Ding! Ding! Ding!

I'm shamelessly stealing this and expanding on it. It's from "Crooks and Liars", a hard left site, concerning Michele Bachmann.

Fire it up and watch her go! We'll sound the bell every time she floats a discredited idea. Ready?

Raising taxes for the wealthy shouldn't be "on the table," says Bachmann, because "tax rates are high enough (ding!), and history shows (ding!) that when we raise taxes, particularly on job creators (ding!) we actually bring in less revenue (ding! ding! ding!) rather than more."

Hmm; let's reverse that. Change the word "discredited" to "completely true and proven". Ding! We win!

And the history of the Great Depression shows that it took government investment to get people working and the economy growing. FDR listened to the Bachmannites of his time in the late 1930's, and everything started falling apart again. That's what history shows.

DING! DING! DING! Loser gets passes to Atlas Shrugged.

"You could actually confiscate (ding!) all the wealth that people make at $200,000 or more," says Bachmann, "and that would only yield about six or seven months of revenue to run the government." Hey, that's half the whole cost of government! She's selling the idea pretty well!

Yes, I can see why you'd like that. Um. What?

They love that word "confiscate."

Yes; you have a more accurate one? Try: steal.

"And I love the way these conservatives say they'd lay down their lives for their country, but if you ask them to pay four pennies on the dollar on six-figure income,that's dictatorship! Think of it: The highest tax bracket under Dwight D. Eisenhower was 91% percent. He must be the greatest dictator of all time!"

Sounds like it. Define "greatest". Oh, you LIKE dictatorships. Got it.

I wish it were 4 pennies on the dollar. At a low 5-figure income we get about 20% (that's 20 cents on the dollar for those of you in lala land) confiscated. That's just income tax; not the other 20% or so that goes to property taxes. No wonder I'm in the Tea Party. This has GOT to stop.

"And yet they'll give away (DING) hundreds of billions in tax revenue (ding ding ding!) like it was peanut butter in a roomful of stoned billionaires."

They love the idea that not stealing something is akin to "giving it away". You can't give what isn't yours. Next time I go into the 7/11 for a dollar-fifty burrito, I'm going to remind the proprietor that because I didn't take all the burritoes on the shelf without paying, I'm "giving" them to him. They'll like that. And when I go to the grocery store I'm gonna walk out with a loaded cart and when they stop me I'll say "Hey, I'm not giving this stuff away, pal! You want it, you pay for it!" Think they'll go for it?

"Already again," she says later, "the top 1% of income earners pay about 40% of all taxes." (That's not the right number, but whatever.) But why do the top 1% pay a large share of taxes? Because the top 400 families in America are richer than the bottom fifty percent of the entire country! So of course they pay a big chunk of income tax, even after they're coddled with tax breaks galore.

Of course.

This makes sense to them.

Nuts or not, her ideas are definitely radical.

Definitely. Define radical. Oh, it means "to the roots"? Yes, ok. Color me radical.