Old Rich White Men

The Financial Crisis

Universal Truths

There are some universal truths about America today: (1) the overwhelming number of people railing against health care reform are white. (2) The overwhelming number of white people railing against health care reform already have health insurance. (3) The majority of those people skew older and may, in fact, already on government-managed health care—Medicare. (4) The majority of that group eagerly await their government check every month while railing against “gifts”—government checks and services granted to minorities. (5) My guess: the vast majority of this overall group are low-information voters, skewing older, who fear change and, more specifically, black people and, even more specifically, black males. (6) The vast majority of this overall group have no black friends, no entre into black or Latino culture, and therefore no reasonable understanding of those cultures. And thus, in my (and many others’) informed opinion: (7) the health care debate is merely a proxy for racism: not all white people, but this particular group of low-information and older folks resent giving their hard-earned money to black people on welfare and free riders now getting free health care.

Believe it or not, I actually understand that. I resent sending my money so Washington can cut checks for the above group of people as much as they resent the assumption that I am somehow benefitting from their paychecks. I’m not. I never have. I’ve never been on government assistance. During my childhood, raised by a single mother struggling with two and sometimes three jobs, we spent winters in the cold because our furnace had broken down. We had no food, no heat, sometimes no electricity. My father lived in the same city, maybe twelve miles away, and he never came to see about us, never sent a dime. When she couldn’t afford a babysitter, my mom would drag my sister and I to work with her, sometimes standing out on street corners later at night in waist-high snow waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming. My mother never applied for welfare. Taught us to never take a handout. There was dignity in work. When I hear white people—and I’m not being racist, here, but this is a true statement: I am talking about white people—grousing about lazy blacks on welfare, I tend to agree with them. I’m just as resentful about lazy blacks on welfare. This is a concept many whites I’ve known cannot seem to grasp: black people are not monolithic. Like whites, we are a plurality. We’re individuals, each with his own worldview and set of ethics. I can’t stand lazy blacks any more than whites do. But blacks, like Latinos and other ethics groups—including Jews and Italians—are often painted with a broad and unfair brush.

When I hear grumpy, Old Rich white Men spewing their racist dog whistles about blacks enjoying “gifts” from the government, I wonder “What gifts? Where’s my gift? Where was the gift to my mother, to my sister?” When I encounter racism in my own town, on my own street, I am resentful because nine if not ten out of ten times these people don’t know what they are talking about. I’ve never taken even one dime from you, you old bat. If anything, I’ve struggled and scraped and worked hard to pay into the system that sends you a check every month. But this is what racists do: look at me like I’m taking money from them, when it is, in fact, just the opposite. Where’s my gift?

Renaissance Man: Questions of competency coming from the man who brought us Sarah Palin.

Showing Up

The other universal truth, one most of the above-described group simply do not understand: (8) the leaders they elect and constantly re-elect, these Old Rich White Men playing games with American lives and the very future of this nation, think their supporters are idiots. Old Rich White Men have no concept of what the actual daily struggle of American life is. They posture and bang on lecterns and echo the reactionary and unreasonable whining of their shrinking constituency, but the truth—as aptly demonstrated by Mitt Romney’s “47 Percent” hidden video—is they have contempt for Americans if not for America herself. They say what they need to say to keep their low-information, ignorant, fearful, racist supporters voting for them, but these guys don’t care about middle-class whites any more than they care about blacks of any economic status. A guy like Arizona Senator John McCain, who can’t remember how many houses he owns, or former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who thinks his wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs” and needs an elevator in his garage to manage his many cars, has no idea what these folks’ struggle is about. He is pandering. He is lying. And, every two and six years, these white folk shuffle down to the polls and re-elect these relics. Hispanics, young people, black people aren’t keeping dinosaurs like Lindsey Graham in office. Their bread and butter are low-information whites, mostly older whites, who will show up in the off-year elections.

Young people and minorities are only now discovering their power and their voice at the polls, but have yet to realize voting for their Congressman is easily as important as voting for the president. You can’t just show up every four years and vote for the president. But most of us slept through high school social studies and don’t realize the president is not God Almighty. He needs a cooperative legislature in order to accomplish anything. That’s what was so insane about minorities like Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West running around bad-mouthing the president. The problem wasn’t the president so much as our voter-education efforts rallied the masses for the president without emphasizing how vitally important it is to also vote in a reasonable and cooperative legislature so the president can actually achieve something.

Who shows up to vote for the legislature? These folk. And they send these creaking ancient dinosaurs back again and again, these Old Rich White Men living in the past as they do. These stubborn, hate-filled, out-of-touch and, yes, evil men who care absolutely nothing about “The American People.” Their actions are clearly and evidently self-serving. And they think the people who vote for them are idiots. In fact, they know it.

And this is where we are: stuck in this malaise of ignorance, fear and assumption. Blacks assuming things about whites, whites assuming things about blacks, and all of us being held hostage to Old Rich White Men in Washington who hate the president because he is black. It is so patently obvious—racism being obvious to everyone except the racists. The entire nation, including the good, honest, hard-working white people these evil (yes, evil) men claim to serve, is being harmed by their steadfast agenda of, first, denying the president a second term and, having failed that, now to mortally wound his second term before it even begins. This is their obvious agenda. They are looking for a fight, for any excuse whatsoever, to kneecap President Obama, and they are willing to destroy America just so they can blame the president for it.

The Fiscal Cliff

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In the United States, the fiscal cliff is a newly coined term (neologism) referring to the effect of a number of laws which, if unchanged, could result in tax increases, spending cuts, and a corresponding reduction in the budget deficit beginning in 2013.[1] These laws include tax increases due to the expiration of the so-called Bush tax cuts and spending cuts under the Budget Control Act of 2011.

The year-over-year changes for fiscal years 2012–2013 include a 19.63% increase in tax revenue and 0.25% reduction in spending.[2]

Some major domestic programs, like Social Security, federal pensions and veterans' benefits, are exempted from the spending cuts. Spending for federal agencies and cabinet departments would be reduced through broad, shallow cuts (referred to as budget sequestration).

The Congressional Budget Office reported an increased risk of recession during 2013 if the deficit is reduced suddenly, while indicating that lower deficits and debt over time improve long-term economic growth prospects. The deficit for 2013 is projected to be reduced by roughly half, with the cumulative deficit over the next ten years to be lowered by as much as $7.1 trillion or about 70%.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 was passed under the political environment of a partisan stalemate, in which Democrats and Republicans could not agree on how to reduce the deficit. It was thought that the blunt cuts of budget sequestration and sharp revenue increases would be mutually undesirable to both parties and provide an impetus and deadline to bring the sides together to solve the deficit problem.

The projected effects of these changes have led to calls both inside and outside of Congress to extend some or all of the tax cuts, and to replace the across-the-board reductions with more targeted cutbacks. It has been speculated that any change is unlikely to come until the period roughly between the 2012 federal elections and the end of the year. Additionally, the debate may be exacerbated by the expectation that the debt ceiling is expected to be reached before the end of 2012,[note 1] unless "extraordinary measures" are used.[3]

Nearly all proposals to avoid the fiscal cliff involve extending certain parts of the 2010 Tax Relief Act or changing the 2011 Budget Control Act or both, thus making the deficit larger by reducing taxes and/or increasing spending.

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