The End of America
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After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published “The People’s Pottage.” A year later, in 1954, he died. “The People’s Pottage” opens thus:
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”
Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.
Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When “Silent Cal” Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.
And today? Obama’s first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.
The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.
Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers. Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes, and “sin taxes” on booze, cigarettes and, soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.
Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi’s House. A surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1 percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8 percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to provide health insurance for employees.
Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that businesses provide their employees.
The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?
While the hardest working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.
Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.
Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.
Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans
All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America — as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution — “for ourselves and our posterity.”
China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that’s swollen to double its size in a year. The 20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows another pattern.
“The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event,” writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine. “Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious.”
Even the establishment is starting to get the message.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
Filed under: Economics, Politics, Uncategorized
Wade Rathke is the Chief Organizer of Community Organizations International (formally Acorn International), Founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN (1970-2008), and Founder and Chief Organizer of Local 100, Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12892
(In Rathke’s interview with the Daily Kos) he says that Americans are not getting all the government benefits they are legally entitled to and that they should claim what society owes them.
This is, of course, the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis. Rathke, and those like him, want to overload the system in order to overthrow it.
Amazing how smart you’ve gotten the older I get, Mr. B. I see many people lamenting the future of American, documenting the decline of America, but few people offering solutions. Why not do as our forefathers did, high tail it out and create a better world somewhere else? The only other options I see are secession and outright revolution, neither seems plausible.
When someone breaks into your house, do you follow him around the house with your journal, documenting his actions? Do you merely wail about how you are being robbed? No, you smash him in the teeth, or you flee to safety.
Anyone interested in further gloom and doom along these lines, can find it in my article “Endstation America”.
http://www.patrickfoydossier.com/patrickfoydossier/Endstation_America.html
Team Obama is certainly a disaster, but it is a disaster which must be blamed squarely on those fraudulent “conservatives”, Messrs. Cheney and Bush Jr. You might even call Obama the “Bush blowback”. The failed Cheney/Bush co-Presidency is only a proximate cause. Looking at the big picture, Buchanan cites Garet Garrett, who was reacting against FDR. From the aftermath of the 1965 edition of Garrett’s Ex America: “Before his death in 1954, Mr. Garrett retired to a cave on a river bank at Tuckahoe, New Jersey, where he lived very quietly with his wife, making notes and comments on the passing show of monstrous human folly.”
Patrick Foy
@Patrick Foy
“..it is a disaster which must be blamed squarely on those fraudulent “conservatives”, Messrs. Cheney and Bush…”
This is like saying Rahm Emanual doesn’t “look” for opportunities, he simply reacts in the only way past events allow him to.
Even if you were right, and Bush were some cartoon-like “100% screwed up”, still, your basic premise is kinda dumb.
The fault, dear Pat, is not in our government but in ourselves, that we are great consumers of big government. The only problem is that we want neither to pay for them (in higher taxes) nor give them up (“don’t reform government on the backs of …). There is no great cry about waste in government (even the Department of Defense, newly awake to this problem, is muted in its response) except in general. Propose specific reforms and a substantial body of enraged citizens will squelch them. The aged, the education establishment, health industry, etc all get heard and and kissed.
So, Pat, stop complaining about government. Obama’s tendencies would not be honored by the people were the people serious about small government.
I’ll say this as a Catholic and someone with Italian bloodlines, but America was ruined the minute all the Catholics and Jews came here in large numbers early last century. Let’s be honest. You can’t have a culture of self-reliance with no safety nets for failure with millions of Catholics and their mindset, and you can’t have Jews with their natural intellectual advantages in positions of power and influence and tilting the country to their favor and the expense of non Jews. The die was cast then. And people at the time knew it, and they have been watching as the place crumbled ever since. Ask any old WASP.
All of the stuff we see now is just part of the process that was put into motion in the early 1900s. I guess it is zero coincidence that the New Deal and all of that coincided with the arrival of millions and millions of catholics? With Jews assuming positions of power? Nah, it can’t be!!! It, it, it, it just CAN’T BE!!!!
Please….
Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
No dogs or Irish, eh Pat?
Nino wrote:
“I’ll say this as a Catholic and someone with Italian bloodlines, but America was ruined the minute all the Catholics and Jews came here in large numbers early last century….”
But Nino, presumably you mean “ruined” in the way the U.S. has moved in a more liberal/Leftist/socialist/social democratic direction. And thus you must also believe that much of the *rest* of the world is ruined too since since it has tended to go even further in that direction than the U.S.
So, did the Catholics and jews “ruin” that rest of the world too?
I suspect with the kind of “ruination” that Buchanan talks about and that Nino means there’s a big generation gap concerning its perception. Us older folks, steeped in what are old verities and beliefs see what’s going on in the U.S. and indeed see it as the very definition of what we always thought was “ruination.”
But I suspect younger folks don’t see it that way at all. Not that they don’t see that it has problems, but I think at the very least they’d point out that our “old” nation had problems too, with many saying they were worse.
A tricky thing saying what exactly constitutes “progress.” In the eye of the beholder to a great degree. And it seems to me a dicey thing betting against America no matter how much ruination it can seem to me to be inviting. 200+ years with the same government, creating the greatest amount of wealth and freedom ever seen in the world ain’t chopped liver in terms of modern human history. And maybe the much shorter and less successful reigns of nearly every other modern government—if not all—is a good argument that those who are against having an elastic enough system to accommodate the kind of big changes we had with the New Deal and Mr. Obama must not mind the kind of periodic upheavals and revolutions you see in other countries since that may be the only real option. Upheavals and revolutions and etc. with all the dislocations and civil wars and sufferings and etc. that can accompany same.
