The People's Money

I'll have to look that up myself when I get a chance, but the way I remember it is that Michigan never passed a balanced budget during the entire eight years that Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm was in office. Indeed, her successor, Republican Governor Rick Snyder ran and won on the promise that he would balance the budget if he didn't do another thing. To be fair, Granholm had a divided legislature while Snyder has a Republican majority in both houses.

The government money going to the poor that I was talking about is all the welfare and government assistance programs. I suppose it's not correct that all that money was taken from the rich people, most of it was probably borrowed and/or printed. I don't know how many taxpayers are rich and how many are middle class, I suppose it depends on where you draw the line between them. It is common  knowledge, though, that almost half of the people in the U.S aren't currently paying any income tax. Remember when Mit Romney got in trouble for making a disparaging comment about that when he thought the microphone was turned off? What Romney apparently overlooked was that not all of the non-payers are poor people. I haven't paid income tax for the last few years myself, and my accountant told me I didn't even have to file anymore unless my income changed substantially. That's because Social Security benefits are not taxable unless your other income exceeds a certain amount. My only other income is my IRA withdrawals, which I reduced to the point that it was no longer enough to put me into any kind of tax bracket. I suppose it's true that some of the very rich don't pay income tax, but that's because you are taxed on annual income, not on how much money you already have in the bank. Once you've got enough stashed away, you can do all sorts of creative things with your current income to keep it out of Uncle Sam's clutches.

Ron Paul was one of the founding fathers of the Libertarian Party, and ran for president on their ticket at least once. At some point he decided that he would like to have a snowball's chance in hell of  actually getting elected to something, so he ran for congress and was elected a few times as a Republican. He's still a libertarian at heart, though, and has never made a secret of that. In true libertarian fashion, Paul advocates an isolationist foreign policy, while Palin is more of a war hawk. I don't know who calls their disciples "Paulites" and "Palinites", the first I ever heard of it was the other day in the Wiki article "Tea Party".

You would know more about this than I do, but didn't a lot of your old Hippie friends end up becoming doctors, lawyers, corporate executives and politicians? Sounds like "Establishment" to me! Even you, living in your high rise condo on the waterfront, might have a hard time passing yourself off as a populist to the downtrodden masses that live only few blocks away.

Speaking of colored folks, did you know that there was a whole Black populist movement running parallel the populist People's Party back in the day? It seems that the regular Populists couldn't agree whether or not to admit colored folks to their ranks, so the colored folks formed a rank of their own. They died out about the same time that the regular populists did but, in their case, they really died out, mostly by lynching.