Author: Mark Noonan

If You Liberals Really Want a Class War…

Mark Noonan51 Comments

…then we on the right are pleased to give you one.  From National Review Online:

…While we would prefer no tax increase at all, eliminating this deduction (for State and local taxes) would be a sensible reform of the tax code, and could be paired with tax cuts elsewhere for a fiscally neutral simplification of our byzantine tax code.

Estimates suggest that eliminating this deduction would raise as much as $900 billion over ten years, though it may well turn out to be less as taxpayers modify their behavior in light of the new incentives. That won’t balance the budget with deficits running that much or more every single year, but it is nothing to turn the national nose up at, either: $900 billion would completely offset the estimated deficit for 2013. Progressives should welcome eliminating the deduction in that the new tax burden would fall much more heavily upon those earning $200,000 or more. As Reihan Salam points out, households in the $200,000-and-up range would pay an average of $5,166 more without the deduction, while those in the $30,000-to-$50,000 range would pay only $70 more…

Wouldn’t cost me a penny more, of course, as I live in a no-income-tax State.  But it would cost people in New York and California a bundle, especially if they are making more than 250 grand a year and are getting hit with those very high California and New York State income taxes.  But, given that those two States voted overwhelmingly for Obama, it stands to reason that they’ll be pleased as punch to fork over a bit more to Uncle Sam.  Unless, that is, they were just stupid and thought that Obama was talking about people like Bill Gates when he said “make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share”.  We on the right can’t be blamed if people didn’t bother to actually look past Obama’s rhetoric and examine his concrete proposals.

This is not quite up to the standards I want – I still prefer my “wealth tax”, and I’ve actually come around to turning the screws a little harder on it.  While still excluding farms/ranches, mines and factories which are family or individually owned, I’m thinking that a 10% annual tax on all wealth in excess of $2 million should do the trick.  Which trick is that?  The double trick of both making rich liberals pay for their liberalism and showing lower and middle class Americans just who’s side we’re on.  The dirty secret of liberalism is that it is run by rich people and largely for the benefit of rich people – I want to drive that home.  Next step is to eliminate charitable deductions for any organization which does not provide direct housing, clothing, food or medical aid to poor people…no more tax write-offs for donating to liberal political groups which have got themselves a tax exemption.  Oh, and the group dispensing the help to the poor better have administrative expenses down to no more than, say, 30% of expenditures or it gets reclassified as a very heavily taxed racketeer influenced/corrupt organization.

I’m all set for the class war.  Are you?

Connecticut School Shooting

Mark Noonan112 Comments

Just absolutely horrific:

Twenty-seven people are dead, including at least 18 children, after a gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Newtown, CBS News reported.

Officials say the gunman, who apparently had two guns, was also killed. It happened around 9:40 a.m. Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School..

Web chatter indicates there might have been a second gunman.  We’ll have to see.  Please pray for the families.

UPDATE:

A Prayer To The Holy Innocents

Holy Innocents, you died before you were old enough to know what life means, pray for all children who die young that God may gather them into His loving arms.

Holy Innocents, you were killed because one man was filled with hatred, pray for those who hate that God may touch their hearts and fill them with love.

Holy Innocents, you experienced a violent death, pray for all who are affected by violence that they may find peace and love.

Holy Innocents, your parents grieved for you with deep and lasting sorrow, pray for all parents who have lost young children that God may wrap a warm blanket of comfort around them.

Holy Innocents, those around you certainly felt helpless to prevent your deaths, pray for all who feel helpless in their circumstances that they may cling to God for courage and hope.

Holy Innocents, you who are now in Heaven, pray for all of us that one day we may join you there to bask in God’s love forever.

Amen.

UPDATE II:  Predictably, some are trying to make a political case right away – probably in service to someone’s idea of never letting a crisis go to waste.  Seriously, people, start to think a bit.  First off, guns can’t be banned without a constitutional amendment, which would never in a million years be enacted…and if the government tried to go ahead and ban them, anyway, you’re just not going to get them out of the approximately 200 million Americans who have them.  Secondly, can you lay off for just a day or two?  At least until the bodies get cold?  A gigantic, unimaginable tragedy has just occurred and the 2014 mid-terms are nearly two years away…whatever points you think you’re scoring right now, they are at best just a waste of time.

