Neil Cavuto: The Chinese First -- THEN American Children and Seniors

[paft.livejournal.com]

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson: We’ve still got to educate our young people, because what are these kids going to do to have no debt and no education, no innovation, no healthcare…seniors will be out of nursing homes…How will they stay in if you cut all the money?

Neil Cavuto: Well, if you’re broke you don’t have options…I would love to have a house in Tahiti…then I come to this annoying fact, wait, I don’t have the money fr a house in Tahiti.

I confess I’m not impressed with Rep Eddie Bernice Johnson, here. Yes, her heart’s in the right place, but she’s not doing much arguing. What we see here, for the most part, is Cavuto and Johson pelting each other with talking points. What’s revealing about it is what Cavuto does not say. Not once does he say, “We’re not giving up on educating, clothing, and feeding our children.”

No, his entire argument seems to be “we can’t afford to educate clothe, and feed our children any more.” In fact, he compares doing this to buying a house in Tahiti. The well being of children (and the elderly) in our society is not a necessity in his mind, but a luxury.

Obama is right. These guys want us to end up as a Third World nation. Judging from what Cavuto is saying here, he's willing to see American children grow up (if they survive to grow up) barefoot, ignorant, hungry, and sick -- so long as we end up debt-free in a couple of generations.


Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes Thoughtcrimes

Comments

The luxury of survival...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of countries that do not protect their own people. Perhaps some UN intervention with NATO support would be in order.

BTW, I find Cavuto's interviewing style to be rather arrogant, disrespectful, and distasteful. He fits in well at Faux News.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I don't see Cavuto denying that we need to educate, clothe, feed, either. So what's your point?

[paft.livejournal.com]

Do you see him affirming it? He doesn't say, "you're wrong, Congresswoman, we're going to keep doing these things. Instead, he attempts to justify not doing it by saying "we can't afford it."

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

If I said "I want a jet plane" and you said "Well you can't afford it," do you take that to mean that I still should get a jet plane?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I think you can rent a place in Tahiti for under $1000 per month. If Cavuto can't afford that, he needs another job.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

You can rent a whole kingdom for £40,000 a night (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1377532/Liechtenstein-puts-country-market-40-000-night.html)!

I'll just leave this here...

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

Re: I'll just leave this here...

[paft.livejournal.com]

What "unknown" is it that you imagine I fear.

Re: I'll just leave this here...

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Love the Icon by the way

Re: I'll just leave this here...

[headhouse.livejournal.com]

...aaand now I'll have that song stuck in my head every time she posts.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Gah. I dislike it when "Third World" is used as a euphemism for "poor dictatorship." It's another Cold War relic that should have been replaced with the real dichotomy rich country/poor country.

That said, this is a surprise to you? The Republicans mistake Rand's badly written novels for a political how-to.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

We need "third-world" to keep people from thinking about what it really is.

I mean, if it's one thing America is good at, it's labeling something falsely to convince people of whatever it is they want to convince them of.

Shitty stocks?? AAA-rating!
Shitty food?? Fast-food!
Shitty goods?? Wal-Mart!

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I have a slightly different take on the subject. I see little or no difference between what the congresswoman is doing above vs. when a Republican warns of dire consequences when the issue of drawing back on military spending is brought up, or when things like repealing the Patriot Act are brought up.

Dire consequences the likes of cholera epidemics were being warned of should welfare reform get passed back in the 90's. It passed, and we're not in the middle ages.

Both sides predict doom when its their bacon on the cutting block. And both parties are full of feces when they do it.

What Cavuto doesn't say isn't interesting becasue what he did say is essentially true. When you ultimately run out of avenues to pay what is owed, you're boned and what you'd like to spend in additon to that becomes meaningless. Like what I plan to spend my money on after I'm dead.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

With one breath Cavuto will say: "we cannot afford it" and the next moment he will say: "But we need tax cuts for the wealthy!"

And that bothers the hell out of me.
Yes, we need revenue to pay for shit.
And yes, there is fraud/waste to be cut.
But I'll be damned if we don't also need higher revenue for the non-waste/fraud stuff we, as a society, benefit from.

[paft.livejournal.com]

jc: Dire consequences the likes of cholera epidemics were being warned of should welfare reform get passed back in the 90's. It passed, and we're not in the middle ages.

Really? People were seriously invoking cholera epidemics and a return to the middle ages? I'd love to see those quotes and see how widespread they were, because I don't remember hearing that.

I do remember people pointing out that if the economy took a dive, that welfare reform was going to have serious consequences, and a lot of people were going to suffer.

That seems to have happened.

Jc: When you ultimately run out of avenues to pay what is owed, you're boned and what you'd like to spend in additon to that becomes meaningless. Like what I plan to spend my money on after I'm dead.

So we should give up on educating children and caring for the elderly?

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I had a friend who put it this way:

"Why are we even cutting schools? Educating children is just beneath putting out fires and arresting criminals in the order of priorities for civilization."

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

That's a good question, If it were up to me I'd have stripped scoial sceurity, medicare, and even the military before i thought about touching education.

