One persons pork is the others bread and butter. It does tickle my funny bone though when it is such a huuuge hypocrisy.
Mmm⌠Butter, bread, and porkâŚ
âHe who warned the British that they werenât going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as heâs riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.â
When that intellectual genius Palin said that undecipherable mess the KockBroTeaBaggers defended it as History, that should tell you what you need to knowâŚ
Only crazy people speak like this!
Oh, I guess I got the wrong KockBroTeaBaggerGOp fâing moron. My badâŚ
Iâm looking forward to the many SNL parodies of her to come.
It doesnât surprise me at all, conservatives always convince themselves they are deserving of government subsidies, because right type of people, and all others arenât.
Well, if itâs good enough for Ayn Rand âŚ
âI got mine, fuck you!â
Sheâs just echoing the sentiments expressed by her voters: âSay no to socialism and hands off my social security and medicare/medicaid!â
Relevant, so very often:
Major Majorâs father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didnât earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Majorâs father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. âAs ye sow, so shall ye reap,â he counseled one and all, and everyone said, âAmen.â Major Majorâs father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.
That describes the current neocon republican perfectly. Just by luck I read Catch 22 about a month before I was drafted. Nothing could have better prepared me for what I was about to experience. Amazing book, amazing insights.
Note the title of the linked article vs. boingboingâs title.
District Sentinel: âDespite Campaigning on Pork-cutting Family Living âWithin Our Meansâ, Sen. Ernstâs Kin Took Over $460,000 in Farm Subsidiesâ
BoingBoing: âGOP senator boasted about her familyâs self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidiesâ
According to the linked article, Ernst didnât receive the money; her relatives did. And the bulk of it ($367K of $460K) went to her brother, as an adult, so it doesnât really break her narrative about her upbringing.
BoingBoing removes the reference to Ernstâs âkinâ, so it looks like Ernst took the money herself.
With the possible exception of a few libertarians who donât get listened to, youâd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesnât love a good subsidy if you phrase it correctly and enough of it goes to them or people they like.
To win over conservatives, it usually works best if the subsidy is:
A) Laundered through some part of the private sector: Collectivist gummint farm paying people to grow uneconomic things? Pure evil. âAgricultural price supportsâ making it cost effective for farmers to grow uneconomic things? Preserving the salt of the earth who make Americaâs Heartland as great as it is. (Same rule applies for getting jobs that need done done. Federal employees are all union parasites; but contractors are the Small Businesses that Grow American Jobs).
B) Carefully associated with at least the appearance of something being done: The activity being subsidized doesnât need to be economic, or even useful. Even actively harmful is fine(eg. depleting soil to grow corn to turn into ethanol that wonât even break even once you factor in the hydrocarbons involved in producing it). But it has to be something, because otherwise it would be Welfare, which is just a handout to the ethnics by the Democrat party. Contracts for goods and services that even the recipient agency says they donât want are a good source for this.
C) In line with A, the subsidy should be structured such that, even if the bulk of the recipientâs income is subsidies, it is not identifiable as such when it is spent. The two usual ways are providing subsidies as cash(and money is fungible, so thereâs nothing to say that any given dollar you spend wasnât earned by the sweat of your brow) or by providing subsidies in the form of tax credits or protective tariffs, so the subsidized party is effectively richer; but no handing-out of handouts ever occurs. Contrast this to bad people subsidies (eg. WIC, with readily visible EBT cards) where the subsidy is made as visible as possible, and paid in something less useful than cash.
St. Ronnie? Is that you?
Did anyone else think it was a little weird that she seemed to be wistfully extolling the virtues of a bus full of kids having to wear plastic bags on their feet? Like that was a good thing? Itâs like being nostalgic for bread lines.
Uh, no.
âRelativesâ = âfamilyâ. In fact thatâs practically the definition of family. Also, Boing Boing have left the bit about her family in their story title. Look. See? Itâs right there. You even quoted it!
I read it that way too, and found myself surprised by the details. In this context, I assumed âfamilyâ to mean âhousehold.â
The no-true Scotsman analogy fits to well with libertarians because this is always the excuse. Even the patron saint of liberarianology took SS and grants from the NEA.
Food stamps, mortgages, student loans, and healthcare subsidies are more for the benefit of the seller, and not the consumer.
Just to play devils advocate: that is not very much money over that amount of time for a farm. I grew up on an 800 acre wheat farm, we could easily spend 100-200k a year on a crop and only make 20K for the year. Even small farms are expensive businesses. Without subsidies there would only be mega-farms, the risk is just too high.
Totally genius book. Where are those Snowdens, these days?
