Tag: success

I’m Envious of Billionaires Too!

America, Economy, Government, Health Care, Science, Society & Culture, Values

At last night’s Democrat debate schoolyard brawl/whine-fest, the unifying theme was, “Let’s bash millionaires and billionaires!” No, wait a minute…let’s just bash billionaires because everyone up there, perhaps with the exception of Boot Edge Edge, (although his CNN or MSNBC contract is waiting) is already a millionaire.

This is one of the big problems of the Democrats. SUCCESS ENVY. Does anyone honestly think, if having invented a product or service that makes a billion dollars, Klobuchar, Buttigieg or Sanders would say, “No, I’ve made too much money?” The hypocrisy of the Left stinks to high heaven.

Hey, I’m envious of billionaires too. I wish I had invented a better service than Quotron (the predecessor to the Bloomberg product/service) and made billions. I’ll bet the “My Pillow” guy is doing ok too!

The problem with the Left is their envy has always manifested itself in a Robin Hood complex. Unable to achieve success on their own, they demand that those who have it give the fruits of that success to them. They argue that those who succeeded either gamed the system somehow, or stepped all over exploited workers, cheated, or were successful because the government was responsible for that success (“You didn’t build that.” – Barack Obama).

It’s the winners against the losers. Irrespective of how the billionaires made their money, let’s think through what would happen if Sanders or Warren were elected and able to impose confiscatory taxes on people making, I think one of the suggestions is, more than $600,000 per year.

  1. The arithmetic is extremely simple and everyone with half a brain already knows that even if you taxed ALL of that income at 100% there wouldn’t be enough money to fund the Democrat utopian dream list.
  2. If you imposed those taxes, would the high income earners put the same amount of money away in private equity, venture capital, hedge or mutual funds, the pools of capital that fuel innovation, job creation, and which indeed trickle down (sometimes flash flood down) to employees thereby boosting the economy and growth in general? And what would that do to the American Spirit and the American Dream? Would people still work hard to advance their careers, think out of the box, invent new things, hire employees, shop more at Saks or WalMart? Of course not. Their consumption and spending would decrease as they would be deprived of the incentive to make more than the specified threshold.
  3. If you actually confiscate wealth as some Leftists have suggested, i.e. say to the wealthy…”I’m going to demand you give us X% of your 401(k) or stock portfolio or savings account so we can redistribute it by providing healthcare or tuition free college for all” for example, how hard will you want to work knowing you’ll be penalized if you’re actually successful?
  4. Look at those people on stage in South Carolina last night. Even if you’re the most altruistic person in America, would you really want ANY of them to decide how to redistribute and allocate the money they’ve taken from you in taxes?

For further understanding of what happens when Democrats take your money and redistribute it, you need look no further than Obama’s 2012 $800 billion, “shovel ready projects”, so-called “stimulus package”. Here’s the breakdown of how that our money was spent:

First of all, it galls me that “Individual Tax Cuts” are called “stimulus” at all. TAX CUTS ARE THE ABSENCE OF INCOME OR WEALTH CONFISCATION, NOT GOVERNMENT SPENDING! (TAX REBATES, by the way, are a RETURN OF YOUR OWN MONEY THAT THE GOVERNMENT PREVIOUSLY CONFISCATED) It’s RELIEF, not STIMULUS. Are you stimulated by the act of a government bureaucrat taking out the nail they drove into your forehead?

Same goes for Alternative Minimum Tax Relief, the second item in the chart. It too was just the absence of additional taxation and had nothing to do with “shovel ready projects”.

State Fiscal Relief wasn’t infrastructure spending either – it was handouts to fiscally irresponsible states, particularly Democrat-controlled states. As with “Aid to Directly Impacted Individuals”, it trickled down only to the public sector unions to fund their entitlement (pensions and healthcare) spending shortfalls and to shore up welfare spending as well.

The final category…Public Investment Outlays… paid for the signs you saw on some of the highways and parkways around you. Did we really see much of any benefit to our nation’s roads and railways from that $270 billion? No. And so only 1/3 of the so-called “Stimulus” went to “infrastructure projects”. The rest went to reward favorite Democrat constituencies, i.e. into the ether.

I used to think Liberals were altruistic. I’ve learned over the years that their motivations are either the garnering of power for power’s sake, or an unbounded arrogance that if they have power and control of our money, they can make everybody happy. Both are evil because they deprive us of the impetus to work hard and achieve success for ourselves, and by extension, our families, communities and our country.

So do we really want Bernie Sanders, Elisabeth Warren, Joe Biden or any of the other megalomaniacal, power-famished hypocrites who were on that stage last night in charge of the government?

To Buffet and Gates’ credit, they’re working hard to give much of their wealth away and there are a lot of true needs and programs where philanthropy is the beginning of a solution. The various charities that build water purification plants in Africa such as “Action Against Hunger” or Doctors Without Borders are good examples, or here at home, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation or the Appalachia Service Project. Do you really want any of those Democrat candidates determining how money should be doled out for such projects? Not all, but the vast majority of Democrat controlled spending consists of handouts to “victims” who with hands out will vote to keep them in power.  

