LastResistance – The words came from Democratic Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota:
“The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it.”
You couldn’t ask for a clearer portrayal of the ethics of plunder. “We” are the government and “we” are not broke because all the government needs to do is to take money from other people.
Ellison was advocating for his “Inclusive Prosperity Act.” He explained,
“The government has a right, the government and the people of the United States have a right to run the programs of the United States. Health, welfare, housing – all these things.”
The looting mechanism proposed in the “Inclusive Prosperity Act” is a sales tax on every sale/purchase of a stock, bond, or derivative. This would arguably be destructive to the economy, but I’ll leave that argument to the side.
Instead, let me ask, if everything turned out as rosy as Ellison pretends, would we be better off?
Ellison claims his new tax would rake in $300 billion a year. I have no idea how realistic his assumptions are. Is he assuming that there would be no reduction in sales of stocks, bonds, or derivatives? Whatever. Pretend he is right and we get $300 billion a year coming into the government.
What does he want to do with it? The Bill itself says the money will be used to “fund international sustainable prosperity programs such as health care investments, AIDS treatment, research and prevention programs, climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts by developing countries, and international assistance.”
I’m not going to address the value of these goals, or if they are based on hallucinations, in some cases, or not. We don’t need to go into all that. The essential point here is that Ellison is questing for more government spending. The best you can say about him is that he doesn’t admit that he wants to increase the national deficit.
But what was that deficit? For 2012 the national deficit was over a Trillion dollars for the fourth year in a row. So the man who is telling us that “we have plenty of money,” even if we assume he really can get all the revue he claims he can get, year after year, is powerless. $300 billion wouldn’t even cover a third of the national deficit if we didn’t spend it on anything else.
So, even by these wildly optimistc claims, we are still just a larger version of Detroit heading toward inevitable collapse and bankruptcy.
Ellison would loot more people to simply make our financial situation even less safe. He is living in a dream world.
