Has someone ever pranked you? Perhaps, you've been the object of a practical joke. As the recipient of such chicanery, you probably realized later that your own gullibility and self-induced ignorance masked the obvious signs of something fishy. Somehow your self-delusional perceptions (conscious naïveté) subdued your innate survival instincts (subconscious alerts) resulting in your hilarious (albeit embarrassing) foolishness. Your trust, violated by the perpetrators of the prank, regenerates slowly as you vow not to be deceived again!
Modern politics have become the new (though time-honored) social prank. A conspicuous manipulation of our good faith and self-induced ignorance. It would all be so funny if the stakes weren't so high. Yet, politicians don't just shake our soda can before we drink it or put superglue in our office chair. They impact the social, economic, and judicial expectations of our everyday life.
It's time to defend ourselves against the practical jokes our politicians are playing on us. Listed below are five of our politicians most recently and frequently played shenanigans... the dumb politics (what they want you to believe), eventual prank, and effectual reality.
#1) Social Security to Provide Your Retirement Income
Dumb Politics: It is an essential retirement and disability income for all Americans distributed fairly to those who contribute to it.
Prank: The benefit income is stupidly low compared to each American's individual contribution and discriminates against individuals who receive supplementary retirement income from personal 401(k)'s, TSP's, or IRA's. Furthermore, increasing numbers of beneficiaries strain the system's shrinking number of benefactors resulting in the government's leveraging of tomorrow's social security contributors to pay for today's social security recipients.
Effectual reality: The "benefit income" masks itself as another federal tax to support a welfare entitlement program as citizens receive its benefits disproportionately to the amount they paid into the program. Additionally, prospective insolvency proves to strip America's youth of hard-earned money futilely paid into the program.
#2) Gun Control to Protect You
#3) Universal Healthcare Required for All
#4) Higher Taxes on the Rich to Alleviate National Debt
#5) Foreign Policy: Benghazi Doesn't Matter
Modern politics have become the new (though time-honored) social prank. A conspicuous manipulation of our good faith and self-induced ignorance. It would all be so funny if the stakes weren't so high. Yet, politicians don't just shake our soda can before we drink it or put superglue in our office chair. They impact the social, economic, and judicial expectations of our everyday life.
It's time to defend ourselves against the practical jokes our politicians are playing on us. Listed below are five of our politicians most recently and frequently played shenanigans... the dumb politics (what they want you to believe), eventual prank, and effectual reality.
#1) Social Security to Provide Your Retirement Income
Dumb Politics: It is an essential retirement and disability income for all Americans distributed fairly to those who contribute to it.
Prank: The benefit income is stupidly low compared to each American's individual contribution and discriminates against individuals who receive supplementary retirement income from personal 401(k)'s, TSP's, or IRA's. Furthermore, increasing numbers of beneficiaries strain the system's shrinking number of benefactors resulting in the government's leveraging of tomorrow's social security contributors to pay for today's social security recipients.
Effectual reality: The "benefit income" masks itself as another federal tax to support a welfare entitlement program as citizens receive its benefits disproportionately to the amount they paid into the program. Additionally, prospective insolvency proves to strip America's youth of hard-earned money futilely paid into the program.
#2) Gun Control to Protect You
Dumb Politics: Assault weapons proliferate the streets and lead to an increase in violent, gun-related homicides. An issue of this magnitude requires federal intervention.
Prank: According to the CDC, Americans are more likely to cause unintentional harm to themselves than to commit/fall-victim-of gun-related crimes (see the following for amplifying statistical support http://platoandpopculture.blogspot.com/2012/12/connecticut-challenging-view-on.html). Marginally (or unarmed) citizens bid less resistance against harsh infringements on civil liberties and eventual tyrannical governmental regimes (consult American Revolution, 1776).
Effectual reality: Emotionally motivating the rescinding of our 2nd amendment rights avoids the intellectual and physical implications of a disarmed citizenry. An unarmed and impoverished populace ventures into pre-Nazi German territory... a slippery slope by which any government consolidating political power within a single party may exercise unchallenged infringements upon our civil liberties.
#3) Universal Healthcare Required for All
Dumb Politics: Private insurance companies and stingy private businesses make personal health insurance unaffordable and/or non-existent. Elderly women, children of impoverished families, and indebted, part-time working youths suffer from the impractically priced private-sector healthcare.
