Through no fault of our own, my family is poorer today. Our risk averse investments have been halved, our six figure home equity has fallen in a locally stable real estate market.
Who am I to blame? Clinton, Bush, Obama? Twenty plus years of inexcusable irresponsibility by Congress? Mortgage underwriters? Wall Street? Should I look back to the policies that birthed federal welfare or stripped Senators of their responsibility to the states? Lobbyists? My illiterate fellow citizens who vote themselves reams of graft? Give me some names.
We pay our mortgage and debts, live within our means and try to save responsibly for our future needs. We provide health coverage, food, housing and clothes for our children without assistance. We pay our taxes and fees in full and on time, never dreaming to ask any agency we fund for a handout or exception. My husband keeps tens of people fully employed, at high pay, by his hard efforts. We volunteer our time and money to worthy causes. Our bill to the city, state and feds well exceeds the poverty line for a family of four. Why are we suffering the price for everyone else’s mistakes? We haven’t made any.
I am unapologetically conservative. I don’t believe another man has any right to the fruits of my labor. I do not believe that I am beholden, on any terms, to provide for another man’s housing, food, children, medical care, education or the thousand other items on the endless list of needs demanded of my money in the name of social responsibility. I have an obligation to abide by the law and be a productive citizen who honors his own responsibilities, the state does not have the right to mandate that I bailout its negligent mistakes or support its unproductive members. I don’t owe your destitute grandma or ill conceived child a damn dime. My children certainly shouldn’t be expected to pay for current lawmakers ignorant legislative blunders or Joe Blow’s lackadaisical take on mortgage payments or unaffordable procreation.
Save me the arguments that my money funds the betterment of society. It obviously doesn’t when 1 in 30 of our citizens are in the criminal justice system, as much as forty percent of our high schoolers drop out before graduation, a scandalous number of non-performing public schools, warehousing ignorant children, are still in existence and we have up to 70% out of wedlock birth rates standing alongside the total disintegration of normal family units in significant segments of society. My money hasn’t done diddley shit for the generations of shiftless idiots unable to carry their own water, except exacerbate the growth of disgustingly useless government programs that induced these ills to epidemic heights.
Nearly half of all employed Americans pay no federal income tax, they don’t contribute anything to the national kitty. I fund their share of the essential goods, plus the pork. The parasites who receive credits and rebates of my money, without ever paying one red cent into the system, deserve to be stood up in the public square and humiliated as maggot infested thieves. These are the same people who put their kids on SCHIP and manage to scrounge $200 a month for their cable bill. Cut the hapless bastards off at the tit, I am not responsible for their general welfare or daycare ticket.
The corporate subsidies we annually provide to healthy industries are bile inducing. The outrageous sums kicked back to business by those syphilitic whoremongers in congress makes my head spin. How dare they treat me like a miserable tenant farmer. They want to show their donors a good time, let them do it on their own nickel. I’m already paying obscene corporate tax rates through the retail price on the shelf, at the very least, these crummy bastards we elect could save us an additional financial ass reaming by telling their good buddies on the boards a hearty hell no when they come panhandling at the statehouse.
I’m sick and tired of being responsible for more than half of my fair share of things I’ll never use, people I don’t care about and self serving, political stupidity.
I’m done.
I want some names.
I blame the French
Laugh out loud funny, Doug!
You’re amazing Daphne. You’ve put my feelings about this whole mess into words, and much more eloquently than I ever could have.
You are under a comlete misunderstanding. Your husband works for the government. He does not pay taxes so much as he collects them for three governments. I would suppose he keeps government workers employed in Texas and Washington supervising his methods, working conditions, and standards.
What is regrettably missing in this is thanks, overtime pay, and perhaps a title and GS rating.
I’d just like to know how I could get in on that “pay no federal income tax” deal. I’m sure it has to do with having shit loads of kids and deductions, so I reckon I’m out of that. Dammit.
[...] An excellent read articulating how the Kool-Aid’s getting a little stale. [...]
It is frustrating and of course the real criminals in politics and their coproarte sponsors will focus our attention on some welfare recipient instead of some far more wasteful defense contractor or corporate titan.
G-d dang it!
I wake up feeling pretty fine.
