Scary...

I watched the "Eat the Rich" video... very good, as Ryan said. Not only does it accurately show just how wrong the current "tax-and-spend" mentality of the left really is... it also made Michael Moore look like an even bigger idiot than he already had.

What is scary is how many people, including those on the right, seem to think that the President's speech had real substance. I watched the speech live while at work in the poker room at the casino (I do love running that room... lots of TVs and no music to compete with it), and he never got much further into details for his plan than the "facts" that fiscal discipline had gotten lax in the last decade and that keeping the Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans was a bad idea.

That is the one and only pillar of Obama and the Left's policy schedule: tax the rich. They forget or ignore that this is (at best) a finite and very VERY short-term solution to our problems. As the video pointed out, were the Left to follow Moore's suggestion and completely seize the assets of the richest 200 people in the country, it wouldn't pay for even ONE YEAR worth of spending that Obama has implemented in the last three, and then it would all be gone for the future, thus placing the burden on the shoulders of the very people they are "trying" to protect and assist... the poor and middle class. Were we to recall each and every soldier, sailor, airman and marine from overseas service right now, and never ship another one out again... ever... we wouldn't even reduce the government's red ink by 20%.

I saw an interesting poll this morning. It seems an online poll asked participants if they favored higher taxes, lower taxes or the same taxes as a means to reduce the deficit... and the overwhelming majority chose "the same taxes". Even I, a registered Democrat, favor a reduction in taxes... but I can't help but think that this poll (if accurate) is a telling sign of the state of the nation's view on government size and cost. They same majority of the poll said they wanted large reductions in spending immediately, rather than the same spending or greater spending. I think that America has seen the recent (and, in my opinion, ongoing) recession for exactly what it is: the Federal Government spending more than it makes for no good reason. Keep revenue streams where they are, but reduce spending to a point where the government actually reduces deficits. Maybe America isn't as dumb as people think...

More importantly, maybe America is coming to realize that people like Moore and Obama are simply wrong when they choose to look to the Government to fix all that is broken. Government distributing funds to those most in need means that the Government must first take those funds from someone else, and even the most ignorant American can recognize that it isn't a long walk from taxing the "uber-rich" (Moore's words) into poverty to taxing the middle class into poverty. This brings home quite nicely the single greatest flaw in Marxist theory that can ever be made: all forms of socialism do nothing more than reduce the average to the lowest common denominator, each and every time. The "labor theory of value" is as worthless as the rest of "Das Capital"... and the more people like Moore quote it, the more America learns this.