UPDATE III:

The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a moment the normal daily life of a people. But faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ’s word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit. Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it. —Blessed John Paul II

Moral Decay Plus Welfare Equals…

Mark Noonan14 Comments

This – from the Daily Mail:

While many families are worrying about how to afford Christmas this year, one jobless single mother has revealed she receives so much in benefits she has £2,000 to spend on designer gifts, clothes and partying.

Mother-of-two Leanna Broderick plans to buy 20 presents for each of her children, including Burberry and Ralph Lauren outfits, iPads and gold jewellery.

The 20-year-old, who has never worked, claims nearly £15,500 a year in state handouts…

Whatever you do, don’t you dare get mad at the girl.  She’s just doing what she’s been told to do.

She was told it was ok to have sex before marriage, then she was told it was ok to be on welfare…and then the welfare system pays her more than entry-level work and, presto, you’ve got a “welfare queen”.  If you get mad at her then you are just being absurd:  this is the system of incentives provided and she has reacted to them in a perfectly reasonable manner.

And, of course, this does happen here in the United States as well – there are millions here who have no incentive to work because welfare benefits, of various types, are either equal to or greater than what can be earned by entry-level work…and even if you have a circumstance where the welfare is slightly less than a 40 hour a week, minimum wage job, not having to go to work beats going to work if its only a matter of 10-15% total income difference.

Yes, of course it is a disgrace – it is better than a lot of welfare situations where mom is a drug addict or some such (at least she does seem to be treating the kids well), but its still a horrid destruction of a human being, and apt to be repeated in the next generation by her daughters who will likely live by their mother’s example…and may not be so lucky on the drug-addiction issue.  We have, in some areas, several generations of people who live like this – who don’t work, never have worked and don’t even know what working is like.  And as liberal policies go their natural course, more and more people are hooked on welfare of one sort of another and yet more and more people develope a disconnect between work and reward.

There is a way to cure this, but it would take some guts and some willingness to genuinely reform the economy.

The guts part of it is this:

Total welfare benefits – from whatever source – for a physically fit person under retirement age must never exceed 80% of the value of a full time, minimum wage job.  They can be up to 100% of a minimum wage job if the welfare recipient is married and both persons have resided at the same address for 365 consecutive days or longer.  No additional benefits may be provided for children born while receiving welfare benefits.  That will take guts because to propose it is to immediately get howls of “racist!” and “hater!” and other such nonsense thrown at you.

The reform the economy part goes like this:

If we are to restrict welfare benefits like that, then we’d better buckets of entry-level jobs for these people to start working at – and that means manufacturing, farming and mining jobs, so we’d better restructure our economy for production rather than consumption and that will require much smaller government, a hard currency and a high cost for personal debt.

Or, we can just keep going as we are until we reach that tipping point where too many hands are in the till and the whole thing collapses.  That is, at most, four or five years from now.  So we’d better choose wisely…

 

We Conservatives Are So Stupid

Mark Noonan41 Comments

At least, that is the allegation of a new “study” – from Pajamas Media:

…The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.

Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group…

The study, itself, is bogus – as is the allegation that it came from some sort of conservative group (you can read the linked article to see just how laughably fake the whole “study” actually is).  But, fake as it is, that is the way liberals view us – we’re conservatives because we’re just too stupid to be smart liberals.

To be sure, we are politically stupid – that I grant.  The reason for this is that we don’t live and breath politics:  we don’t hold it as the be-all and end-all of existence as liberals do.  Only a liberal, for instance, could have thought up political correctness, which is nothing more than a demand that whatever is politically fashionable at the moment among the elite become obligatory among everyone.  You can only think  up something like that if you hold that what is political trumps what is personal.  But while political correctness is idiotic, in practical, living terms it is highly effective in purely political terms:  it allows you to control the debate by either insisting that everyone affirm some particular view or, more often, condemn some idea…with what is being condemned always being something that is traditionally held by the broad majority of the American people.  We’re stupid in the sense that we let them get away with it.