Not an ideal choice, but life is indeed usually a matter choosing between less than ideal options.
Nino, as I am also a Catholic and of Italian descent, I would have to disagree with at least some of what you write. Italians are inward looking in that they regard family as everything and are suspicious of government and all it entails, hardly making them good candidates for supporting big government. I believe I am correct in noting that government provided “safety nets” grew out of a sensibility that was both Protestant and largely northern European, from Scandinavia and Germany, recognizing that having homeless people die in the streets was in no one’s interest. Catholic regard for the sanctity of life may not have had much to do with it.
WASPs undeniably shaped America for much of its first 200 years, but their “self reliance” benefited from creating institutions that supported their supremacy. That broke down when large numbers of “outsiders” gained access to university education after the Second World War.
Then why did you throw The American Conservative behind the election of Obama?
I have seen to many people get more then they earn and to many people earn more then they get.
What do you EXACTLY mean by ” hardest working ” ?
To be sure they are a lot of slackers- i mean look at slave holders that is the ultimate slacker of all and yet they profited much despite be lazy and self rightous. And our last president was the biggest slacker of all- born with the most, made the least. How could you people actually respect that-huh?
TomB:
What ruined the “rest of the world” was that it was destroyed in a war, actually several wars. I don’t want to compare life in Italy or France or Germany or Norway to America b/c we have not had to deal with all the physical and human devastation of a succession of wars since 1900 — not very long ago. So I am speaking most directly to America and what America could have been. As for the likes of South American europeanized countries, they have been economic failures until recently, and they are plagued by deep-seated racism of “gringos” vs the natives and mulattoes.
I think there IS a direct correlation to the socialism of this country and the arrival of poor immigrants of a Catholic background. Can anyone here honestly say we would be LESS socialist without the likes of the Kennedy clan, the Moynihans, the Leahys, the Dodds, the Bidens? Add in the Cumos, the pseudo-conservatives like Giulinani and Molinaris, the Pelosi family? Not to mention the innumerable Jews on the left in the media, the academe, in politics. True, there was a strong WASP contingent in there as well, but they didn’t get their massive programs until the Catholic immigration waves and Jews moving into positions of power in many institutions, and now with yet more Catholics from Mexico?
You do raise a valid point, along with Mr. Giraldi, that socialism thrives in northern European countries. But I think that is more b/c they were homogenous as a people — but not anymore, and now look how their social experiment is falling apart. Anyone been to Norway lately? If not, be prepared to see what looks like a mini Pakistan and Somalia in Oslo, its capital city. London is not even English. Paris is a mess. Germany too.
In the end, I guess I have to throw my hands up and say “Who knows?” I sure as hell hope we don’t keep drifting toward socialism. But it has been gaining steam and it looks like with all the Mexicans now that our hopes are fading and it may take a generation or two for Mexicans to be in a position where they have something to lose (money) through promoting socialism and want to be left alone to spend and invest as they see fit.
I don’t know the answers. I am just here reporting what I see. Just the facts, maam.
It will not be too long before White European race becomes a minority population in the United States.
Yes, Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan and many others might probably not be around to see that happen; because, it is gradually happening.
Wise Latina women and very wise Muslims breed faster than White Europeans do.
White European women choose abortions of their offspring.
America was founded on Christianity 300 years ago. Today’s America is without Christianity.
A de facto Muslim man got elected to White House where Christianity is utilized, but Islam is actually practiced.
Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan has already become a minority now!
“in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.”
Meanwhile, “Communist” China’s public spending as a % of GDP is 30%. Canada and America have very close public spending levels, but Canadians get “free” “health” “care” out of the deal.
I don’t see Americans fleeing America as the Brits and New Zealanders and South Africans are – yet. How bad does it have to get, though? Brazil, the Philipines, Thailand, Uruguay, and Slovenia are just a few countries off the top of my head where someone with a modest nest egg could conceivably live a better life than in America.
What is to be done? I see far too many people merely documenting the decline of America and western civilization, and I see too few solutions being proffered .
[...] End of America? Patrick Buchanan and other conservative thinkers are scared to death that the America they know it is [...]
In response to my post Nino wrote:
“You do raise a valid point, along with Mr. Giraldi, that socialism thrives in northern European countries.”
Yeah, I thought that was a germane phenomenon, and that there does seem to be somewhat of a … Leftward directionality to the arrow of modern world history in its entirety too. But I will say that your post did strike me as raising a very astute point that I at least had never thought about and that is the role of Christianity in that phenomenon.
Striking when you think about it: No matter whose leaders it has come from, European, African, Asian or whomever, nor even what kind of leader it came from, including the most virulent religion haters imaginable such as Leninist communists, the core message of the most vociferous partisans of that Leftward direction especially has often been cast in the language of Christianity, hasn’t it? “We are our brothers’ keeper” and etc.
Of course much has been a bastardization of same, but, still….
Very very interesting Nino.
(And by the way I loved your opinion in the Ricci case.)
Cheers,
Dont you know that Joseph Goebbels is laughing in his grave witnessing the successful brainwashing of the masses. The question is…, are there any Americans left. The answer is yes. Check out the following video interview with, of all people Ted Nugent, regarding the 2nd amendment:
http://biggeekdaddy.com/miscvideos/TedNugent.html