“Oh, good. The room’s not spinning. And look! The sun!! And there’s Good ‘Ol Feral Cat waiting on the deck for her morning installment of foodstuffs.”
And then I read the above, and I want to: (1) go back to bed and think about Stevie Nicks; (2) shoot something, repeatedly; (3) get hammered on tequila and contemplate the grass.
Must be that I agree with this Daphne person.
Stevie Nicks? Nice rant Daphne… Stevie Nicks? I agree wholeheartedly; I wish I had your talent for the rant as art form…Stevie Nicks? Really? I’d rather get hammered on grass and contemplate the tequila. Shooting something repeatedly works too.
Well stated you heartless Conservative. Have you no compassion for those less fortunate than yourself? You have obviously won “life’s lottery” not through hard work of course.
From a heartless Libertarian.
Screw all of these lazy ass bastards. I don’t want to support lazy people, crooked politicians, illegal aliens, other country fix ups like Palestine. I don’t want to pay for everyone else’s hospital bills when I pay mine. I say neuter and spay every well fare mom and the SOB that knocker her up.
If they cannot support or feed themselves they can go to Federal work farms and work to be fed.
I want the real America back, where everyone is responsible, the borders are shut tight, we grant now asylum to anyone and we send all illegals packing without a trial.
Wake up America it is almost too late.
Patrick,
You are wrong. It is not “almost too late.” I think it is too late. We just elected a Marxist/racist who obviously has no intention of doing anything to address the current crisis except to use it to further his Socialist agenda. I have serious doubts that our great country can survive even four years of an administration that punishes the producers and rewards the non-producers.
I blame George Clooney. I say we hang the bastard.
Names? You really want names? OK… anyone commonly referred to with a (D) or an (R) after their name. And an (I), too, for good measure. Every goddamned one of them, without exception.
I’m not quite sure how to ascribe blame to those who voted for the aforementioned, but they’re most definitely accessories after the fact… for not cleaning house when the house was beyond… WAY beyond… needing a good scrubbing.
Nice rant… and I’m with you all the way.
Magnificent tirade Daphne. I pity any politician who sees you coming towards him with a pitchfork !
I only agree in us all providing a viable accessible health service. Not because i am pitiful so much as I am pragmatic. Outside of that I agree with all that you say Daphne. If you ask me the rot set in when we moved into this idealistic republican nonsense that made politicians into Gods. The bizarre idea that they serve their country out of duty is ridiculous. Sorry America. They serve themselves first and protect themselves from others chomping at the bit second. I only wish in the UK we had better protected the best form of check and balances to date, a constitutional monarchy. We are frittered away these freedoms to some pathetic notion of republican freedoms, and ill educated mockery, and i HATE it. Give me a proper constitutional monarchy or give me death. We would have these morons out on their arses legally as a result – and their heads severed from their twit bodies. I ain’t joking!
London’s in the house!! I love my Brits.
We seem to have had a long spell of revering (depending which side you’re on) any given man in the White House.
But you’re exactly right, Ali, that is a huge part of the problem. We turn public servants into rock star Gods and give up all control of accountability to their bombastic whims. We stand back and watch them thrash the foundations to shreds while serving their OWN selfish interests.
We’re fucking stupid.
“Well stated you heartless Conservative. Have you no compassion for those less fortunate than yourself? You have obviously won “life’s lottery” not through hard work of course.”
A flippant but dead-on summation of one of the core precepts of progressivist thought: Progressivism genuinely believes that external social and environmental factors have more to do with the prosperity or poverty of any one individual than that individual’s personal efforts. There is no such thing as “earning wealth fairly”, in this model, only the luck of being born to the right or wrong class, or family, or circumstances.
As the Rush (not Limbaugh) lyric goes from “Roll the Bones”: “Well you can stake that claim / Good work is the key to good fortune; / Winners make that case, losers seldom take that blame”.
There’s a case to be made for this point in principle. Not all well-off people earned their money by hard personal work, and not all poor people caused their own poverty by foolish choices. And bad or good luck can outweigh anything people do or don’t do. But when it comes to giving a government the power to decide who “deserves” society’s wealth more, better to give the benefit of the doubt — both the credit for success and the responsibility for failure — to the individual.