Breakfast Special Today: Low Hanging Fruit

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  • 08/20/2022

 

I thought I’d serve everyone a little low-hanging fruit for breakfast this morning: a speech by Alan Grayson, the gibbering lunatic who was mercifully ejected from the House of Representatives by the voters of Florida’s 8th District in the midterm elections.  Grayson brightened the lame-duck session of the House with his high-energy prop comedy, bringing pictures of expensive things The Evil Rich could buy if Congress extends their tax cuts: a Mercedes, twenty thousand bottles of Grey Poupon, expensive wine, and so forth.  You can see the video over at Real Clear Politics.  Warning: it goes on for a long time.

Of course, since Grayson is an idiot, he blows his little show in the first ten seconds, by blathering about “Obama tax cuts.”  Barack Obama cut no one’s taxes.  He is on the verge of raising them, fantastically, but George W. Bush signed the tax cuts that are due to expire, for both The Evil Rich and The Sainted Middle Class.  We may have purged some exceptionally stupid Democrats from office in 2010, but we're a long way from dispelling their conviction that voters are stupid.

The really fun parts come toward the end, where Grayson wails that tax cuts for The Evil Rich will cost taxpayers a hundred billion dollars.  Stop scratching your head .  You know what he means: it will prevent the redistribution of a hundred billion dollars from class enemies to the proletariat.  When people like Grayson say “taxpayer”, they really mean “dependent.”  All money belongs to the State, and money withheld from the State is money stolen from the children under its care.  Of course, the figure Grayson cites is the kind of casual lie Marxist theory specializes in.  He is no more capable of understanding the Laffer Curve, and the effect of tax rates on economic behavior and tax receipts, than your cat is capable of learning to play Monopoly.

Grayson has some ideas about what the government should do with a hundred billion dollars, instead of giving it back to the people who earned it.  Our glorious, all-knowing State could use it to create three million jobs!  And not just burger-flipping jobs, but “living wages” of $30,000 per year!  This would instantly reduce unemployment by two percent, and turbocharge the economy as those newly-employed workers cash their government paychecks to pay rent, eat at restaurants, and get haircuts.  If the State does not enforce its wisdom on the bourgeoisie, Grayson sternly warns, those three million people will wind up “living in their cars.”  Which, I might add, would probably end up being repossessed, probably with the unemployed and their families trapped inside.  I don’t understand why Grayson didn’t mention that.

What would those three million people end up doing, to earn their $30k per year of government cheese?  Put up signs announcing the glorious triumph of Democrat stimulus spending?  We obviously don’t have enough people doing that, since unemployment got worse – worse than their own nightmare projections – after Democrats threw almost nine hundred billion dollars at the problem.  There are places where “stimulus” jobs were created at a cost of over two million bucks apiece.  A lot of those phantom jobs lasted precisely as long as the stimulus money did, then vanished into the expensive ether from which they came.

It’s easy to laugh at the crude antics of Grayson, who is also noted for saying his victorious opponent in the 2010 elections, Dan Webster, was a member of the Taliban, and Republican health care ideas depend on the speedy death of sick people.  The ideas he expresses, however, are not at all different from mainstream Democrat economic thought.  He’s giving you a very low-wattage version of the Party line:

All money is the rightful property of the State.

The State is the virtuous collective will of non-rich people.

Tax cuts for The Evil Rich cost The People money by impoverishing the State.

Higher tax rates automatically generate increased revenue from a static economy.

Contrary to the Constitution, property rights attenuate with income level, and vanish entirely once a mystically-ordained threshold of $250k per year for non-politicians is reached.

The Evil Rich do not spend money.  They hoard it, or spend it on ridiculous luxuries, produced by people whose jobs do not matter.  Only The Sainted Middle Class generates positive economic activity.

Jobs are not created as a response to demand and opportunity.  They are goods the State can purchase and bestow upon a grateful populace. 

You won’t find many Democrats, most especially including their leadership, who disagree with all of Grayson’s ideas, when they are presented in a less boneheaded way.  I defy you to name a single Democrat who disagrees with all of them.  Sadly, you won’t find nearly enough Republicans who disagree with all of them, which is why it’s so important to educate 2012 voters about the importance of finishing the job they started in 2010.  Alan Grayson is a useful educational resource. 

Correction: The perils of having too many browser tabs going at once... I incorrectly attributed the video link above to Red State instead of Real Clear Politics, although the link works properly.  I have corrected the mistake, and apologize to all involved.  You should read both sites, like I do!

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