Living in Fear – A conservative stance to raise taxes
For the better part of four decades there has been an ongoing debate about the future of the social agenda laid out in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The ultimate cornerstones of that agenda were what we now call Social Security and Medicare. He didn’t really invent them, or create the form they are in now, but the crystallization of the social democratic compact on which they exist was formed out of the Great Society. And, oddly, for forty years they have both succeeded and failed spectacularly. Nowhere in my experience has anything so widely depended on and so fervently hoped for been so widely despised and feared.
If you want to understand why Americans have so little faith in their government, live their lives in such constant schizophrenic hope and fear, then look no further than the latest headline on these two programs. And if you want to fix consumer confidence and add hope to the middle class, thus overcoming the largest obstacle to our economic recovery, then stop playing demigod with the only security that over 70% of Americans have that they won’t starve and die a horrible destitute death in their old age.
Stop It.
I don’t care if you are the smallest government Republican Tea Partier or the most pragmatic budget conscious Democrat, this is not where the solution lies. The fear level in our country is reaching the level of the poorest backwater third world country you can name. We have built an economic system of compensation, rewards and long term incentives for every worker below the top one percent who’s most fundamental underpinning is that the money taken from your check every week guarantees that you will have food money and health care when you get old. It works. It creates just enough security that most people do not have to live their lives in constant fear. And, now, every day, you are expanding the number of people that have to live with that fear.
STOP IT.
You are going the wrong way. Raise taxes, on everyone that pays, we won’t mind, to ensure the health of those programs. Thats 3.5 trillion dollars over ten years to expand the benefits for everyone who needs them. Then means test them so that people who CLEARLY don’t need them don’t qualify. Don’t be cheap, make the cutoff 150k of income, make sure they don’t need them, but means test. This ensures that you can increase the security they provide for those who do.
Let’s be clear, I am a free market Republican conservative(or something see About). I don’t believe in a socialist country. I believe that unemployment benefits should run out. I believe lot’s of things most Democrats would abhor. This is a conservative point of view. Free the people to worry about doing today what they can do to achieve a higher standard of living, take risks, create value for themselves, their families, the economy and society. 70 % of our neighbors living in fear of the future is NOT what we need today or tomorrow.
Raise taxes, use them specifically, and wisely. Watch the wellspring of hope and energy that it creates.
