By Seth Richardson
Berkely leftist professor and former Secretary of Labor under Clinton Robert Reich is prepared to “guarantee” your Social Security check will be there for you when you retire. Really? Somehow I don’t think Reich has that much money in his bank account, or will have in 40 years, although with Progressive/Socialists like Reich, you never know, he might just be able to redistribute enough to his personal use to make his guarantee worth more than the electrons it took to publish his asinine boast.
In his September 26, 2010 blog at the Huffington Post, Reich writes, “Look, I used to be a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. Believe me when I tell you Social Security is basically okay. It may need a little fine tuning but I guarantee you’ll receive your Social Security check by the time you retire even if that’s forty years from now.” The only good thing about Reich is that he’s no longer a trustee, although he ought to be tarred and feathered for what he did while he was, not to mention this current bit of bombast.
Somehow I think his assurances are as worthless as the promises of Nancy Pelosi that we’d all be satisfied with the health care bill if we’d only pass it without actually reading it first.
The reality is that if your Social Security check is there even five years from now, it’s either going to be for about 20 cents per month, or it’s going to be for a gazillion inflation-devalued dollars that will buy the equivalent of a pack of gum, if that. Anybody with a lick of sense knows full well that Social Security and Medicare are both teetering on the brink of insolvency, as is the entire United States government. Our unfunded liabilities, all 110 trillion (with a “T”) dollar’s worth, are enough to bankrupt the nation even without all the spending Obama’s doing right now. Social Security is the number one unfunded liability our government has on (sort of) the books and it will, within a decade, consume the entire gross domestic product of the nation, and will require virtually 100 percent taxation on those who actually pay any income taxes just to keep pace with the bloat.
But Reich is living in Progressive Delusionland, right next to Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Progressive/Socialist party, and Americans with any degree of intelligence, who eschew the propaganda churned out by the left, know it. Which is why, with any luck at all, Congress will take a sharp right turn in November. If it doesn’t, our economy is not headed for the next Great Depression, it’s headed for the scrap-heap of history and bloody rebellion and oppression are sure to follow.
Reich goes on to excoriate Republicans over unemployment insurance, saying, “Republicans also hate unemployment insurance. They’ve voted against every extension because, they say, it coddles the unemployed and keeps them from taking available jobs. That’s absurd. There are still 5 job seekers for every job opening, and unemployment insurance in most states pays only a small fraction of the full-time wage.”
Wrong. Funny how the 12 million Mexican illegal immigrants seem to have work, isn’t it? When they lose their jobs, they don’t go on unemployment, they go back to Mexico, and while there is substantial out-migration, there’s substantial in-migration too, because there are plenty of jobs out there, they are just the sort of jobs that breast-fed Proletarians accustomed to having Mother State shove a nipple in their mouths whenever they cry won’t do because it’s beneath their dignity.
Republicans are right, the dole does sap the industry and accountability from its victims, as any Brit can tell you. What gets people working are unemployment conditions that are so unpleasant that the alternative, taking a stoop-labor job picking tomatoes or onions or digging ditches seems desirable by comparison. Soup kitchens and bread lines are other grand motivators towards self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Eating at McDonalds and driving the SUV aren’t.
Back in 1985, the terrible choices men and women had to make during the Great Depression were highlighted in the film “The Journey of Natty Gann,” starring Meredith Salanger as a street-wise young girl of about 15, and Ray Wise, as Natty’s father, Sol Gann. In the film, Natty and her dad are living in a cheap rooming house as Sol looks for whatever work he can find while Natty roams the streets of Chicago. While Natty is gadding about, Sol is given a chance at logging work in Washington state. It’s a one-time-only offer and the bus leaves in a few hours. If Sol misses this opportunity at hard, steady work, he and Natty are likely to starve to death. Sol tries desperately to find Natty, with no success, so he makes a heart-wrenching decision and leaves her a letter and gets on the bus, telling her he’ll send for her as soon as he can, leaving her in the dubious custody of the matronly and rather unpleasant rooming house owner. The rest of the story chronicles Natty’s trials and tribulations as she rides the rails across the country in search of her father, after she runs away from the rooming house when the owner calls the police to have her placed in an orphanage.
