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When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay – welfare always breeds contempt

by Mojambo ( 30 Comments › )
Filed under Europe, Politics, Progressives at February 28th, 2010 - 4:30 pm

Take a good look at Europe because that is the direction where we are heading as the entitlement mentality takes precedence. Unions hold government’s hostage, people do not believe in hard work, nobody has the incentive to achieve because in the end everyone is to be taken care of, and the most important decision in life is where you will take your 5 weeks vacation. To top it all of – the bureaucracy will decide when you can get that operation. Yes welfare breeds contempt, but it is the contempt that those who are receiving welfare have for those of us who are providing it.

by Mark Steyn

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book America Alone, I put the then–Social Security debate in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public-pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent: in other words, head for the hills, Armageddon outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And really the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn’t going to have a 2040 — not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.

[..]

The perfect spokesman for the entitlement mentality is the deputy prime minister of Greece.

Read the rest: When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay

Tags: entitlement, Mark Steyn
Posted in Europe, Politics, Progressives | 30 Comments »

Obama’s Blame Rhetoric Delusion

by Phantom Ace ( 115 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Liberal Fascism, Progressives at February 2nd, 2010 - 5:00 am

Being the Statist Progressive that he is, Barack Hussein Obama believes Washington is where the solutions to America’s problems are. When they don’t work or the American public rejects them, he blames others. Even with the public is tiring of his rhetoric, he continues to insist being in the public eye. With his Leftist agenda rejected, he doubles down and insists we don’t know what’s good for us. Obama really believes that his Progressive Ideology will solve all of America’s problems.

Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, whenhe isn’t blaming George W. Bush, Mr. Obama blames “Washington” – a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Mr. Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”

So let’s have more Washington! That raises the question: Does even Mr. Obama listen to his speeches?

The public does – at least to this extent: They understand that when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the game, but when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it. That’s the only Barack Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy is spending means higher taxes.

Read the rest.

Mark Steyn nails it with this piece. Obama just blames others when his policies don’t work. He still blames Bush for everything that is wrong. Even the deficit which he has increase in his new budget, Bush gets blamed. He blames Washington gridlock, even though his party controls both houses. Obama has even blamed the American people for not understanding what he is trying to do. Blaming is all he can do as an Ideologue. It has never occurred to him that his ideas are wrong.

Hey when all else fails, Obama can blame Bush!

(Don’t forget to vote in the Blogmocracy Awards! One vote per award, per day~ Voting ends Feb. 5)

Tags: Bush bashing, Mark Steyn
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Liberal Fascism, Progressives | 115 Comments »

Obama doesn’t get it

by Phantom Ace ( 290 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Politics at January 25th, 2010 - 8:00 am

Barack Hussein Obama still doesn’t get why the Radical Progressives lost the Massachusetts Senate race. He is in denial that the American people are rejecting his Un-American agenda. Instead of doing a Clinton-like move to the Center, he has doubled down on Leftist policies. He is proposing a special tax on banks. This has rattled the market. He has engaged in Populist rhetoric against his former Wall Street allies to boost his popularity. This tactic is not working and clearly Obama doesn’t get it.

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”

Read the rest.

Mark Steyn gets this one correct. Obama believes that the American people don’t understand what he is doing. This is far from the case, they know exactly what he is doing. Americans are rejecting the Totalitarian agenda of the Progressive Movement. Mr. Hussein is an elitist who doesn’t understand the average citizen. That is why he’s in the situation he’s instead of admitting his policies are unpopular, he blames Bush. Barack Hussein Obama lives in a fantasy world of his own making. Reality is hitting him and he doesn’t know what to do.

Tags: Mark Steyn
Posted in Barack Obama, Politics | 290 Comments »

99-year-old Granny isn’t the problem

by Mojambo ( 38 Comments › )
Filed under Islamists, Political Correctness, Politics, Terrorism at January 21st, 2010 - 10:00 pm

Mark Steyn says what we all know is truth. The threats to us at airports comes from Muslim men and women and that politically correct “democratizing” of airport security where an elderly grandmother is treated as the same potential threat level as a 23 year old man from Syria, is patently absurd. Time and resources are wasted on checking out threats from certain types of people who pose zero threat to us. What we need to do is adopt the Israeli method which is looking first for the terrorist and then the bomb; however political correctness will never allow that to happen. Steyn also points out that with the ever long “security lines” – why not then just blow up those lines – the terrorists will just as many people?

by Mark Steyn

A couple of days after the Christmas Day Pantybomber tried to light up his gusset on the approach to Detroit, I was at a small airport in Vermont shuffling through the line to what they call the “sterile” area. Anyway, I handed over my driver’s licence and, as he had done with all the previous passengers, the Transportation Security Administration agent examined it. And examined it. And examined it some more. He had a loupe, one of those magnifying glasses jewellers use to examine diamonds for any surface blemishes or internal flaws. In this case, he was deploying it to examine how the ink lies on the paper. And when he’d finished doing that he got out his UV light to study the watermark on my licence.

And, looking down at his bald patch as he went about his work with loving care, I was overcome by a sudden urge to point out that nobody had ever blown up a U.S. airliner with a fake driver’s licence. Why bother going to all that trouble when a real one is so easy to get? On Sept. 11, 2001, four of the terrorists boarded the flight with genuine, valid picture ID issued by the state of Virginia and obtained through the illegal-immigrant day-workers’ network run out of the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church.

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Oh, to be sure, you can still find the occasional nonagenarian spinster who thinks if they’re patting her down and making her unscrew her leg brace it’s a sign that they’re being extra-super-careful about security. Which, of course, they’re not. Every minute spent on the nonagenarian spinster is a minute not being spent on, say, a nervous 23-year-old Muslim male who’s a bit twitchy because his crotch is loaded with PETN.

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Question: what do the 9/11 killers, the Shoebomber, the Heathrow plotters, the Pantybomber, the London Tube bombers, the doctors who drove a flaming SUV through the concourse of Glasgow Airport and the would-be killers of Danish cartoonists all have in common? Answer: they’re Muslim. Sometimes they’re Muslims with box cutters, sometimes they’re Muslims with flaming shoes, sometimes they’re Muslims with liquids and gels, sometimes they’re Muslims with fully loaded underwear. But the Muslim bit is a constant. What we used to call a fact. But America’s leaders cannot state that simple fact, and so the TSA is obliged to pretend that all seven billion inhabitants of this planet represent an equal threat.

Read the rest.

P.S. – I cannot remember the last time Mark Steyn was linked to at the other place. Is he persona non grata there? I would not be surprised.

Tags: Mark Steyn
Posted in Islamists, Political Correctness, Politics, Terrorism | 38 Comments »