McCain Decries "Hobbits," Accused of Ringbearing 722
Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "Senator McCain decried Tea Party 'Hobbits' on Wednesday for their failure to support the GOP's debt deal, at times reading from a WSJ editorial that began the analogy. The Tea Party fired back, with a prominent member noting on CNN that McCain had been corrupted by the ring of power. The full text of his floor remarks should be in the Congressional Record later today."
Re:Obviously McCain doesn't understand the story (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Obviously McCain doesn't understand the story (Score:2, Interesting)
This is really about entitlement. The US was founded based on the idea that birth did not define one's future. This was basically started in England with the Civil list and the Magna Carter in which the lesser aristocrats said the the King and his family did not deserve all the money and control simply by the fact they were born royal, that god did not in fact endow them with special privileges. This continued to the Americas where wealthy briton living here diid not think there were inferior to the aristocrats in England, and set up a new country to prove it.
And now we have a new aristocracy, people who think by birth they deserve a job, and toys, and a cool place to live, and a big car. They don't want to take the time to educate themselves, or work for it. Look at the Tea Party whining that the government won't give them jobs. This is not the party of Reagan and the welfare queen, where if one didn't have a job that was a personal failing, not a government problem. No, we have Hobbits that are used to six meals a day, and now that times are rough, they do not blame themselves for being uneducated and lazy, they do not leave the shire and take risks to better themselves, no they sit there and cry.
This would be easily solved if the entitlement of birth were taken away. Every child in this country should have equal access to education and housing and food and health care. But maybe adults who don't want work should not receive citizenship. Maybe the US would be better off if those like the tea party who don't want to work, don't want support their children [chicagoist.com], don't want to part of the political process of the US, would not earn the right to be American. It is a complex issue, this entitlement. Look at Romney. His great grandfather emigrated to mexico. His grandfather basically lived as mexican, his father lived in mexico, but because the family travled back to the US so their kids could be born, they are not considered mexican, and Romney is eligible to be President. Now, these are hard working people so I have no problem with them pretending to have allegiance to the US, but the Tea Party is not based on work, it is based on perceived entitlement of the white race. Obama, whose mother is a US citizen is not qualified for president, but Romney who is for all intents and purposes a Mexican is?
Re:Smeagol (Score:5, Interesting)
We're seeing what was predicted two or three years ago. The Tea Party is poisonous to the Republicans, not the Democrats. It's pretty clear that Boehner is at maximum frustration level, and I think it's beginning to dawn on mainline and moderate Republicans that the Tea Party tail is now wagging the GOP dog. There's a level of hysterical irrationality about the Tea Party that is now coming into full view. They're not interested in governing at all.
I'm sure the White House has a long list of contingencies in place just like Clinton did when he was up against the Gingrich mob, and is probably quite content to watch the Republicans and the Tea Party wing battle it out. I think 2012 is pretty damned safe for him.
Re:Easy enough (Score:5, Interesting)
If citizens actually had free choice in which government programs to fund as well as how much to contribute, the size of the US government (measured both in revenue and power over the people) would be 1/10 the size of today's utter monstrosity.
And if citizens literally had to cut a check at the beginning of every year, rather than pay through deliberately-obfuscated systems designed to hide the true cost of government, the size of government would be cut again by 90%.
No. It would not, unless, of course, you have some facts to back up this remarkable assertion. No? Didn't think so. Please stop parroting stuff you've heard parroted by various Fox News personalities. Simplistic "solutions" like this sound attractive until one spends more than ten seconds thinking about them. Then their absurdity becomes obvious. And no, I don't mean fiscal responsibility is absurd. I mean that it's absurd to suggest that the government we want can operate on a tiny fraction of it's current revenue. Not even close. So this suggestion, one that is near and dear to Tea Bagger hearts everywhere, is nothing but an absurd distraction from the critical process of meaningful reform, reform that actually has a chance of solving the very real problems we are facing. It is the folly of indulging this absurd distraction that Senator McCain refers to, and (I can't believe I'm saying this...), he's absolutely right.
Re:Smeagol (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easy enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you really think this is the case? What I see is a lot of people saying: "Don't touch my Medicare, don't touch my Social Security, don't raise my taxes, and balance the budget." Which is sort of a ridiculous position to take. Even if we're allowed to touch defense (which a lot of people don't want either) that's not enough room to maneuver. Hell a strikingly large percentage of Americans don't even seem to realize that Medicare and Social Security are tied to the federal government and the debt. Remember back during the health care debate when the nice old lady stood up to President Obama to say something along the lines of "I hate socialized medicine and don't touch my Medicare?"
