But before I begin, a couple of terms need to be defined.
They are socialism and socialist.
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) a member of the U.S. Socialist party. The Washington Post has a "Live Web chat Q&A" with Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation.
To say, that Mr. Phillips, does the Tea Party movement a disservice, would be an understatement. The sheer fecklessness on display is impressive. When presented with counter factual, Mr. Phillips merely denies their existence. Provides no substantiated rebuttal, just refuses to acknowledge them. So I would highly recommend reading through the whole exchange. There were a couple comments in particular that jumped out at me.
Now, it is simply a matter of fact, that when the ARRA (Stimulus Bill) passed, it included tax breaks for approximately 95% of tax payers. That is in the bill. On top of that, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts has not happened yet, and even when it does, it will only be sunsetted for those making 250k+. That is hardly a tax increase on the "vast majority of Americans".Nashville, Tenn.: "Judson -- Are you willing to admit that taxes have actually gone down for the vast majority of Americans under President Obama?
Judson Phillips: No"
Okay - can you provide actual evidence that taxes have increased or stayed the same under President Obama?
Judson Phillips: Let's start with him allowing the bush tax cuts to expire.
It was nice for the questioners to actually demand answers and not the palaver that normally gets to pass from these sorts of political types. Notice how he still does not answer the question. Entitlement programs my follow up to this follow up would be, "So Medicare and Social Security, how do you want to cut them specifically? Scale back benefits, raise the retirement age, or perhaps some combination of the two, or even something else entirely?".Washington, D.C.: "Second, let's go through the entire federal budget and eliminate programs that are consumed by waste, fraud or abuse. Start eliminating them. "
This doesn't answer that poster's question at all. WHAT would you cut? Social Security? Medicare? National defense? What would you cut?
Judson Phillips: Let's start with entitlement programs. They are the biggest source of out of control spending. Then let's go to congressional pork programs. Since we have a war on terror or as Obama would call it, man caused disasters, I do not believe cuts in the defense budget are appropriate at this time.
But just for clarification I want to toss out a picture of the governmental budget:
This is what the actual budge looks like. Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and (more often then not) Defense spending are seen as mandatory spending. Add that to the "Other Mandatory" spending and you get about 80% of the federal budget. If you think you can balance the debt by cutting "pork" you are an idiot. It is a tiny part of the discretionary spending part of the graph. This is just one example of how unserious some of these individuals are. They deny anything that does not comport with their world view.
At no point does Mr. Phillip present any information to prove his assertion that President Obama is a socialist. He just asserts it. After the stimulus bill, health care (no public option), and the talks over Wall Street reform if Obama is a socialist, he is the worst one of all time.
Again, I highly recommend you give it a read.
-Cheers
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