But in terms of actual living, I wouldn’t trust a liberal with a burnt out match.  These are people, after all, who think you can craft a national health care system for a nation of more than 300 million people, spread across four time zones and having places as completely different in demographics, economics and philosophy as, say, San Francisco, California and Birmingham, Alabama.  They also think that incurring debt creates economic growth and that spending is more important than saving (we might get some liberal denials on that, but the whole of liberal, Keynesian economics is based upon the laughable fallacy that spending is better than saving).

Preening themselves on their credentials, secure in well-paid Big Government and/or Big Corporation jobs, liberals look out upon us and see a great, unwashed mass of ignorant bigots, bitterly clinging to guns and the Bible…meanwhile, their Great and Glorious Leader presides over a bankrupt nation and their solution is to raise taxes on “the rich” which will pay for 8 days of spending…brilliant!

UPDATE:  76% favor cutting spending across the board.  In a very real sense, we’ve won the argument…we’ve just failed to craft a plan which gets us back in to the White House with full control of Congress.  We figure that out over the next four years and we’ll be unstoppable.

Nader: Obama Worse Than Bush

Mark Noonan92 Comments

Breitbart has the video of Nader discussing Obama.  Nader does have some major blind spots – first off in saying that Obama is failing because he knows the law and yet he violates it.  This, to me, is a failure on the part of Nader to understand that people like Obama don’t even know what a law is.  But Nader is also pretty upset with Obama on the way Obama has been running the war – essentially calling Obama a worse war criminal than Bush.

First off, I’d like to say that I deprecate the whole concept of “war crime”.  There are, of course, laws of war – things which have been held to be right and proper for ages.  Such things as not going on a rampage of rape, looting and murder.  Things like accepting an honorable surrender and treating the captive decently.  But these are things for honorable soldiers with proper morality – when dealing with people who have deliberately set themselves outside of all morality, then it becomes a bit different.  The honorable soldier will still refrain from senseless brutality, but he isn’t bound to treat an inhuman adversary as if he were humane.  The biggest example of war crimes, of course, were in Nazi Germany – but it was absurd of us to put the captured Nazis on trial as if judging them by our standards in a court would some how make right what was done.  How can one exact justice against someone who organized the mass murder of millions?  Who deliberately broke the peace simply to grab wealth from others?  You can’t – once the millionth person was done to death in a Nazi death camp then no amount of judicial sentence could ever balance the scales of justice.  We should, instead of bothering with all that (and especially without putting on the bench Soviet judges which represented a regime just as hideously anti-human as the Nazi regime on trial), just taken out whichever Nazis we felt were most responsible and shot them one, fine morning.  It wouldn’t have been a matter of justice – it couldn’t be a matter of justice; it was a matter of disposing of people who had outlawed themselves in the fullest sense of the word (but Mark, you’re a Christian – what about mercy?  Indeed, and people with a sense of honor would have tried to discern whom among the captive Nazis should get that mercy…and be let go; by trying to be “legal” about it we ended up hanging someone as trivial as Ribbentrop while letting off someone as crucial to Nazi power and cruelty as Alfried Krupp).

It is, then, impossible for us to commit a war crime against the Islamists we fight against – these are people who will murder a Christian for nothing (and rape his daughter and burn his church, in to the bargain).  These are people who will strap a bomb on a kid and send him off to commit mass murder in a shopping mall.  These are people who have outlawed themselves from human society.  The only reason to take them prisoner, at all, is to obtain information from them.  Outside of that, how is justice served if we were to, say, give a man a 20 year sentence because he organized a campaign of suicide bombings in Afghanistan?  So, when Nader says we are committing war crimes when we drone-attack a jihadist, I disagree with the notion – even when, at times, such attacks end up killing the innocent.  It isn’t our fault that our enemies deliberately hide among non-combatants for the sole purpose of ensuring that innocent people are killed so they can score propaganda points against us.  We still have to fight these people – though a bit of wisdom at this point would lead us to withdraw completely or steel ourselves to going after the ultimate sources of the trouble:  the money-bags in the oil States and the government of Iran.  Be that as it may, we are at this point fighting them, and it not only isn’t a crime to do so, it is impossible for it to ever be a crime.

