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Yes, there should be thought given to personal responsibility. But we teach people to be consumers. We don't, not really, talk about investing in people or the country - these things are seen as "expenses", something dirty which must be minimized. We mouth the words "save money", but have no conversation about why our priorities are so screwed up, about what value there is in employers who don't pay enough to save anything, about why it cost someone who makes less than $30,000 a year a couple grand in extra fees that wealthier people don't pay. (There's a whole damn industry profiting from that). We need to have a grand conversation about whether we want to live in a bankster economy. In that economy there is little investment, nearly nothing that will lead to wealth-building except by a few. And the country crumbles around them.
We could craft policies that insure investment in our country, with so many jobs we could have billboards in our cities which say "We Welcome Businesses That Want To Pay Taxes. If You Are Looking For A Handout Tax Credit, Please Molest Another City". We could re-structure our lives so that Joe and Jane could trade that SUV off (she never liked it anyway).
Our immediate problem, however, is the effort of the assholes led by Grover Norquist, Koch Bros. and friends, who have only two goals in life. 1 - Get the black man out of the presidency or 2) Destroy the provisions for Social Security and other ideas from earlier in the last century that made and continues to make our society better, safer and healthier. (there are some other issues, but it really boils down to these). So far I have seen no evidence that they wish to do anything other than defeat, destroy, and dominate over the tar-paper shacks that are left.
They would be quite happy to see (literally) smoking ruins at their feet, where the rubble contained all of us, everyone we love, everything we ever cared about, in the pursuit of those goals. I agree with the statement in the op "They do not share our values...".
Our negotiating position should be Obama holding a presser while he nails wanted posters to the podium. With a bounty. Maybe send a seal team after the treasonous bastards.
In the meantime, we could distribute fliers that ask "Is your mom missing money from her purse? Ask one of these Republicans where it is".
There are a lot of things that could be done if enough voters realize exactly what they will lose if the 'baggers prevail, We cannot give one centimeter. Any quarter you give them will cost you dearly. Never address any of their ideas as even worth discussion, because they do it for selfish, petty, childish reasons, and their end will be the destruction of this country. We have to change the conversation, and force others to do so.
There are reasonable people out there, statesmen and brilliant women, who care about the country and its security. We can work with them and build something.
Here's a little honesty, a point about just one of their goals, decreasing SS:
Our U6 unemployment is 16.2%, up .4% from last month. There is nearly nothing out there which indicates that we will be able to markedly reduce that for at least the next 10 years, perhaps longer.
Thus, millions of our neighbors who have lost their jobs in their 50's have already worked and been laid off or fired from the last job that will pay them a living wage. Millions have worked the last job they will ever have. Not the last one they need, but the last one they will ever have. SS is the first relief they will see, 5, 6 8 years from now.
8000 people a day are turning 65. (We added over 500,000 people to the rolls of SS in the past year).
According to Bernie Sander's latest report, 1 million seniors, our neighbors, do not have enough money for food. The SS Administrations stats show 38 million of our neighbors on SS, and a third of them with nothing else between them and abject poverty.
A raise in retirement qualifications means 2 more years without food, heat, or shelter for those people. It also adds hundreds of thousands more to their number.
Knowing that, how many people could you send to bed hungry, or into the street in the winter, and still think you are doing the right thing? Half a million, a million? Not me brother/sister.
That is not representative of what the people in my country want, I am pretty sure, so I see no reason to go down that road. I will never vote for anyone who furthers that aim - there is no possible result that I think is important (or scary) enough to do anything else. As a nation we have insured the jobs and bonuses of very wealthy people and corporations (wait, are corps are people too? But I digress...) at the expense of these, our most vulnerable. Demand is the ONLY thing that will fix this economy, and there is none to speak of. Were we to invest the bankster payoffs in our people instead - training, in building whatever passes for manufacturing\wealth building facilities and jobs in the economy of the future - we would very likely have no need to have this conversation, and the 'baggers would look even sillier and more radical than they do now. (They are giving "radical" a bad name, eh?). They must be sealed away, so to speak, so we can get on with the important business.
When that is made plain and clear, that the choice is that stark, evidence seem to indicate that enough people will rethink their position and stop this. (It's early, but Wisconsin may prove to be not only an early indicator, but a warning of the kind of effort it will take to move this conversation in a different direction.
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