Posted on 04/20/2011 8:21:22 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Rising star Paul Ryan seems to have had a rough outing when talking to seniors in Milton Wisconsin today. The video, posted by liberal site ThinkProgress, shows an antsy group of seniors question Ryan about current levels of taxes on the rich.
Specifically, he's asked why the rich can't pay more in taxes -- even if we do cut spending -- and at about 1:25 he said "we do tax the top," which is what prompts the chorus of boos.
Two things we take away from this: cutting spending is going to be political hell and people like to see other people get taxes.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO...
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
After 40 years of working and paying into social security and my employers paying into it I finally at age 64 (65 in May) am receiving $2100 minus $115 a month for medicare at age 64. I will never get what my employers and I paid into this ponzi scheme.
“I’ll make them a deal, they give me 25 cents on the dollar of what I paid into social security and they never will hear from me again.
I’ll just say that I was robbed of 75% and the crooks got away. I’m totally serious about that deal.”
It is robbery. It’s one of the biggest scams pushed on the American people.
Folks, when you are confronted with this type of trap question, turn the argument against the person posing the question.
Ask one or both of the following:
1) So what is the right percentage that the rich should pay? 25%? 30% 50? Get the person asking the question to state a specific percentage. Whatever their answer is, compare that to 35% ... Yes, one dollar out of every three made goes to the government.
2) So the top 5% of income earners ... what percentage of the tax burden should they have to pay? What is their fair share of the total tax bill 20%, 30%, 40%? The “rich” already pay for 57% of the federal tax burden
The political system is broke. The freeloaders decide who retains the power. They know how to work the system just like the Community Organizer and Chief.
Both Ryan,
and the (possible set up) audience,
are in the wrong here.
Ryan and Heritage just snowjobbed the Tea Party, political (small c) conservatives, and the people of this country with the projections they fabricated and advocated in the prior two months.
ON the other side, these retirees and other audience members don’t seem to understand that every dollar they receive in Federal redistribution is now exceeding the total Federal intake of taxes.
Even returning to pre-Bush tax rates for “the rich” will not even cover the newer and future interest expenses on the new national debt.
NO matter how high the top income tier tax rates are going forward, the total theoretical increase in Federal tax receipts for any given year will not even cover half of the future national debt interest payments.
It’s all over and Paul Ryan chose to not be a leader and instead be a charlatan, and the sheep in that audience chose to be sheep.
I’ve been on FR a long time, I really dislike using the word sheep and sheeple, as these are fellow Americans, and even politically aware enough fellow Americans to attend a Ryan listening session event, kudos for that, but they have not a clue as to the actual debt and liability overhang of the FEderal government and are not even conceptualizing the actual financial dire straits the country has entered since Greenspan blew the housing bubble in ‘01.
In the last month I’ve talked to two large contributors to Ryan, both pretty certain he doesn’t understand that he’s walking along the edge of a sword here.
I really hope he starts hedging his position here, to include structural reductionsin areas of the budget he claimed as sacrosanct, or he’s very likely to permanently discredit himself and leave the Heritage Foundation a smoking pile of wreckage once the popular outrage boomerangs around on them.
Obama says he wants to live in a “fair society” well, what’s fair about 45% of the households in America not shouldering any of the tax burden and 5% shouldering 57% of the burden? It’s not a matter of how much anyone earns, but everyone sharing in the cost of the federal government. Maybe if they shared in the burden there would be more outrage at the things government is spending their money on.
“You people think everyone who has a lot more than you do somehow deserves to be taxed more than what they currently are paying?
There will come a time when YOU yourselves are going to be viewed as making a lot more than other people, and they will be screaming you’re not paying enough and that you’re unfairly earning too much and need to have government take more away from you.
Then what will you say? “Rich” is relative. If you wind up being in the class of people being demonized for not paying enough because you’re too well off compared to the rest of them, why should anyone fight for you?
That’s a lot to read into a few minutes of video. Fact is that this is what Ryan has been able to get from the leadership, who are trying to ride a wave that was much higher than they expected when they started surfing last October. The elders in that room have all made plans for the future based on false expectations. Both face an administration that is dedicated to reforms that will disappoint those seniors profoundly, but which is lying though its teeth about what they are doing and hoping to mget away with it until the door closes on the trap.
I went to University in the NYC area during the late 1990’s.
Amongst my classmates were numerous students who were immigrants from former Yugoslavia, former Warsaw Bloc countries and Soviet Republics.
Amongst their parents, I’d hear dire stories...
ONe was a nuclear physicist and nuclear engineering professor at one of the Soviets closed nuclear cities, he had the 5th to highest civil service clearance and a career salary and pension to match the stature of his positions. By the time the ruble had been devalued again in 1998, his pension would have bought about 3 loaves of bread per month in Moscow, slightly more in the outlying region of the closed city as it was in the Urals breadbasket. He moved to America and worked in a drycleaning store in Brooklyn.
Another friend’s father was a bureacrat in the St. Petersburg regional sea port, put in his entire career there and was equivalent at retirement to a Longshoreman port master. His pension was less than 2 loaves of bread a week after the 1998 ruble devaluation. My friend’s father basically was drinking himself to death in Brooklyn.
Another friend came from a family of Soviet apparatchiks in Tblisi, as a teenager he had to fight in the streets after the Soviets withdrew and Georgia had a small civil war. His family lsot everything, came to NYC with his family and three grandparents, all their pensions that were worthless left a lot of mouths to feed.
A few other guys came from Serbia/Croatia after the civil war, one of them had a family in the import/export business under state monopoly in the days before Milosovich, they lost everything inside Serbia and fled the country with just the accounts receivable bank accounts for the business in various countries abroad.
My father knows a woman who was a neurosurgeon in Moscow, her pension was worthless after the 1998 devaluation. Smart woman who made a new life for herself here.
I don’t see how the pensioners and gov employees and other dependents on the state are not going to see similar suffering here in the United States as the FedRes loses control of the yield curve and inflation and funding crisis after funding crisis roll through the country.
Trump said the same on the Bush taxcut extension. He said let the Dems cause it to elaspse and cause an economic slowdown. When the GOP take the House in 2009 they will have a stronger position to force the Dems to reinstate the taxcuts premanently. Again it is common sense tactics yet the GOP did the dumb thing, extend the Bush cuts for only two years and give the Dems breathing room to regroup and strike.
So the GOP is in a position of strength to fight for the Bush tax cuts but they aren't in a position of strenght to fight for cuts in the budget.
Look at your two paragraphs. You describe a Trump strategy in paragraph one that contradicts the strategy in paragraph two.
Unbelievable.
The long knives are out for Ryan, who must scare the hell out of these people, as they are going full-on Alinsky on him.
I’m with you.....my husband and I (both 60) have worked hard all of our lives....I’d like NOT to have to sign up for Medicare (want to pay for and choose MY OWN insurance)....and would accept the same on soc sec as you, Cajun...
Ingrates is right. When I think how seniors voted, at every opportunity, to take more from the pockets of our grandchildren, I say kill Social Security. Kill it and AARP.
Well, get it before someone else gets it ...and the program collapses. Oh, is that being “greedy”? I guess we need a committee of 15 appointed bureaucrats appointed by the president to decide who is greedy and who isn’t.
When the rich do what they are supposed to do and reinvest their wealth, they get richer. However, by reinvesting their wealth, they give money to a business needing new capital to grow their business, hire new workers and grow the economy. Why the Left can’t understand this is like looking at a dog chasing cars.
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