My wife was reading the news and came across an item and I heard her mumble to herself, “why are they cutting the top tax rate, idiots”. Now, to you and me who are long time Conservatives, we know precisely why: lowering the top marginal rate spurs growth and thus, ultimately, leads to more revenue for the government. But to someone like my wife, who despises politics, it was just a dumb give-away to people who already have quite enough. You have two ways to go with this:
1. Call my wife stupid (I advise against it, but you do you) and try to hammer her into believing that cutting rich people’s taxes is a good idea or…
2. Understand for regular folks who don’t pay close attention that in a political sense, cutting taxes on rich people is not going to be popular. Ever.
Abraham Lincoln advised that a widespread belief, whether well- or ill-founded, cannot lightly be set aside. You can, with patience, set yourself to the task of educating people into your views, but while they have the views, all you can do is work with them to advance as much of your cause as you can. Another example of where Conservatives, who are right, will still run afoul of the people is in the matter of the minimum wage. You and I know that the minimum wage, itself, is one of the dumbest ideas ever created in economics – that all it does is price low-skill, entry-level workers out of the labor market. We can explain this until we are blue in the face and it won’t get us anywhere…average folks just figure that if a person is working, it should be for a wage they can live on. The folks are going to look at it in terms of, “could I live on $8.25 and hour?”, and there answer is going to be a flat “no”, and so they’ll think that paying someone that much per hour just isn’t right.
I bring this up not in order to urge us to abandon Conservatism, but in order that we might understand that there are some brick walls we’re up against and we’re going to have to adjust our playbook to work our way around or over them. That is, we have to play the game on the field that exists, not the field that we might prefer. And it’s not just we who have this problem: our Progressive friends do as well. They have a whole host of ideas which are not remotely popular but they are determined to enact come heck or high water (in this, we have the advantage: more of our policies are actually popular than Progressives policies are). They, too, have to work their way around the widespread beliefs of the people. They do it by lies and disgusting political tricks. As we have a sense of honor, we can’t do it that way…but we still have to lean new ways of doing things.
What our Never Trump, Fredo-Cons don’t get is that we’re not going to have anything Conservative if all we’re doing is quoting the Founders and arguing for lower taxes. First off all, taxes and the Constitution are not the crux of the matter. We’ve seen even Progressives agree to lower tax rates from time to time and we’ve especially seen over the previous eight years that the Constitution is utterly meaningless to them. Additionally, as long as their unconstitutional actions don’t immediately harm the mass of the people, the people will not rise up against them (they did screw up with Obamacare – shoving it through unconstitutionally wasn’t fatal to them, however…what was fatal is that the bloody thing didn’t work, not even half-work like Social Security does). In order for us to have anything – to leave any semblance of America to those who will be alive 100 years from now – we on the right are going to have to get very smart about how we take on issues which matter to the people.
Think about it like this – if the Republican Party were to cut taxes across the board except that on people who make more than $1,000,000.00 per year, the top marginal rate was going to 40%, then we’d win the tax debate in a walk-over. All we would have done is move the top rate four tenths of a percent higher and on income which is 120% higher than now. The top marginal rate today is 39.6% and it kicks in at $400,000.00 per year. Even the highest income earners would get relief because there’s $600,000.00 more in yearly income which would be at a lower rate than now but we on our side would be able to say, “see, we’re making the rich pay their ‘fair share'”.
Let’s raise the minimum wage to $16.00 per hour – with an allowance for companies of less than 100 employees to deduct on taxes, dollar for dollar, each dollar over $8 per hour. It makes us in favor of a “living wage” without putting an undue burden on small to mid-sized companies (larger companies can carry the freight).
Yes, I realize that all of this is based upon a false understanding of pure, free-market economics. But, what are you going to do? Tell a blue collar worker in Michigan that the rich guy has to pay less in taxes than he does, now? Tell people that they don’t need a higher wage?
The bottom line is that we’re in a crisis in this nation. We’ve got schools failing to teach kids to read but filling their minds with Progressive garbage. We’ve got a popular culture which relentlessly and mercilessly attacks basic human decency. We’ve got a Ruling Class which is corrupt to the bone and willing to sell us out to anyone, foreign or domestic. The institution of the family is under attack. Religion is being forced to prove itself worthy of being allowed to exist. Fifty more years of this, and there won’t be an America left to conserve. We’ve simply got to get power and keep it, for a long time. And we can’t obtain and retain power unless we’re offering something to the people which is of immediate, tangible benefit to them. Remember, the people are generally on our side on the matters of faith, family and property – only Progressive lunatics want to destroy faith and family and take away everyone’s property. They don’t dare campaign on that because they know their vote would drop to 20% if they did. We can’t beat something with nothing – we’ve got to bring something to the table.
Trump did – in 2016, he promised tangible things to the people. Yes, tax cuts were included – people do like their taxes cut, they are just less enthused about taxes being cut for people who make more than they do. But he also offered to bring back the jobs that Obama and the Fedo-Cons said weren’t coming back. He promised us a border wall…which is actually supported by a far larger segment of the Latino population than the MSM wants anyone to know. He promised to drain the swamp – and the people, correctly, view our government as hopelessly corrupt. What Trump didn’t promise us was that he was going to ensure that the 4th Amendment was going to be enforced just as the Founders envisioned. He’s enforcing it like that, but that wasn’t part of his sales campaign for the Presidency (and every political campaign is, at bottom, a sales campaign). You see? Promise what the people want, and then in addition to that, do the other things which need to be done, but don’t necessarily have a huge political constituency behind them.
We’ve got Trump in, now. He’s beset by enemies trying to annul the 2016 election. They may succeed: time will tell. But our fight was, is and remains to obtain and retain power for as long as we can. The longer our people are in charge the more likely our total program will be enacted. Give us 20 years of uninterrupted GOP government and we’ll have saved our nation. By the time the Democrats get back in after that, it’ll be too late for them to undo what we’ve done. It took the Progressives 80 long years to get us to where we are…because no one really wanted anything they were selling, so they have to go slow and disguise their real goals. We don’t have to do that – we can say with pride what our goal is: a people free, secure and able to do with their own as they wish. We can turn the clock back a lot faster than the Democrats pushed it forward…and turn it back in such a manner that it is increasingly difficult for them to get rolling again.
The key is power – we must have it. Having it means that we can’t be pie-in-the-sky purists on policy. We have to tailor our desires to what the people want at the moment. Never abandoning the goal and, indeed, never actually compromising it…but by weaving together what is possible with what is best, moving the ball forward, day after day.
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