turns out you are both huge pizza fans. Knowing that you’re strapped for cash when you two decide to order a pizza you decide to share a seven inch pie, and he pays for most of it. In fact, he pays for the whole pie and asks that you only tip the delivery driver. The pizza is not distributed equally, as Bob has a massive appetite for pizza. He eats six of the slices and you only get two, but for tip money this is a good deal. Then one day a breakthrough technology in pizza ovens hits and your local pizza shop can now sell you an 18 inch pizza for what a seven inch pie had cost, and you both eagerly jump on the deal. Of course, Bob is disproportionately benefiting from this deal, but he is still paying the bulk of your tab. Now you have two choices – are you happy that you are now enjoying more pizza than you did before or do you resent that fact that there is a growing gap in pizza distribution in your household?



Of course, in my old post I argued then (and still do) that income inequality is a problem in this country, just not the way that the radical left wishes were true. Read the whole thing (And share it on FaceBook, Twitter, and Google +)!

I could easily drop a few thousand words on the many reasons that forgiving student loan debt is a bad idea (unless we want to take it from those colleges and specific departments churning out useless degrees), but if the Radical Left’s own stupidity is ammunition enough to strike down even worse ideas then I’m all for using it.

As long as I don’t get any on me.

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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog

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Irving Janis published a book called Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign- policy decisions and fiascos, in 1982..The behaviour of the left resonates in groupthink as did it with kennedy, fdr, clinton and the fool. All four used the emergence of “mindguards” or party gestapo to ensure that al toe the line.

Of course the guy who keeps getting the small share is actually the one who spends 8 hours shoveling pizzas in and out of a hot oven. He also designed and erected the building housing the pizza restaurant, planted and harvested the wheat, milled it into flower, picked the tomatoes, raised and milked the dairy cows, and drove the truck that hauled all of the necessary materials. He also runs the cash register and delivers pizzas. And while he has continued to do all of this work for many years, the truth is that the size of his share of the pizza hasn’t really grown proportionally as the pizza has gotten bigger and bigger. He’s getting about the same size of a slice that he did 30 years ago.

The middle class is shrinking; real wages have been stagnant for decades; employment related benefits such as health care and pensions are vanishing, with those responsibilities being offloaded onto the taxpayers. The pain in the average household has been lessened with a flood of cheaply produced foreign goods, but that has been at the cost of American manufacturing jobs. Interest rates have been suppressed to encourage borrowing, which locks people into the system and allows the government to run up public debt to pay the bills. Savings accounts pay nothing, forcing people to gamble their futures on the stock market, which is rigged to the advantage of the house and big players.

Did I miss anything?

But don’t think about this. Think about the threat of terrorism. Even though the individual risk level is lower than that of being struck by lightning, or killed by an off-target golf ball. It’s far lower than that of being shot by some random idiot with a gun.

My sons were helped by me and my 2nd mortgage should not be paid for by my community or state’s taxpayers. College debt is a choice; one I made for myself and my sons. Another issue that the Democrats use to buy votes. That may keep them in the presidency, but do they have a plan to recover from the enormous debt the US has; so much of it by this President.

I’ve always thought Leftist stupidity was like renewable energy: An inexhaustible supply ever day!

@Brother Bob: Greg lacks the capacity to do anything except parrot what he hears from the left. It isn’t worth our time to reply to his posts.

@Greg: You voted for Obama twice, and currently “Feel the Bern” rendering anything you have to say further invalid. That is all.

Free college ya but that kinda makes it worthless. Once upon a time a guy with a high school diploma could support his family.
How long before a college grad cant read when getting diploma Is there testing like in high school or do we just assume.

@Greg:
If the guy you portray does all that work and doesn’t learn to advance themselves at some point then I guess they deserve what they get. You’d be the guy jealous of the others success.
As for wages, who has been president for the last seven years? Under his watch poverty has gotten worse not better. Can you a least admit he is a failure?
The biggest enslavers of people is the government itself, with welfare programs that entrap generations of people.

@Me, #7:

The fact that you refuse to think about what someone says doesn’t make what they say any less true.

The left will never rid itself of the intrinsic lazy, greedy self-centeredness which is the foundation of leftist ideology. The cheap veneer of “concern for the poor” with which the stereotypical marxocrat stridently tries to paint upon himself instantly crumbles when they are faced with actually doing anything themselves to actually help the poor.

The immature leftist mindset that rambles on about low level, non-technical employees somehow deserving more than the wage contract they agreed to when taking a job is nowhere to be found when making demands for “free” health care. Suddenly, the expectation of getting paid for performing a service is being a ‘selfish, greedy physician’.

How dare I take offense at having 30-40% of my hard earned income taken against my will by government hacks to pay for infant car seats and baby formula for parents claiming poverty while surfing the net on their iPhone 6, with bilateral sleeve tattoos and multiple body piercings?

How dare I believe that it is MY job to work to pay for the cost of raising my children, rather than sitting on my fourth-point-of-contact watching ESPN, collecting SSI, medicaid, foodstamps, and section 8 housing?