I’d like to be a billionaire too. I wouldn’t buy a yacht. I wouldn’t buy a bigger house. I would still insist that my kids and grandkids work at McDonalds when they turn 16, or stock shelves as mine did. And I’d find those meaningful charities that TRULY support the TRULY needy, or that promote self-reliance, meritocracy, the production of goods and services that advance the frontiers of science and health, human longevity, and natural resource renewal and preservation (NOT ENVIRO-FASCISM BUT CLASSIC CONSERVATION).

Please let’s stop allowing the Left to serve as our nanny, putting spoonful’s of pablum in and wiping the corners of our mouths while congratulating themselves over champagne on how well they’re taking care of us. Please America, just at the point where we’re starting to get back to basics, let’s not empower demagogues such as we saw at the debate last night to spew their utopian fantasies or, God forbid, enact more of their soul-crushing plans.

Traditionalists vs. Progressives

Politics, Society & Culture

by Treadstone (Contributor)

The battle for the soul of our country is not between Republicans and Democrats, not between Conservatives and Liberals, but between Traditionalists and so-called Progressives; in broad terms, the “Right” and the “Left”.

First of all, Progressives aren’t progressive. Just listen to any of the Democrat presidential candidates for 2020, all of whom wrap themselves in the “Progressive” label, and you’ll hear a mish-mash of old, tired, recycled Marxist/Socialist drivel dressed in inflammatory and headline-grabbing, 7 second soundbites and catchy phrases. It’s lipstick on a pig. It’s regressive, not progressive.

Look up “Traditionalists” and you’ll see a variety of definitions and descriptions. Some equate Traditionalists with religious conservatives, some with people born before 1945, some call Traditionalists the “silent generation”.

We characterize Traditionalists as those who espouse many or most of the Core Values listed in our About Page. In shorthand, we us the term “The Right” even though that term itself has many connotations. We use The Left as the opposing side in the culture war.

We Traditionals on The Right look around us and are appalled, perhaps even frightened by what we see happening before our eyes. We know we live in the greatest country in the world, but we see the light-shining-on-the-hill dimming, perhaps not precipitously, but as in a death by a thousand cuts, slowly but surely.

At its core, our society is still more traditional than not, but the megaphones the Internet and social media have put in the hands of Progressives: “victims”, takers, losers, indolent, faithless and statists gives them undue influence and exposure.

We recently came across a really good essay by John Hawkins on Town Hall that nails what’s happening to our culture.  We suggest reading the whole article, but here are the bullet points:

  • We treat success as an accident or a cheat while defending people who make bad decisions, who won’t educate themselves or who won’t work.
  • We’ve allowed pornography to become so accessible that it’s practically universally viewed, even among teenagers.
  • We love victims so much that people actually fake hate crimes to claim victim status.
  • We celebrate losers and deviants by giving them their own reality shows. Meanwhile, Hollywood regularly portrays businessmen, Christians and soldiers as the worst people on earth.
  • More children have died because of Roe v. Wade than were killed during the Holocaust.
  • Marriage is falling apart and we’re encouraging that by pushing gay marriage.
  • Our universities reward Communists, terrorists and blatant anti-American sentiment with professorships. Those are the last people who should be teaching impressionable young Americans.
  • There’s a whole grievance industry full of people who make a living claiming to be “offended” by things.
  • Religion and morality are denigrated while nihilism and immorality are considered cool.
  • Legalism has superseded morality and what’s “right” and “wrong” has become secondary to what’s “legal” and “illegal.”
  • We’re the greatest, most powerful, most prosperous and most virtuous nation that has ever existed and despite all of that, we obsess over our nations faults instead of our achievements.
  • Americans across the spectrum are being encouraged to separate themselves off from the larger culture and nurse grievances that barely would have been given a thought a few decades ago.
  • In practice, our society focuses almost exclusively on the short term without thinking about the long-term consequences of our actions.
  • We have a higher moral standard for the NFL than we do for our own leaders in Washington.
  • We have a political party dedicated to the idea taking things from people who’ve worked for it and giving it to people who haven’t.
  • We make little effort to assimilate immigrants into our society and instead, encourage them to embrace the culture they fled for the United States.
  • We’ve stopped acting as if we have to pay back the money we borrow.
  • We treat the rule of law as optional, depending on who’s impacted by it.
  • We believe our children can grow up in a moral sewer and still turn out to be fine, upstanding citizens regardless.

Hawkins’ conclusion is both devastating as well as prescriptive:

“ We’ve become so divided, so antagonistic, so morally separated that for the first time in over a century there are people asking hard questions about how much we really have in common with other Americans. If you’re comparing let’s say a conservative from South Carolina to a liberal from California, the honest answer is “not much that matters.” Perhaps not even enough to hold a country together over the long haul if one group or the other ever became politically dominant.

There’s only one way to change that and it’s to address the real sickness at the heart of American culture. That sickness is our newfound reluctance to address the moral health of our society. Over the long haul, we can’t thrive and we may not even be able to survive as a divided, degenerate society full of people who reward failure, resent success and live for the moment. Morality matters and if we forget that, our nation is doomed to descend into decadence, decay and perhaps one day, even dissolution.”

Quite simply, we agree. In other articles we attempt to answer the question, “So how do we revive basic morality in our country?” Stay tuned.

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