The Ultimate Evil of "Reaganomics"

This should make everyone in this country rise up in arms and in anger.

I am sick and tired of hearing that "we simply can't afford the welfare state."  To which I respond:  It depends on which welfare state you're talking about.

Before the advent of Saint Ronnie, we had the ability to take care of ourselves to such an extent that an article in Newsweek magazine actually used "Is Poverty Dead?" as a headline.  Naturally, it wasn't.  The article itself concerned the efforts of conservative groups to argue that poverty programs should be counted as income for the poor.  But that article only contained credibility to the extent that it showed how much we were willing to spend on the poor.  The argument, such as it was, can and should be treated as a concession to the success of those programs.  Poverty, for a time, appeared to be in retreat.

But along came the Great Dissembler, whose sunny optimism and note cards could create "facts" just through the sound of his voice.  He declared that "[i]n the war on poverty, poverty won."  Goodbye, poverty programs.  Hello, tax cuts for the few on top.  That was supposed to solve everything, to create so much money that, in no time at all, we'd all be drowning in it.

Well, as it turns out, those tax cuts might make you drown, indeed.  Because if you wanted to even so much as look at all of that money, you'd have to swim to an off-shore shelter to do it.  And even if you made it, you probably still couldn't see it.

Tax cuts are not the source of prosperity.  They are a foreign-aid program for tax shelters.  They are the source of most of our annual deficit and the national debt.  They are the reason that government at all levels has been purchased out of the hands of the people.  Putting it as basically as possible, they are welfare for those who neither need nor deserve it--and who have only used it to corrupt and nearly destroy the Republic (ironically, under the name of "Republicanism").

Make no mistake.  If you tolerate any more of this, you are responsible for the death of the American Dream and the wasting of millions of lives sacrificed for its sake.  You are culpable, and no one will save you, because no one will think you are worthy of salvation.

Including me.  Because I'm going to fight like hell to stop this travesty.  And, unless you're prepared to join me, get the hell out of my way.