1827 The Truth About the Tax Cuts - Leeches, Parasites and the End of Us All
Why no politician can ever talk about how government spending is going to be cut. Text: http://www.fdrurl.com/tnleeches From Freedomain Radio.
Jan. 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:49
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| So there's this immense charade going on at the moment, which is the pretense that the existing democratic fascistic system can actually sustain itself. | |
| And this charade is really centered around the issue of deficits. | |
| So you've seen this like a million times. | |
| You get some politician on a talk show, and the talk show host says, well, what are you going to cut from the government? | |
| And the politician won't ever give a specific answer. | |
| General cuts or cuts in the growth of entitlements and so on. | |
| But no politician will ever say specifically what he or she is going to cut. | |
| And the reason for that is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell. | |
| The reason that people won't say what's going to be cut in the government is the moment that you say X is going to be cut, then everybody who receives money from X is going to start campaigning like mad against you. | |
| So if you say we're going to cut the post office budget by $100 million, then the post office union will spend at least $100 million campaigning against you. | |
| If we say we're going to cut the benefits of a particular group of public servants, then immediately those people will go hog wild in making sure that you don't get elected. | |
| And that's just a basic reality of an imbalance of incentives that can't ever be discussed or pointed out in the existing system, because the moment it is pointed out, The moment that people realize that if you're going to cut the budget of some particular government agency by $100 million, then that agency has $100 million worth of incentive to campaign against you, whereas the average American has no incentive whatsoever to spend even one thin dime supporting the measure. | |
| Then we understand that this imbalance of incentives means that the system is going to forever grow until it collapses and there's no possibility of reforming it because people respond to incentives, right? | |
| Two basic principles of economics. | |
| One, people respond to incentives and two, all desires are infinite and all resources are finite, which is why you need allocation algorithms like the free market, for want of a better phrase. | |
| And the tax cuts fall into this paradigm very clearly. | |
| So Democrats are against the tax cuts and Republicans are for the tax cuts and that's for very simple reasons to do with their constituency. | |
| There are two basic classes of people who feed off the middle class or the productive classes in a state of society. | |
| The first, you can call them the leeches, because they steal the blood as a whole and you can't really feel them. | |
| And that's the banking classes and the money classes and the classes who benefit from the manipulations of currency and of interest rates from the Federal Reserve. | |
| You can't really see them And they take from the money system as a whole and they end up owning everyone through debt enslavement, through national debts and so on. | |
| Those are the leeches. On the other side, you have the parasites. | |
| And the parasites are much more visible. | |
| They're the people who benefit specifically from government spending. | |
| And those are public sector union employees, those are welfare recipients, social security recipients, and so on. | |
| And their income in a cash from the state to the citizen way, like in a check way, is dependent upon the extension and expansion of state programs forever. | |
| And so, if you want to understand the American political system, all you need to understand is that the Republicans represent the leeches, or the banking classes, or the financial classes, and the Democrats represent the parasites, who are public sector unions and people who specifically receive government checks. | |
| Now, the Democrats oppose the tax cuts because tax cuts mean that there will be eventual spending cuts. | |
| And spending cuts means that the constituency of the Democrats, which is the public sector unions and recipients of government aid, the parasites who the Democrats represent will be harmed if government spending is cut. | |
| So they want to keep taxes as high as possible to pay off the parasite class who funds and supports them. | |
| The money classes, the bankers, the financial classes, the leeches, well, they want the tax cuts because that's to their specific interest. | |
| It has nothing to do with any preference for helping the poor or helping the old or stimulating the economy through tax cuts. | |
| All it is is a mere paying off the group who got you into power, the parasites and the leeches. | |
| And there's really nothing else to think about in terms of these tax cuts. | |
| Because there's this bizarre myth that's floating around that austerity is coming to government. | |
| Which is sort of like saying, if you know a guy who's 500 pounds and who eats 15,000 calories a day, that if you can get his diet down to 14,000 calories a day, that somehow he's starving. | |
| If government could be cut by 80%, it would be about where it was relative to GDP in the 60s, when society did seem to function relatively well. | |
| So the idea that government cuts or cuts to spending in government departments or to government budgets, it's somehow austerity, is completely insane. | |
| It's ridiculous, but it's a lie that is propagated by people in power to frighten everyone with an imaginary belt tightening that really doesn't exist. | |
| There's also this myth around, which is quite funny and ridiculous, which is that the tax cuts are going to increase government deficits. | |
| So they say if the tax cuts are extended, then the Treasury is going to end up with that much less money, which is automatically and immediately going to add to the government deficit and the national debt. | |
| I mean, how ridiculous is that? | |
| I mean, it's an embarrassing statement for people to make. | |
| It's even more embarrassing for people to print it. | |
| And it's even more embarrassing for people to accept it. | |
| If you're expecting a raise of $5,000 next year, and you don't get that raise, does that immediately mean that you're going to be in debt an extra $5,000 next year? | |
| Well, of course not. If you don't get the raise, all that happens is you don't spend the $5,000 that you were going to get in the raise. | |
| So the idea that there's some connection between an extension of the tax cuts and an automatic increase in government spending is completely lunatic. | |
| You and I, if we don't get extra money, we just don't spend it. | |
| But it is an indictment which says that government spending is going to increase no matter what, no matter what, no matter what. | |
| And if we don't get tax increases, then the spending is simply going to slip into deficit. | |
| In other words, there's no conceivable way to stop the growth of government spending, and so we need the tax increases to cover that spending, which is a complete indictment of the complete lack of control that society has over the increase in government because of the mismatch of incentives we talked about earlier. | |
| These are just things to note and to point out, particularly the fact that it's not noted and not pointed out. |
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