John’s earlier post brought back some memories that were well tamped down.
But if you ask the modern GOP, I pay too much in taxes, and we do too much for the girl in line in front of me and Lolo Jones. We’re just a seriously fucked up nation.
Here, let me fix that for you:
But if you ask the modern GOP, I pay too much in taxes, and we do too much for the girl in line in front of me and Lolo Jones. We’re They’re just a seriously fucked up nation group of people.
I have no problem paying my taxes to help people like that young mother. Not so very long ago, while we were both in college, Soonerwife and I had to apply for TANF. My part time job at $8.00/hr and GI Bill and drill pay weren’t making the ends meet for a family of four. As most of you know, I was a surgical technician for a while both in the regular army and as a civilian after I got out. At some point in there, stressed out of my mind, I passed the Surgeon the wrong syringe during a procedure, and the patient almost died. My boss, a wonderful, caring person, fired me the next day because she and I agreed that my future wasn’t in the Operating Room anyway and this way I could get assistance if I needed it, which I couldn’t if I resigned.
We took out college loans, I took classes I had no intention of even trying to pass to get the full-time GI Bill payment, and we both sold blood plasma, and we still couldn’t pay the rent and the tuition and the books and the fees and the utilities and the clothing and the food unless we took out every penny we could get in college loans or we applied for whatever aid we could get. We were on TANF and unemployment for two semesters, and it was so degrading having to go to the office and stand in line, and get all these lectures about personal finance and responsible parenting. After that, we took out every penny in student loans that we could. I dropped out of school and volunteered to go to Iraq because my wife was always the smarter one and we figured her degree would be worth more in the long run, and if something happened to me, I had SGLI and she and my children would be taken care of.
I did anything I could to avoid the humiliation and degradation that we subject the poor in this society to because a debased, morally corrupted minority demands that we do this to the less fortunate. It is the flip-side of the prosperity gospel so popular with the white conservative crowd–God rewards the just with material wealth under this belief, and conversely punishes the morally weak with poverty. This cruelty to the poor is God’s Work, you see. I’m not much of a Christian anymore, but if Christ is the actual Christ of the bible I grew up reading, these people are in for one hell of a shock.
Most of the people I met in those offices were white divorced mothers, but some were young fathers trying to keep their families together. I never met anyone who was gaming the system, but they must exist because all of these people with fancy cars tell me so.
The real moral failing of our time, the real thing that makes us, as John stated earlier, “a seriously fucked up nation,” is that people who think that giving more to the rich will make them work harder and giving less to the poor will make them work harder are given any voice in the nation’s affairs at all.
And one more thing-correct me if I’m wrong, but DNC did NOTHING for Wisconsin Dems and the recall. Not one thin dime from me until Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is out as DNC chair. I’ll target my giving to individual races. Feel free to use this as an open thread in addition to the topic.
EDIT: And I’m wrong about DNC and Wisconsin. Thoroughly wrong. Good. I’m glad to be wrong on that score.