I don't think people are stupid, but much like with technology they often lack the bandwidth in their daily lives to learn as much about politics as they probably should. People want more responsible government, and smaller government until they see how it's going to affect them personally. Everyone's happy with the idea that we should cut "stuff" out of the budget, but when the "stuff" gets personalized to "My Medicare", "My defense industry job", "My road project in my town" or whatever the happy starts to wane. Then you start hearing the "Well don't cut stuff like that, cut stuff like funding for research on the affects of cow methane on the local owl population (or pick your ridiculous government project of choice)" crowd starts up; blithely ignoring that fact that a) some of that research actually is valuable, just not in obvious ways, and b) it represents a really small portion of the federal budget.
We have among the lowest taxes in the developed world in this country, and we have the infrastructure to prove it. I'm not saying we should move to the European model of 40% taxes (yes, I pulled this number out of my butt, your European taxes may be higher or lower than this figure), but we can easily balance the budget with some prudent and moderate cuts to spending, along with very modest tax increases to say, where they were just 10 years ago. I know that real "small government" people like you probably understand the cuts that would be needed for true "small government", I'm not saying that you don't full understand your position. I'm saying that if most people truly understood what it meant to cut government this way, far fewer of them would support the idea.
Re:Easy enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Great Depression is your answer to what? Because Great Depression was created by the Fed, who monetized UK debt (yeah, English debt). Fed was printing obscene amounts of greenbacks and buying UK debt to prevent UK from defaulting (sort of like Germany is doing with Greece).
The 1921 saw a depression that had higher unemployment than what is observed today, but by 1923 that depression was over. The difference? Government spending was cut by 70%.
1925 US Fed started monetizing UK debt, this inflated the agriculture bubble, which burst by 1929, similar to what Fed was doing starting with Greenspan and Clinton, when they set discount rate at 1%, and later Bernanke and Bush, who set the discount rate at 0% and since gov't was mandating that Freddie/Fannie and FHA subsidize 30% of substandard mortgages by 1992 and 50% of them by 1999 and 65% of them by 2006, it's not a surprise that the bubble that burst 3 years ago was in housing and not in agriculture.
The Great Depression started because the burst of the agriculture bubble inflated by the Fed was actively fought against by government bail outs and stimulus. I provided a time-line earlier on this topic [slashdot.org], just like the bail outs and stimulus printed and given out by Congress and the Fed in 2008 and ever since. In 1929 this started the Great Depression. I am expecting the Greatest Depression this time around, because this time around USA doesn't have the savings and manufacturing (production capacity), that US of the twenties had and today USA is the biggest debtor nation with no savings and no understanding of economics on all levels and a enormous, all encompassing government, who completely abolished the idea of freedom by its mere existence.
So you are going to make smart ass comments, maybe you should try and understand the subject first.
Re:Easy enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not convinced that it is the quantity of government, but rather its specific content. The government is doing things that it should not, and not doing things that it should. Reducing the size of government might reduce the number of things it is doing that it should not, but I assure you the other side of this imbalance will only get worse, because the government will likely also stop doing several things that it should be doing.
Re:Easy enough (Score:4, Interesting)
The grandparent was referring to Somalia being in what we in the US consider a state of anarchy, but in fact most of the country has fallen under traditional tribal leadership and obeys tribal law for their various tribes and the central government has dissolved. No tribal leader has the influence or power to take control of the central government, so there is no central government, which has led to some areas being in a state of lawlessness. In some ways that is not necessarily a bad thing, because depending on who is in power, it could be a very oppressive dictatorship (think Taliban).
As for the 10th amendment, it is and pretty much always has been filigree with little substance - States are considered subordinate to federal law in all cases, which is understandable in some ways - for example, the South could potentially still have slavery if it weren't for the government stepping in. Before you argue that slaves are human and should therefore have rights under the constitution, remember that up until the end of the civil war slaves were considered more like an animal than a human (by the South).
Re:Way to completely miss the point (Score:4, Interesting)
The federal government, as the least representative government of any specific person does a whole hell of a lot it was never intended to do. It's not a matter if government should do it, it's a matter of if a government so far removed should do it. If every single person in Montana wanted to opt out of Social Security in favor of their own locally run version, where do the assholes in the rest of the states get off telling them how to run their lives? If you want to be a dictator to the minority, instead of respect differences of opinion, maybe you should leave. Your ideas of how the government should be run are further out of touch with our laws than small government fans. You obviously don't have the support to change the laws or the constitution would have been ammended to make a lot of these illegal, overreaching programs legal, so you get out. There is nothing stopping any state from implementing any of the federal programs for themselves, they just want to impose it on everybody else whether they agree to it or not so they can get the benefit of other state's resources. That is the evil of strong central government, that is the purpose of the electoral college, and that is why changes to the constitution require more than a simple majority. But you can get around all of that by simply ignoring the constitution, and that's what we as a country have done. Somehow the people that don't support it want to send us back to a third world country? No, not at all. But I guess it's easier for you to cover your ears and scream than to challenge your own beliefs.