http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/the_feds_want_your_retirement_accounts.html
One key concept of Marx was the prohibition on inheritances. Wealth can not be allowed to accumulate and all that one had at the time of death should go to the state (Or whatever followed the end of the state in his sick mind).
Leftists, such as Theresa Ghilarducci, of course would love to see this happen, but what they really want first is your money while you are still live.
The way they explain it is this; the rich (whatever that is to the Left) and some middle-class folk were wrongfully allowed to put money into retirement accounts before it was taxed. Even though they will pay taxes on it when they retire and are earning less money, this was a mistake as it deprived the government of revenue. The government should have been able to get more revenue when the workers were earning more and being taxed at a higher rate. This system is also not fair as some people cannot afford to invest money in this manner.
The Left enslaves the poor by handouts, and the workers by national debt and seizures of their assets.
What Ghilarducci and her comrades want is to get their mitts on your 401Ks, IRA's, Deferred Compensation Plans, etc. (I don't have one of these but if I did I would not want it stolen), comfort you with a pittance of an annuity, and have all of the earned, invested and appreciated private assets under their control.
Now that I think about it, they will probably go after public pension funds also - which would wreck my police pension. Man, I contributed a whole lot of money to that fund (Most at the end when I made more). It hurt especially badly when I was a new officer and making little money.
You had no right to keep any significant amount of money to yourself, and you most certainly have no right to bequeath it to your kids or anyone else of your choice.
Apply Obama's anti- private business rant "you didn't build that, somebody else made that happen" to your retirement savings - I'll bet that Obama does. It's the same thing; no matter that you paid a college or a college loan for an education, worked long (often grueling) hours, weekends and nights, missed your kids baseball games or birthday parties and after school-time in the evenings, put off buying things that you desired so that you could (gasp) save some money, etc., these were the work of someone other than yourself. None of that matters, your "excess" is wrongfully possessed and should be spread around.
http://www.wnd.com/2010/01/123024/
"Professor Ghilarducci repeated the proposal on Oct. 17, 2008, in testimony before the House Committee on Education and Labor. She testified that the current system “exacerbates income and wealth inequalities,” and told an interviewer later: “I’m just rearranging the tax breaks that are available now for 401(k)s and spreading … spreading the wealth.”
Excerpt from American Thinker:
".........2) What will the CFPB do with your money? The CFPB incursion into individual personal savings, in order to control how you invest your money, isn't a new idea. Current proposals grew from a policy analysis as disclosed by Roger Hedgecock.
On Nov. 20, 2007, Theresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, presented a paper proposing that the feds eliminate the tax deferral for private retirement accounts, confiscate the balance of those accounts, give each worker a $600 annual "contribution," assess a mandatory savings tax on every worker and guarantee a 3 percent rate of return on the newly titled "Guaranteed Retirement Accounts," or GRAs.
How would that be accomplished? The Carolina Journal reported Ghilarducci's 2008 testimony to Nancy Pelosi's House.
'Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers' personal retirement accounts "including 401(k)s and IRAs" and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.'
Your Government universal GRA investment savings account is an annuity managed by Social Security. Hedgecock noted '[m]ake no mistake here: Obama is after your retirement money. The "annuities" will "invest" not in the familiar packages of bond and stock mutual funds but in the Treasury debt!'
By 2010 Bloomberg published an article titled "US Government Takes Two More Steps Toward Nationalization of Private Retirement Account Assets." In that article Patrick Heller observed that, with Democrat control of Congress and the Presidency
[I]n mid-September 2010 the Departments of Labor and Treasury held hearings on the next step toward achieving Ghilarducci's goals. The stated purpose was to require all private plans to offer retirees an option to elect an annuity. The "behind-the-scenes" purpose for this step was to get people used to the idea that the retirement assets they had accumulated would no longer be part of their estate when they died.
So the Government would get the money, not the estate or family of the people who saved the money during a lifetime of work. That's a one hundred percent death tax on savings. Worse, the most responsible and poorest families will be penalized........"
The following two links provide more detail:
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/11/29/democrats_are_after_your_401_k
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/11/29/details_the_plan_to_steal_your_401_k
Again, I have to assert that we have no choice but to split our nation into two countries, one Progressive and one a Republic. The Left wants it all, they are growing by expanding the ranks of the welfare-enslaved and by churning out more leftists in our schools. They force, or try to force you, to accept fake marriages, cheapen your life by granting the privilege of paying a doctor to kill you (and denying cancer treatment if you are too old), and give up your firearms (or leave you with hunting rifles/shotguns only). They ignore or demean your cultural inheritance in schools, insist that you live in a town in which any religious symbol (particularly those of our Judeo-Christian heritage) are prohibited, be enslaved by national debt and rampant welfare, and acquiesce to massive immigration, the rates of which are guaranteed to prevent any assimilation.
http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/11/in-consideration-of-secession-part-i.html
If States that traditionally vote for Conservative candidates take steps towards secession, the outcome in no way has to be bad. Those who live in "Red States" but prefer the Progressive )Read -Leftist) outlook can move to "Blue States" if they so desire . Blue-Staters would similarly have the right to relocate to a Red State.
This is not an impossible feat - The USSR, which was a far larger nation, did the same things a mere twenty years ago. It took a while for things to get back on track but it worked. The back and forth migration of people to also has an historical background. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Catholics left the United Provinces) Modern Netherlands) and moved to what today is Belgium. Protestants left the latter to live in the Netherlands. The exact same thing happened in Germany; Protestants often moved from Catholic German States to Lutheran ones and vice-versa.