Prank: Government programs such as medicare and medicaid inflate hospital costs and shrink compensation for medical practitioners seeking coverage for pricey operations and routine check-ups. Private healthcare strains to marginalize costs by imposing slightly higher prices on corollary insurance companies and private healthcare recipients. Despite inflated costs of private healthcare induced by federal government entitlement programs, private healthcare remains affordable for those that prioritize their health. * Give up the cable television, the dining out, and the pleasure-seeking, and save some money toward your own health insurance. Otherwise, quit your complaining when you enjoy a weighty doctor bill because you spent your insurance money on HBO. Sophisticated healthcare ain't free!
Effectual reality: A further entitled country expects top-notch healthcare nearly free-of-cost, while aspiring medical practitioners stray from a federalized profession that will compensate much lower individual wages. Consequently lower wages dissuades prospective practitioners from entering the field due to a fear of accruing un-repayable student loans. Medical field strains to recruit practitioners, accepts suitable alternatives (registered nurses vice medical doctors), and reduces specialty practices and independent research currently benefitting American healthcare recipients. Private healthcare still exists but only for the tremendously wealthy. Working class America receives an equitable but crappy quality of healthcare.
Dumb Politics: The rich pay disproportionately lower taxes than working-class America. Difficult economic times requires those who have prospered more from the labors of America's working class to contribute more to remedy her economic sufferings. It's a patriotic duty.
Prank: America's total National Debt exceeds 16.4 trillion dollars (expected to add nearly 2 trillion dollars to this number by the end of 2013). The top 50% of U.S. wage earners pay over 97% of U.S. taxes. The top tax brackets (top 1% of American wage earners) contribute 37% of the country's taxes. In that upper tier exists people like Warren Buffett (the world's third richest man) who even if he paid all that his net worth amounted to (a whopping $50 Billion), he'd only reduce our national debt by one-third of 1%. Our national debt requires more than levying higher taxes on the rich. We must also reduce governmental spending on pricey entitlement programs (i.e. social security and medicare, which outweigh defense spending).
Effectual reality: Stigmatizing the rich by demonizing their tax contributions and legislating tax increases thereby instigating class warfare only penalizes the working class. Working class wage earners suffer the repercussions of wealthy Americans who must pay less to their employees, afford lower company dividends, or shelter money overseas (by sheltering money off-shore or by investing in foreign businesses) due to aggressively disproportionate federal income taxes. In the end middle class America suffers the most during class warfare. The timeless adage remains: you cannot take from someone who has earned and give to someone who has not and expect each to work equally.
#5) Foreign Policy: Benghazi Doesn't Matter
Dumb Politics: The incident on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya represented the backlash from a discriminatory documentary maker who's vile condescension of the Prophet Muhammed riled an angry mob to violently overthrow a U.S. embassy and kills several American embassy workers.
Prank: The attack on Benghazi was later determined to be pre-meditated, sophisticated, and terrorist-backed. The assault on a sovereign U.S. government structure received little public media attention and accrued no legislative or executive accountability. Investigation into the shortcomings of our foreign policy and associative international security measures in this region would not be assessed until four months later.
Effectual reality: A four month-delayed hearing with our Secretary of State to account for the Benghazi attack revealed how weak-hearted and disinterested our elected officials have become as few questions were poised to establish the veracity of our reported standing in that region of the world. Consequently, North African militancy and Islamic extremism grows bolder as countries like Mali, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt test the ideological resolve of America. Not only has our involvement in the Mediterranean and North Africa been complicated by conspicuous gutlessness, but our elected officials seem indifferent to holding our Executors responsible for flawed policy. Politicians piss on our legs and tell us it's raining without fear of repercussion. Such political nonchalance endangers our servicemen and women serving abroad in hostile parts of the world. Violence and terrorism resurges as America demonstrates political impotence in response to conspicuous acts of evil. Safeguarding domestic and allied economic interests abroad grows more tenuous. Alliances weaken. America regresses to pre-superpower status as power projection abroad diminishes behind cavalier politicians and a willingly pranked populace.
*** Stand against political pranking, America! These D.C. shenanigans have gotten out of control. Stop the public ignorance... stop submitting to DUMB POLITICS! ***
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