TAX RECIPIENTS VS TAX PAYERS

How often is it that the most telling bit of information in a news story is neither the headline, or first paragraph, but some tidbit almost hidden in the text.  And so it is with The Currier Times coverage of Congressman Fitzpatrick’s flip-flopping votes on our government shutdown.  Fitzpatrick is just another journeyman GOP politician who feels it necessary to explain away what might have been a principled vote.  He was against shutting down the government before he ended up voting for it.  Why am I not surprised?  

Personally, I thought and said as much on the YIPLAS radio show, that shutting the government down over Obama Care is a tactical error for Republicans.  I side  with Napoleon who said that one should never interfere with an enemy while he is making a mistake.  Obama Care is such a mistake for the Democrats.  It will discomfit far more people than it will please in its early stages.  It is already crumbling like a cookie in the rain.  The President has taken the extraordinary step of exempting whole sectors of society from the law that he trumpets out of the other side of his mouth.  Things will get worse.  Right now the President is popular with young people.  I suspect that when they are hit with hundred dollar fines for not selecting an insurance provider that they already don’t think they need, that will change.  Especially hard hit will be those who graduated from college only to find that in the Obama economy, their jobs have been given to H1B foreigners.   When many thousands are let go by small businesses or reduced to part-time status due to Obama’s law, they too will find “Hope and Change,” less appealing.   When all this hits, that’s the time for the Republicans to cry havoc and loose the dogs of war.  But they aren't called the stupid party without reason.  

So what was significant about the story?  Fitzpatrick mentioned that the number of federal employees in the Eighth District had doubled since the 1995 shutdown, now comprising eight thousand.  That is an astounding fact.  Since the  years when President Clinton told us that “The era of big government is over,” the number of our fellow citizens who live off our tax dollars has doubled locally.  National numbers are similar.  This would have been a good opportunity for Fitzpatrick to explain that there are two classes of citizen now.  There is the taxpaying class and there is the tax recipient class; and the tax recipient class is overtaking those of us who are expected to foot the bill.  

This can be seen clearly in all the poor suffering federal worker sob stories we are bombarded with.  This afternoon I was almost driven to tears on hearing of single- mother federal workers facing sudden destitution by a shutdown forecasted for the past two months.  Then there is the farce of closing off federal monuments while various federal police officers cruse by.  We are informed that the federally funded Head Start Program, which accomplishes nothing, will cease accomplishing nothing (except babysitting) until the evil Republicans turn the spigot back on.  An army of pests who regulate our every move find themselves banished to their backyard grills for a few days or weeks, and we who foot the bill are asked to pity them.

The Republicans are maneuvering in this shutdown better than they did last time, but not much.  They fail  to seize the pivotal argument.  The point is not who benefits from the vast behemoth of government.  We can see that many people are committed to living off the rest of us.  Some of them deserve our help or do things we need done.  Most are drones who vote themselves raises at our expense by populating the managerial state that is eating the rest of us alive.  

It is telling that in all the shutdown reportage almost nothing is mentioned about the millions of taxpayers who fund our bloated government.  The poor have been exempted from much federal taxation and the wealthy have the wherewithal to avoid it.  If the Republicans have a future, and I doubt it, they must make it clear to the densest blockheads among the middle classes, that the GOP stands with tax payers not tax recipients.