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The Spectacle Blog
In his column yesterday, Ross Douthat made the point that the alternative to a free market deficit plan like Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity would be the European high tax, low growth model. Then he suggests that that model might not work as well in the U.S. as it does in European countries:
Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working-age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.
…what Obama didn’t acknowledge is that the alternative path could lead to a different country as well - a more stagnant and balkanized society, in which our promise to the elderly crowds out the fundamental promise of America itself.
Yet Obama still hasn’t promoted that alternative path. Instead, he’s stuck to using “millionaires and billionaires” as scapegoats, without advocating measures that would lead to fiscal sustainability. The left-wing scenario Douthat sketched out involves eliminating the Bush tax cuts for everyone, including middle class workers, and raising all kinds of other revenues as well.
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More Blog Posts by Joseph Lawler
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/04/19/if-not-the-ryan-plan
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btims| 4.19.11 @ 3:17PM
He's a radical idea to avoid racial and generational strife, reduce immigration. Since most immigration over the past 25 yrs has been of non-white immigrants, lower immigration levels and we will remain a majority caucasian, English speaking nation.
Is that racist of me? If so, please tell me why a country can't choose it's own course.
Is it so necessary for the country's population to be driven to half a billion (the course we're on)?
btims| 4.19.11 @ 3:17PM
Oops, should have started "Here's a radical idea...."
Ore Gone| 4.19.11 @ 4:27PM
No matter what the topic the best thing to do is to try to make it a race issue. The only people who are racist are the people who scream racism ever chance they get. It is their sole reason for being.
C Bowen| 4.19.11 @ 4:28PM
Is this a joke?
The alternative to the Obama-Ryan plan, is a free market plan that would balance the budget in two, maybe three years (rather than 10 or 12) and eliminate multiple departments.
PattyMor| 4.19.11 @ 4:42PM
The Ryan plan is at best modest. It would take years to balance the budget (if ever). The time to fix the problem is now, but with the Demogoguer in Chief, there isn't much chance of that happening.
He can keep on saying that he will tax the millionaires and billionaires, but in reality Obama plans to tax the upper middle class heavily. Don't count on the M & B aires poneying up lots of money. You have Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet taking little salary, so they rely on lightly taxed capital gains. Carrying interest has special tax treatment and guess who runs a giant hedge fund?
None other than "spooky dude" George Soros.
So, I just consider anything coming out of the mouth of Barack Obama as Just Noise.
Oldefarte| 4.19.11 @ 5:11PM
I'm not going to say completely WHITE, but the seniors of this country BUILT THIS COUNTRY BY WORKING THEIR FINGERS [WHITE OR OTHERWISE] TO THE BONE OVER THEIR ENTIRE WORKING LIVES. Their paid taxes have provided the governmental funding of food stamps, housing subsidies, public transportation & education, etc, and now supposedly they're being critisized for supposedly receiving 3:1 benefits for Medicare? Give me a GD break!!!!!!!
logan| 4.19.11 @ 5:27PM
Oldfarte, the USA is no longer ours. I belongs to Jose and Mohammed, they are the "new Americans".
Endless LEGAL immigration with endless "family chain migration" is the root cause of white Americans being replaced in our own country.
LarryK| 4.20.11 @ 9:50AM
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."
— Frank Herbert (Children of Dune)
Is the ruling class, the Federal Government, and our "representatives" not just agents of that government and will that government not crush anything that will oppose change that benefits the governed to the detriment of the government?
It is time to lock and load.
carol| 4.20.11 @ 1:47PM
duh ya think?
or maybe not