Then again, I suppose we all have our sacred cows.

[farchivist.livejournal.com]

As far as I see it, this just confirms the opinion I have come to form. The Baby Boomers got us into this mess, first with their hippy-dippy crap in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then with their rampant greed and yuppy attitude in the 1980s, and now that shit is catching up on it, they expect ME to go without because THEY fucked up.

Except that I don't see it that way. THEY fucked up. The seniors can be put out on the street for all I care because they're the ones that created the situation. Made bed, lie.

Instead, I'm supposed to go without, to not have Social Security or Medicare or any type of social service whatsoever and pay for their shit. Nah, I don't fucking think so.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

As Garrison Keillor once said, "We live in a country where every senior deserves their hip replacement and well, their children don't deserve a goddamn thing."

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Neil Cavuto is one of my least favorite people on television, and that is saying a lot.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Would you rather have barefoot, ignorant, hungry and sick children who are debt-free or barefoot, ignorant, hungry and sick children who are indebted up to their eyeballs? You are content to look in the short-term and that is why we are in the position of having to make that choice.

Also, you're creating what you think his argument is and claiming he thinks something based on your own creation.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

You are content to look in the short-term and that is why we are in the position of having to make that choice.

Because the choices the entire society is standing in front of, depend on what a blogger on LJ thinks.

Would you rather have barefoot, ignorant, hungry and sick children who are debt-free or barefoot, ignorant, hungry and sick children who are indebted up to their eyeballs?

False dichotomy is false.

[debergerac.livejournal.com]

Obama is right. These guys want us to end up as a Third World nation.

which guys?

[mybodymycoffin.livejournal.com]

they not only want, but they actively try to impoverish everyone except themselves and those who already hold the wealth of the nation.

Ftfy.

Evil means are a poor way to address good ends.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

No, his entire argument seems to be “we can’t afford to educate clothe, and feed our children any more.”

Cavuto, to his credit, is claiming that the government cannot afford to continue to attempt doing these things (and badly), not that "WE" cannot afford to do them. It is not the government's job to do these things. The government certainly does not "create jobs" that the economy needs. If the economy needed certain work to be done there would be people willing to pay to have it done. The fact that the job must be "created" with money involuntarilly taken from people is evidence that the "job" is not one that people would voluntarilly hire someone to do, at least not at the price a politician, spending someone else's money, is willing to pay.

The totally unsupported article of religious faith, implied and put forward in this post, that if the government does not do these things they cannot or will not get done, is telling. The belief is a fallacious superstition and it is believed by the vast majority of people, no matter how many times the idea fails. Leaving such issues to politicians is a guarantee of having them get worse and worse until the government collapses from prolifigacy and corruption. The truth is that people, and by this I mean YOU and ME, not some nebulous "WE", out there in the collectivist cloud, cannot continue to afford to vote to take from Smith to give to Jones in the vain hope that Jones finds and forces somebody, somewhere, to feed, educate, and house people who are having trouble doing that for themselves. It doesn't work. It fails every time it is tried. Of course, if people got any kind of education in economics growing up more people might understand this. History leaves us little reason to hope on this account though. The real irony of it all is that most people are content to believe that just because they have taken the trouble to trot over to the precinct voting location and mark a ballot that this means that they have done their part to help "US" take care of whatever issue they think politicians should address.

The fundamental fallacy is that Americans, under the delusion of "democracy" have a very naive understanding of politics and government. Politics is about power. Politics is the sphere of conflict and power relations. It is not about cooperation. To accomplish anything in the political sphere it is absolutely necessary to first have more political power than anyone who may have a different idea from yours. Politics is about coercion and force, not voluntary community participation. Politics will never ever be about "feeding the hungry, educating the children, or housing the poor," as a primary goal, for the simple reason that it is limited by the nature of its means. Politics must always be about acquiring power first and accomplishing whatever the politically minded want to do as a pretext a distant second, if at all. People who understand this better than others will always be able to use whatever political power their is to their own gain. This is why outside of Social Security and Medicare, which are presently working on utterly destroying the fiat dollar system, so many other unprofitable and corrupt wealth transfers are occurring, over and above all of the supposedly "socially relevant" spending that government is supposed to undertake.

Re: Evil means are a poor way to address good ends.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

The government certainly does not "create jobs" that the economy needs.

Stopped reading right there.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

It'd be something else entirely if we "couldn't afford it" for any reason other than we keep giving enormous tax breaks to anyone with more than fifty bucks in their pants pocket.

[ccr1138.livejournal.com]

It's a false dichotomy. We can pay down the debt, cut spending, and still have the basics. Cavuto is a moron.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

We're running incredibly high deficits and accumulating debts just before the baby boomers are about to retire. S&P has just downgraded the US's outlook and several states look like they are about to go bankrupt. I'd say that the assessment that we are going broke is accurate.

Shooting the messenger is clearly the correct course of action in this case.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Do you feel I got the "message" right? That we just are going to have to give up on public education and any aid at all to the poor and sick?