Leftist ideology is nothing more than pathetic rationalization of sloth, envy, and greed.

@Mully, #10:

Is charity also a form of entrapment?

@Greg:

What the left fails to admit is true charity does not require coercion. What the left euphemistically classifies as “charity” is, in fact, government enforced theft.

@Brother Bob, #15:

Just curious, but do you understand between charity and welfare? If you do you’d be the first lefty who does

Welfare is an acknowledgement of a societal obligation and responsibility to those whom the prevailing economic system places so little value upon that they would be unable to meet the basic needs of life without help. People can be in such a situation for a variety of reasons: physical or mental incapacity, advanced age, birth into disadvantaged family situations, economic downturns resulting in job losses, etc. Part of the taxes I pay go toward programs intended to promote the general welfare, which to my thinking is often a wiser and better use of my money than pursuing wars on the other side of the world. We do not need to promote the welfare of the wealthy. They are highly adept at promoting their own welfare.

Charity is what we might do for someone in a disadvantaged situation voluntarily, as individuals. When I write a check to the local Food Bank or give money to a children’s hospital, that would be charity. Charity is a matter of kindness, not obligation. If you do it so you can say that you’ve done it, it isn’t what it should be. Among other things, it’s an expression of gratitude.

@Brother Bob:BB- Charity– is the VOLUNTARY giving of help usually in the form of money to those in need—the practice of being benevolent, giving and sharing. If we ALL ENBRACED charity there would be no need for
Welfare–provision of a minimal level of well being and social support for all citizens–may include unemployment insurance and universal healthcare.

You agree BB?

@Greg:

Welfare is an acknowledgement of a societal obligation and responsibility to those whom the prevailing economic system places so little value upon that they would be unable to meet the basic needs of life without help.

How did we manage for 150 years without you radical left wingers stealing our hard earned money from us to redistribute it to those you deem worthy?

Odd that people survived the Great Depression and there was nothing more than food lines to help them. Those photographs of all the hundreds of thousands dying in the streets during the Great Depression is a vision you cannot erase.

You’re an idiot.

@Rich Wheeler:

Welfare–provision of a minimal level of well being and social support for all citizens–may include unemployment insurance and universal healthcare.

And that can be found in our Constitution where?

@Greg: No,it is your stupidity and abominable judgment that makes what you say utterly worthless twaddle

How did we manage for 150 years without you radical left wingers stealing our hard earned money from us to redistribute it to those you deem worthy?

We had a 19th Century agricultural-based economy, which subsequently turned into an industrial economy. Things changed. Both societies and individuals must adapt.

Technological advancement eliminated the need for so many agricultural workers. It then eliminated the need for so many factory workers. What do you expect such people to do?

Government interfering with the farms and industry is what caused the ruin, we still buy durable goods but the taxation and regulations became too burdensome for them to stay. Everything the government touches withers and dies. They dont do a single thing well.

@kitt, #22:

That’s not a factual observation. It’s the premise of a cult, and one that won’t stand up to even a cursory examination. It’s a premise of anarchism, which is a traveling companion of Marxism.

Government and governmental regulation are essential to an orderly and productive society. Contrary to cult teachings, capitalism is not a magical force that, if allowed to run wild, automatically produces a maximum degree of order and prosperity.

@Greg: What would you know have you ever tried to be an owner or operator of your own business? Idiots that want the government to control every last detail of their lives. senate bill S510 you may find interesting, Monsanto and industrial farming hard at work lobbying there.

@Greg:

Typical foolish leftist brainwashing. It was capitalism that built the US from a wilderness to the preeminent world power in a little over 300 years, while it has taken barely 100 years of inhumane “progressive” marxist policies to grind the economic engine of America to the teetering abyss into which we are about to collapse.

There is no way that adding layer upon layer of worthless government bureaucrats -who produce NOTHING but regulatory strangulation of economic producers – can do anything other than increase wasteful costs and resource shortages.

You cannot reach financial stability by spending more than you earn. You might be able to postpone the inevitable collapse by printing more paper currency, but that will not prevent financial reality.

The punishment of hard work and rewarding of sloth via confiscatory taxation of producers, and “wealth redistribution” for buying votes of the lazy will decrease the pool of the former while increasing the numbers of the latter. When there isn’t enough remaining wealth to steal from producers to feed the bottomless entitlement greed of the “poor”, chaos will ensue. See Venezuela over the last couple of years. (Or any other marxist craphole).

People who wish to provide charity are perfectly free to do so, but such people have NO right to engage in the false, cheap compassion of imposing government theft on everyone else to assuage their discomfort over perceived “unfair” economic disparity.

As to a comment upthread regarding spending on welfare being better than military spending, one need only read the Constitution to see our founding charter EXPLICITLY delineates the duty of the government to use military force to defend the nation, while nowhere does it state the government has the duty to take money from some people to give away to those who have not earned it. Leftists act as if there was no such thing as poverty in the 18th century when trying to defend the socialist thievery enacted from Wilson’s income tax, to FDR’s social security pyramid scam, to LBJ’s bogus “war on poverty” – why else would the Founders have overlooked the need to make the government a giant sugar daddy?