Nader reflects a certain, hard-left disappointment with Obama – a feeling, correct in a lot of ways, that Obama has not been what he promised to be.  Schooled his whole life to believe that the left is in favor of peace, prosperity and freedom, someone like Nader just doesn’t know what to do with an Obama who doesn’t make peace, doesn’t create prosperity and is clearly uninterested in individual freedom for average folks.  Part of this comes from a failure to understand that the left has an inherent problem in getting to any of these desired results.  Nader, honest as he is, simply does not understand that a large government setting out to, for instance, create prosperity is in an impossible situation:  the thing can’t be done.  Even the most benevolent government, grown large, can only get in the way.  But, still, you can see his point:  clearly Obama is not carrying out the programs and policies which leftists believe will bring peace, prosperity and freedom.

It still astounds me that Obama managed to win a second term:  the only people actually benefiting from Obama policies are those who are getting a rake-off via government contracts and grants.  For 90% of Americans, Obama’s Administration has been a net loss.  I can see why dyed-in-the-wool Democrats voted for Obama, but they only make up about 35% of the electorate (at best) and Obama got over 50% of the vote…which means a very large number of people who aren’t just mindlessly Democrat and/or personally profiting off of Obama voted to re-elect this man who has not a single policy success to his name.  The fact that Nader – and some other hard left people – are taking Obama to task just makes it more remarkable that we’ve got Obama for four more years.

Nader is right about this:  Obama is far worse than Bush.  Far worse than anyone we’ve ever had in the White House.  I’d welcome back a combination Carter and Nixon and figure we’re coming out ahead of the game, right about now.  The combination of dishonesty, insensitivity, lack of patriotism, old-school Chicago graft and a general sense that Obama is happy to see us decline at times makes me sick at heart for our country.  I can only imagine how much worse it must be for a true blue leftist:  here was a man (and a black man!) who had dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s of true-blue leftism and yet he manages to get elected…and then he goes about messing up so badly that when he is replaced, the whole concept of leftism will be in disgrace for a generation.  Just as after Carter left office no one would call themselves a “liberal” for more than a decade, so it will be after Obama leaves…people will be ashamed to be thought of as being in any way like Obama.  And for someone like Nader, that is tragic because his whole life has been a sincere (if muddleheaded) quest for a leftist settlement in the United States.

It is to be hoped that there will be an awakening from this – as I hope my fellow conservatives will awaken to the fact that Big Corporation is a bane, so I hope that honest leftists like Nader will awaken to the fact that Big Government is also a bane…and a worse bane than Big Corporation.  You can, if you want, be a leftist and be against government – the only fundamental change is to understand that whatever social changes you want will have to be done via education and at the local level, not by the heavy club of government because such clubs are always eventually wielded by someone like Obama.

 

 

If Liberals Acted Upon Their Convictions

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Then stories like this would be true:

Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) – Local and state police scoured the hills outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists going missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers “duct taped inside fast food restaurant dumpsters,” according to police officials.

“Something just went wrong,” said a still visibly shaken organizer of the protest. “Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong.”The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activists, “growing tired of throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats,” decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event “in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats.” “In fact,” said the organizer, “motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it, ergo, they should stop.”

According to witnesses, protesters arrived at the event in a vintage 1960′s era Volkswagen van and began to pelt the gang members with balloons filled with red colored water, simulating blood, and shouting “you’re murderers” to passersby. This, evidently, is when the brouhaha began.

“They peed on me!!!” charged one activist. “They grabbed me, said I looked like I was French, started calling me ‘La Trene’ and duct taped me to a tree so they could pee on me all day!”

Still others claimed they were forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs under duress. Those who resisted were allegedly held down while several bikers “farted on their heads.”…

 

Our Liberal Future: a Vision

Mark Noonan45 Comments

Here’s what life will be like for, say, me in 2041:

I’ll have died at the age of 77 of an easily treatable disease which I could not get care for because the National Health Service didn’t have sufficient resources to treat me before the disease went too far.

I’ll have been living from the age of 67 forward in a one-room, government-supplied retirement home which I was forced in to because given the way the economy developed I was never able to secure enough wealth to replace the home I lost in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

My 401k had been destroyed years previously.  First by a government program to start taxing it, secondly by the massive inflation which was necessary to get our annual deficit to become 15% of GDP. 