The point of the story, as it applies here, is that during the Great Depression people were desperate for work, and nothing was beneath them if they could get a day’s labor and a day’s pay, so they could eat that day. The historical sub-text here that isn’t pointed out in the film, or in the Progressive propaganda and revisionist history of today is that while people were stealing apples and working crap jobs for nickles and dimes to survive, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his economic “brain trust” were toying with the economy in ways that prolonged the misery of the Great Depression for as much as a decade longer than necessary. While Sol and Natty Gann were scraping for scraps and standing in soup-kitchen food lines, along with millions of others, FDR’s National Recovery Act and his Agricultural Adjustment Act were throwing farmers in jail for producing unauthorized crops and FDR’s thugs and hooligans were destroying existing food crops, as people starved, in order to try to prop up farm prices by creating artificial scarcity.
For those who want a true picture of the ineptitude and gross malfeasance of FDR’s attempts to implement Progressive policies in the face of a depression, I highly recommend the book “New Deal or Raw Deal” by Burton Folsom Jr. for a non-Progressive truthful view of FDR’s response to the Great Depression. And anyone reading that book will end up in stomach-churning fear when they see the exact same failed policies FDR tried (many of them ruled to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court) being repeated and expanded upon by the Obamanation. If the parallels don’t scare the pant’s off you, you’re a brain-dead Proletarian who has no business being allowed to vote.
My point is that there are plenty of jobs available, but so long as the government keeps people on the dole, and it’s more comfortable to wait for the unemployment check than it is to stand in a bread line or pick onions, people will wait for the check. It’s simple human nature, and no one can really blame them for opting for the dole.
The problem is, those who are producing, who actually pay the taxes that the bottom fifty percent of the populace get handed by the Obamanation, are running out of energy and desire to keep on producing wealth, only to have it taken away from us to be given to people who would rather sit in their easy chair watching American Idol on their flat-screen than go scrub toilets or sweep gutters because manual labor is beneath them.
And when the goose that lays the golden egg finally gives up the ghost and quits producing, there will be hell to pay, no matter how jolly and avuncular Robert Reich tries to be in assuring us that there’s nothing wrong and that the already-failed policies of Progressivism, with it’s something-for-nothing economic model, will somehow prevail. You want to be dead when that happens, because the Great Depression will look like a celebration at J.P. Morgan’s mansion compared to what’s coming when people start starving to death and the Progressive/Socialists in government can no longer keep the promises they have made.
When that happens, blood truly will run in the gutters. The only good news is that the first heads rolling from the guillotine will be the Progressive’s.
Our only, and final chance at salvation, at avoiding emaciated bodies lying in the streets and bloody revolution is to extirpate Progressivism and Socialism from our government and expel Progressives, Socialists and Communists from the halls of power, as we did the last time they got control, and restore the Republic and the Constitution through the hard work, sacrifice and self-control that has historically made this country the most prosperous nation on earth, in spite of Progressivism’s attempts to destroy it. We need another Tailgunner Joe and another Red Scare, and we need it now.
But it’s going to be a hard row to hoe, and it’s not going to be much fun. We’ve done it before though, and we’ll do it again, if we can get the Progressives out of the way first, and never let them take power again.
© 2010 Altnews
“The only good news is that the first heads rolling from the guillotine will be the Progressive’s.”
Don’t bet on it.
Vote at your local gun store.
Well said, Seth.
“Reich goes on to excoriate Republicans over unemployment insurance, saying, ‘Republicans also hate unemployment insurance. They’ve voted against every extension because, they say, it coddles the unemployed and keeps them from taking available jobs. That’s absurd. There are still 5 job seekers for every job opening, and unemployment insurance in most states pays only a small fraction of the full-time wage.’”
Here in Arkansas unemployment insurance pays up to $409 per week as of 2008, which is the most recent figure I could find on the web. Contrary to what Reich says, many people are perfectly happy to receive over $10/hr not to work.
Informative article, as always, Seth.