There is no dignity in whining about how unfair life is, while demanding others pay for your living expenses.

@kitt, #24:

That’s typical through-the-looking-glass right-wing spin, promoted to protect big-money special interests. The opposite is actually the truth: Irresponsible behavior by industrial-scale farming operations and huge corporations like Monsanto is precisely what S510 was intended to provide protection against.

The Tester-Hagan Amendment specifically exempted from S510 regulation small farming and processing operations that make less than $500,000 a year and sell more than half of their products directly to consumers in the same state and within a 400-mile radius. Such small, localized operations all remained under the already existing state and federal regulatory framework.

Personally, I have little or no faith that giant corporations like Monsanto will put the public’s best long-term interests ahead of their own profit margins. These are the people who insist that phosphonate herbicides are perfectly safe, and who have lobbied against allowing consumer choice in connection with genetically modified foods. Does anyone remember dioxin? It has been demonstrated that they can’t be trusted.

@Greg: Wrong as usual, if you produce x amt of produce you must be regulated and controlled, raw honey, maple syrup, organic gardeners, its a “food saftey act.”
My brother in law is technically a smuggler cause I got apples from his tree.
. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. It resembles the Kissinger Plan.

2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security. It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection. Instead, S 510 says:

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

3. It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into “the United States.” Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, “entry of food into the US” covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and “entering into” it by virtue of being produced.

@Greg: exempting small farmers?
Lie #4 – S.510 will exclude and protect small farmers
The Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more “quantitative easing,” anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket — and this will shift even small family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.

In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.

Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030587_Senate_Bill_510_Food_Safety.html#ixzz3v4mqvw1Q
I personally think Monsanto is evil, would not in any way protect that corp but Hillary in her last election was backed by that company and maybe this election too.

Inflation? The rate of inflation under the Obama administration is presently around one-half of 1 percent. We actually had deflation, or negative inflation, during three months of 2015. The unemployment rate has been steadily falling and job growth has been been increasing; 211,000 jobs were added in November 2015.

Want to compare the numbers with those of the preceding administration at the same point in its 7th year?

I get so tired of the right’s bogus claims that economic disaster will strike at any moment, that the economy in appalling shape, and that everything has gotten steadily worse since Obama took office. In reality there was an economic disaster that commenced at the end of Bush’s 7th year and steadily worsened through his 8th, with growing indications that it might turn into an economic catastrophe. This was turned around early in his first term, and the economy has been growing stronger ever since.

Federal tax rates are historically low, particularly at the top end. Corporate profits have been historically high, even during the recession. Somebody has done very well indeed, and continues to do so. So, you’re thinking it must be overpaid, do-nothing government workers, overpaid, do-nothing union workers, and people on food stamps? That’s the right’s story, isn’t it?

They’ve also been claiming for 7 years that Obama is going to confiscate everybody’s guns, that marriage is under attack by gay people, that there’s a leftist war being waged against Christmas, and that Obama is going to turn the U.S. Muslim. They claim that climate change is a fabrication of left-wing scientists, that wind-generated electricity doesn’t work, that the EPA is the enemy of the public, and that the federal government is worse than useless—an argument which I must concede one might support by pointing at the republican-majority Congress. (Is it an accomplishment to have lifted 40-year ban on exporting U.S. oil? What a deal! We get to export a vital, non-renewable natural resource to make some quick bucks, at a point when market prices are at record lows! China will suck our wells dry using their dollar holdings to pay the bill. No doubt future generations will applaud our wisdom and foresight.)

Is there one word that describes all of the foregoing, other than “republican?” How about “crazy?”

@Greg: You are too stupid to engage. You might be the smartest retard on the short bus of life, but for the sake of all that is holy, stop voting.

Anyone who raises a point that you dislike, but have trouble refuting, seems to fall into the “too stupid to engage” category. That pronouncement is then presented in lieu of an intelligent rebuttal.

@Greg

Not to get into a online fight, but regardless of tax rates, inflation, the stock market or other economic indicators seemly good, it comes down to trust. As the saying goes, “I’ve never seen a poor person give anyone a job” is not exactly 100% true but close to it. Those who have the money stashed away in the US, between $1 and $2 trillion are not investing it creating jobs and around $3 trillion is held overseas. There is no confidence in this administration and the feds spending, admittedly assisted by a Republican Congress, is seen as too much of a vote buying exercise. All I see are policies that restrain investment and confidence building. The “you can keep your doctor and insurance” lies set the stage for the lack of confidence by so many Americans. The use of EOs to illegally bypass Congress, as the SCOTUS three times has ruled against, is another example of not instilling confidence in government. Now Obama is doing it with gun control that has nothing to do with the terrorist threat.
I have been close to people who lie about almost anything and I can tell you that their lack of integrity destroyed our relationship and one died completely alone; his daughter even abandoned him. At least he wasn’t destroying a country.