Friday, April 28, 2006

American dream - Paying taxes??

I was just over at Facing South, which bills itself as "blogging for a progressive South" and in this post, stumbled upon this hook line.
The essence of the American dream is that every child born should have an equal shot at success, and that every person should pay their fair share of taxes, right?
I had to back away from the screen and rub my eyes. Part of the American dream is paying taxes? Not any dream I have ever seen in print.

I've seen taxes viewed as inevitable, as confiscatory, as unconstitutional, but never as part of the American dream. What kid dreams of growing up to pay taxes?

Then I started chuckling to myself. I couldn't help it. I read blogs for information and entertainment. This was pure entertainment.

Line after line of pure Fisk-able thoughts, loosely assembled with a tainted understanding of American culture. We find multiple disconnects in adjacent sentences, such as this lovely:
The scandal season is still in full bloom, claiming ethically challenged lawmakers across the political aisle. Two recent items of a Southern flavor (hat tip to TPM Muckraker):

(1) Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) is in deep trouble, says today's New York Times, for funneling half a billion dollars to his favorite non-profits in the state. Small beans compared to, say, the amount the Pentagon has misplaced for the Iraq war in the last couple years, but still unseamly.
First of all, West Virginia isn't a Southern State. Folks from New York or Maryland might consider it Southern, but no one from the deep south would even consider it on the list. Second, it seems that she is complaining about a scandal affecting a Democrat. Then we find it connected, somehow, to DoD expenditures. The disconnects are stunning in their breadth and mystifying in their complexity.

I read some good progressive blogs, but this ain't one of them. This is pure entertainment.

1 comment:

Rivrdog said...

Of course, the blogger completely fails to mention Sen. Byrd, who singlehandedly has removed a large slice of Federal Bureaucracy and replanted in WV, to the point that they had to build a freeway to that little corner of nowhere to handle all the bureaucrats driving back and forth to DeeCee.