While I officially retired at the age of 67 and started to collect my Social Security (worth about 50% less than it is today because during that bout of inflation the government kept insisting, in spite of rising food and fuel prices, that inflation was non-existent and thus SS payments remained constant in dollar amounts while going down in actual value), I actually quit work at the age of 60 because I found out that by a varied combination of government benefits, I could actually get more income by sitting on my duff than by working 40 hours a week.  At that point, it stopped bothering me so much that a cheeseburger costs $12 because Uncle Sam was picking up the tab.  Until, that is, they banned the purchase of cheeseburgers in the interests of cutting National Health Service costs.

I did get some exercise from the age of about 57 on because the government mandates on fuel efficiency priced me out of automobile ownership.  This resulted in a great deal of walking on my part as the inefficient bus system provided by government didn’t get me to where I needed to be when I needed to be there.  I moved out of the suburbs and in to the city center because at least there were stores closer to home:  on the other hand, I had to pay higher prices for the basics because government policy was to forbid “big box” stores in the area because they provided “unfair” competition to the small shops.

I found as I entered my 50’s that food was harder to obtain – the price kept rising and there kept being less of it.  Various agricultural policies were taking more farm land out of production while various taxes were making the production and consumption of things like beef out of the question.  I was given Supplementary Food Insurance which allowed me to buy whole grain bread, government cheese and all the potatoes I could eat.

I got a boost to my health as I gave up cigarette smoking when the banned it outdoors, where I did most of my smoking.  Also, even buying generic smokes at the Indian reservation was running me $80 a carton.  On the other hand, I found out that ‘Capulco Gold Lights were an admirable substitute, though they did make things a bit hazy; on the plus side, I was permitted to fire up a joint even indoors at work!

It is where we’re heading, people, if things go well.  In other words, if the government manages to avoid complete fiscal collapse, this is how it will be.  Unless you are already quite rich or you manage to get juiced in with a high level, government job, this is what life will be like.  We can still avoid this, but only if we crush the left in 2014 and 2016.  If they win in both those years, then get ready for your government-rationed health care, food and housing…as people eke out a miserable, impoverished existence while liberals (living in guarded enclaves) endlessly tell us how great they are making things for us.

 

The Texas Education Miracle

Mark Noonan87 Comments

From The American Interest:

The Department of Education has just released its first state-by-state comparison of education statistics, and the report has a few surprises. Texas performed extremely well, tying five other states for the third-best graduation rate in the country, at 86 percent.
And Texas isn’t the only high-performing red state: Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Tennessee all place within the top ten as well. Meanwhile, New York, Rhode Island, and California, all of which take a traditional, high-spending, blue model approach to education, are closer to the middle of the pack , with graduation rates in the mid-70s.
This is convincing evidence against the popular notion that we can fix the public education system if only we are willing to spend more money. Not only does Texas do a better job of graduating its students than its blue state competition; it does so at a fraction of the cost per student.

More and more of that and then go out and explain to the American people – especially poor and middle class Americans who live in areas which usually vote Democrat – that we have a better plan and that their current education problems are the deliberate and malicious result of Democrat education policies. Pull no punches – tell them (again and again and again) that liberal Democrats want lousy education because badly educated kids become government dependents.  Don’t let them off the hook by saying nonsensical, idiotic statements like “all of us want excellent education for our kids” because Democrats – by their actions – prove they don’t want it.  They want bloated education budgets.  Well paid union workers.  Graft and kickbacks.  But not education.  We bring this to the American people and we’ll start to do the main thing needed:  prove that we are on their side while Democrats are not.

Fight the long fight and never give the left an inch.  That is the path not just to victory, but a reformed America.

A (Temporarily) Lost Debate

Mark Noonan52 Comments

We certainly haven’t convinced a majority of our fellow Americans on this basic issue:

…Sixty percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll support raising taxes on incomes more than $250,000 a year, long a popular option overall, but also a divisive one: While 73 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents are in favor, far fewer Republicans, 39 percent, agree…

…Sixty-seven percent in this poll…oppose another suggestion, raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.  And on this idea, strong opposition surpasses strong support by more than 3-1, 49 to 14 percent…

So, at the end of the day, a solid majority are in favor of raising taxes on “the rich” while an even more solid majority are opposed to the basic, common-sense idea of raising the age of Medicare eligibility in order to preserve the Medicare system.  People are in favor of something which won’t help and opposed to something which would.  Whatever else we did in 2012, we utterly failed to make a dent on the issue of fiscal reform of the United States government.