The hateful and thuggish behavior can also go away. Elections signs and bumper stickers would no longer be cause for vandalism or assaults. Both sides get the manage their governments in the manner that they please.
The National debt could be evenly divided, and both sides can service their debt shares.All revenues, including income taxes, will remain within their respective nations.
We must allow that their can be, like the European Union (Not that I am a fan of that group), a measure of cooperation between the two bodies. This would include the possibility of jointly-administered armed forces.
This would entail the stepping down of the US as a world leader, but we cannot keep that role going anyway. We don't have the money, and the world will survive without us.
Things have changed since then. To the electorate has been added people who, in those halcyon days and since then, were in college where they were subjected to Marxist and anti-western propaganda, vast amount of people from nations that had no experience with effective representative republican-type governments have been imported. The welfare rolls have been bolstered due to the ongoing efforts of Progressives.
Sean Hannity made a bold move for someone who has to answer to his bosses. The latter are under enormous pressure to avoid political attacks and boycotts of station sponsors.
What made Hannity's statement stand out is the fact that, instead of merely arguing whether or not secession is legal, he noted that our Declaration of Independence was a radical document. In doing so, he recognized that most political breaks and assertions of sovereignty start out as illegal moves. Our nation was born with a political move that was clearly contrary to British Law.
Here lies the argument that pathetically few supporters of secession bring up; the Declaration was not designed to be a legal move, but as an acknowledgment that a break had already been made by the Crown and Parliament. Those who signed that document noted that all of their efforts to reconcile with the mother country had yielded negative results. They specifically applied the concepts advance by writers such as John Locke, who insisted that, when governments cease to be protectors of rights and property and become oppressors,.it is the right and obligation of a people to alter or abolish it. Locke noted that people are born free and have no right to allow themselves to be subjugated.
This is where we are right now. Our system has become something altogether unrecognizable from that which was crafted at the Constitutional Convention. Washington is dominated by Progressives and submissive Republicans. We have protested time and again to no avail, and things will probably only get much worse in the next few months and years.
So the question is not about the legality or illegality of secession, but whether or not our national government has already effected a break with its own people, abandoned our Constitutional system, and subjugated the law-abiding taxpayers to a lifetime of servitude and control.
My answer to all three is yes.
Even if no permanent break is desired, a temporary secession of a group of states may be the only hope to force significant changes both to our direction and to roll back abusive and oppressive laws and regulations.
You make a lot of sense. If only it could be done peacefully. I suspect that the Blue States would resist a such a move and would back that resistance with military force. Remember who controls the military.
ReplyDeleteThe Oath Keepers would need to be very active before this occurred.
Also, two countries would not work because of the geography. The Blue States are on the coasts and despite the existence of advanced technologies this amount of distance would be prohibitive. The modern case of North and South Pakistan, separated by India, is an example. South Pakistan finally seceded and became Bangladesh.
The scenario is an interesting one. For instance, how long would it take for the Spanish speaking to secede and become part of Mexico? Would Maine become a new Canadian province? Would the south include the Texas Republic, assuming it is not of Mexico? Would certain states, like California and Mexico, have their own splits (like Virginia/West Virginia did in the Civil War days)? Would the results be alliances of sovereign states or entirely new countries?
Interested people want to know.
History indicates otherwise. Roman possessions before the consolidations towards the end of the republic, late Medieval Burgundy, the possessions of the English kings in France such as Aquitaine, the 17th century Palatinate, the post Napoleonic Prussian state all point to the feasibility of non-contiguous regions under the same rule.
ReplyDeleteFor across-the-sea rule, Spain's Britain's and other colonial empire should also be considered.The former was surprisingly stable until the occupation of Spain by Napoleon's French, and the latter was the same until the gradual changing into a full commonwealth system.
Unlike our era, none of the land-based two-part nations had telephones, computers, trains (well Some in Prussia), planes, large trucks, or other easy means of communication or transport. It would be far easier today than it was for earlier states in similar situations, especially when we account for the fact that the new republic would be cooperative and fully non-threatening. This includes the barring of customs duties.
As for war, I insist that it would not be necessary at all. We watched the USSR do the same a mere 20 years+ ago, and that worked out OK. Any possible aggression of an angry establishment would be their doing.
As far as the military goes, of course many of the generals are too worried about media handouts of commentator jobs, but we must not forget that generals don't fight wars, the soldiers do. People from the regions of the proposed new republic comprise a disproportionate portion of the combat arms units in the military. The latter units are the ones tasked with sending bullets in the direction of the enemy.
I cannot think of one people or nation that restored or kept their/its freedom by failing to act simply because the other side may want to fight about it. That would cancel out the free Greek states v. Persia, the Roman republic v. the Etruscan kings, The German tribes east of the Rhine v. Rome (Teutoburger Forest) and many others, including the American Republic v. the Crown and Parliament. The latter case is of particular note as we had a tremendous amount of loyalists and these too were spread out among the colonies.
One that point is that, by definitions of feasible republics such as that of Montesquieu, these types of states work better when they are small or medium-size. The last thing that we should avoid is a paralysis due to concerns that a state may leave. I cannot imagine any state making a move to join with a narco-state to the south and for Maine, Canada would be barely different from the proposed Progressive state.