“Clearly before you progressive 'thinking'^^ stands exposed, the patient, the patient’s family, the doctor . . . these are not important here . . . the government will take it upon itself to decide who lives and dies. Let us for propriety’s sake call it ‘the Ultimate Tax.’” Rajjpuut
The Liberals are Dead,
Long Live the Progressives!
Today in his “The Conscience of a Liberal” column, N.Y. Times economist and Op-Ed writer Paul Krugman reiterated his call for “death panels” (his exact words on two occasions Sunday) and a Value Added Sales Tax (without first eliminating income tax) as the way out of the country’s present fiscal crisis which he’d expressed earlier as a member of a This Week (ABC’s Sunday morning political affairs TV program) panel. Mr. Krugman implied the same thing almost exactly five months ago without mentioning the death panels only then saying . . .
“Dealing with this problem will require, first and foremost, a real effort to bring health costs under control . . . .”
Apparently Krugman who calls himself a “liberal” has now moved beyond vague generalities and found the specific magic key to solve all our problems by killing off those useless old fuddy-dud senior citizens, precisely as Fabian Socialists and Eugenics-advocating progressives all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger eagerly did . . . government control over life and death, t’aint it mahvelous? Rajjpuut believes Mr. Krugman just added the Value Added Sales Tax to run up more deficits and increase the opportunity for Death Panel Denials, but that is, as yet, not provable.
Ignoring the ramifications of his proposal for “death panels,” Krugman chose to concentrate upon the VAT saying it was no more hideous than eliminating the mortgage-tax benefit for home owners. There it is unclothed before you, the liberal thought process exposed in all its naked glory. Before we’ll even consider cutting taxes and spending with responsible means . . . the ends we see are so, so very important that we’ll consider denying health treatments and medicines to our elders; we’ll consider eliminating the biggest incentive to becoming home owners; and we’ll slap another tax on their without mentioning anything about personal or corporate income taxes. It is so, so very important that we have the resources to control your life and the lifeblood of the economy that this passes for logical thinking from our brightest mind on the most important newspaper in the country (Rajjpuut exaggerates here: USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are clearly far greater and far more important than the “old gray lady,” but tradition must be honored).
It is important to realize that this is a reiteration, not a slip of the tongue.
“I said something deliberately provocative on "This Week," so I think I’d better clarify what I meant (which I did on the show, but it can’t hurt to say it again.)
“So, what I said is that the eventual resolution of the deficit problem both will and should rely on “death panels and sales taxes”. What I meant is that
“(a) health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they’re willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care
“(b) We’ll need more revenue — several percent of GDP — which might most plausibly come from a value-added tax
“And if we do those two things, we’re most of the way toward a sustainable budget.
Refusing clearly to face the vile impact of his proposal for “death panels,” Krugman soft-pedals
“. . . not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care . . .”
Clearly before you progressive "thinking stands" exposed . . . the patient, the patient’s family, the doctor . . . these are not important here . . . the government will take it upon itself to decide who lives and dies. Let us for propriety’s sake call it ‘the Ultimate Tax. Those reasonable liberals that once walked among us (like John F. Kennedy who slashed taxes dramatically . . . the top rate was 91%* and JFK cut it to 65%*) are dead; long live the progressives who would tax us our very lives before considering cutting spending; cutting government control and interference; before cutting taxes. The liberals are dead; long live the progressives.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
^^ more like: "progressive stinking"
** It must be clarified that in fact in 1961, the exemption process, made it highly unlikely that any wealthy taxpayer paid anything close to these levels . . . which is to say, the tax code in those days was a sham, but a modestly fair sham one could live with . . . today we prefer to eliminate the mortgage-tax deduction . . . and real bottom-line taxes are much, much higher on all income earners.
By the way, the economic malaise that JFK inherited from Eisenhower disappeared virtually overnight once this income tax slashing took place. That severe business downturn cost Richard Nixon the presidency in one of the closest elections in the nation’s history. Much like Harding who wiped out the Wilson Depression by slashing taxes and spending roughly 50% and paid down the National Debt 30%; Kennedy likewise wiped out his predecessor’s economic problems by cutting taxes.
As an aside, in case you had any doubts about the integrity of the Nobel Prizes "earned" for Peace and Economics . . . consider this: besides granting the Nobel Peace Prize to the likes of Yasser Arafat, Al Gore and Barack Obama while Mohandas K. Gandhi never was deemed worthy of winning it; and except for the prize given to John Nash (famous as the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind) virtually every economics Nobel Prize granted is to some Keynesian economist whose "discovery" creates a whole brand new "school of Keynesian Economics so that now we have four or five dozen such "schools" none of which ever even once predicted anything with any accuracy! Our Mr. Krugman is a Nobel Prize recipient whose theories represent the usefulness of an udder on a male bovine's nose. He's been quoted as saying that Public debt "isn't as bad as many believe -- it's basically money we owe ourselves . . . " a statement that reveals a deplorable lack of practicality and empty-headed Keynesian thinking not to mention failing to account for an awful lot of Chinese, Japanese, Russians, etc. holding huge amounts of our debt instruments. Mr. Krugman finds it necessary to revise his truths about every nine or ten months in a manner that makes all his earlier books obsolete. Since Keynesian economics is the economics of preference for socialistic thinkers and totalitarian dictators . . . Rajjpuut says, "Bah, humbug" and gets his classical economics here:
