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Why Are State Pension Plans Broke?

Matt Taibbi might give anyone who blames state public employees' unions for their deficit plight a more realistic answer.



So who are the real freeloaders?

A friend of mine just said this, which I tweeted (I didn't want to take credit for it):

Try to say this with a straight face: "We're running a deficit because the teachers and police make too much money."

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The Taxman Cometh...

posted by Armadillo Joe

On this tax day, as you do your patriotic duty and surrender your hard-earned dollars to prop up the opulent lifestyles of assorted corporate executives in the manner to which they've grown accustomed, I give you my counter-proposal to all the misdirected anger of those asinine, corporate-sponsored (with your bailout dollars!) tea-baggin' parties:



Matt Taibbi, on whom I have to kinda admit I have something of a man-crush, also has a point about the underlying truth of the tea-baggin' parties:

It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires.

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