I think our failure on taxes is that our absolute opposition to all tax increases has painted us in to a corner where Democrats (aided by the by-lined Democrats in the MSM) can label us as extreme.  To be sure, opposing tax increases has been, is and will remain a key GOP principal because we know that you can never feed the Big Government beast enough.  No matter how much money you give to it, it will be blown through and more demanded.  We’d have a $6 trillion a year budget if we hadn’t held the line on taxes all these years.  But one must not allow rigidity to overcome good sense – we should have seen four or more years ago that as long as there are people with more money than they know what to do with the Democrats would be able to successfully campaign on an “make the rich pay their fair share” slogan.  That most of these super-rich are liberals and that Democrat tax proposals will hit the super-rich lightly, if at all, is irrelevant: we handed them an issue and ideological rigidity against tax increases prevented us from a counter-offensive which can preserve low marginal rates (vital, as we know, for economic growth).  This is the genesis of my “wealth tax” proposal – a tax aimed at the very richest and not at productive capital, but at money just squirreled away in tax shelters of various types.  Had we come out with a wealth tax for the 2012 campaign it would have been us attacking Democrats and deflecting their attack on us – at worst, it would have been a wash and it may have worked out to our credit…and we’d be in a much stronger position right now to fight for lower marginal rates to be maintained.

Our failure on entitlement reform stems from the failure on taxes – as a party which has been successfully painted as defending low taxes for the rich, any and all reasonable reforms of entitlements can be (and have been) cast by the Democrats as a callous disregard for the poor and middle class by a party which is only interested in defending low taxes for the rich.  Yes, I know this isn’t true, at all – but it is how we’ve been painted and it is something we must change if we are to succeed.  Remember, Obama won’t be President forever – eventually we will be back in power.  When we get there if we haven’t convinced a majority of Americans to back us on entitlement reform then there’s no point in winning.  If we don’t reform entitlements then even if we some how manage to avoid fiscal collapse in the next five years or so then we are still absolutely stuck with the fact that entitlements will soon eat up almost all government revenues.  That is unsustainable.  But we can’t offer ourselves as reformers of entitlements until the people trust us as defenders of the poor and the middle class.  That we already are (no greater enemy of the poor and middle class than a tax hiking, entitlement expanding liberal who pretends there is no crisis), but the people don’t know it – don’t understand it; don’t buy it.

To get the people firmly on our side we have to be seen as firmly on their side.  To be sure, it is almost certain that things will just get worse and worse as Obama’s 2nd term unfolds.  Nothing which was wrong in 2008 has been fixed and nothing will be fixed as long as Obama is President – he’s apparently unaware of the problems or just doesn’t care about them.  Whatever the case, the problems won’t be solved.  But it won’t be enough for us to just be “not the Democrats”…we have to be seen as something which will change the course from the Democrats and in a manner which is easily understood as helping the poor and middle class.  This, in turn, requires a ruthless turning away from big business, from those who have, and a relentless pointing out of the plight of the poor and the middle class and a relentless education of the same that it is the Democrats who have, on purpose, done all this to them.  My “wealth tax” proposal is one method.  Another is to go gangbusters, once again, for school choice.  Yet another is to point out that Uncle Sam can use Medicare money to help people take care of their old folks rather than shoving them off – at twice the cost – to sub-standard nursing homes (and telling oldsters and their kids that we’re going to keep them at home will resonate as more and more people get old).  On and on like that – show them that we are not for the rich, that we are for the poor and the middle class…that we will get them better results without taking anything away (do not campaign against “free stuff” – in time, with rational economic policies, less and less free stuff will be needed until we reach a tipping point where only a tiny minority is getting free stuff…but if you go out there and complain about the free stuff then all you do is automatically alienate everyone who is getting free stuff…including those who would rather not but just don’t see any other way: really, we have to stop being the Stupid Party and learn how to play a long game).

Its either become the party of the people, or perish. Our choice.  We’ll see what we decide.