Dems Choose Class Warfare on the Eve of Independence Day

The president took his opening salvo, starting his campaign a year early, demonizing yet another group of Americans. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) calls him out on the Senate floor as engaging in behavior more akin to that of a third world leader. Video.

We have a jobless summer, only one in four teens is employed. The minimum wage was raised by Dems when they controlled both Houses in 2007, costs have gone up, tax and regulatory uncertainty is rife, yet the president picks a fight with job creators.

A case in point in Minnesota, where the new Dem governor faces a new Republican legislature. Despite the governor's claims of cuts, the GOP House and Senate actually increased spending slightly over the previous year, balancing the budget without a tax increase. You can just watch the first 5 minutes of this clip for the gist of it. "Whether we tax one group of people or the whole state, it's debt we cannot afford". But Dem Governor Dayton wants to play the class warfare card, so he shut down the state government. [what stays open, what closes] A millionaire himself, his initial shutdown plan--clearly a priority over budget negotiations--kept his chef and gardener at the governor's mansion, classifying them as essential services. And when the governor, prior to the election, in October of last year, was asked if he would shut down the government to achieve his tax increase, he said no. Yet here we are.

Back in DC, Treasury Sec. Tim Turbotax Geithner is the last of the Obama econ advisers to abandon ship. Tax and spend seems to have sunk this country.

Will we still be the land of the free and the home of the brave when our children inherit America?

The Stamp Acts and duties on tea that the British government imposed from afar from the 1760s onward were not symptoms of a deep hatred and mistrust between the center and periphery of the English-speaking world; they were not flash points for anger swelling up from deeper causes. The taxes -- illegal in the English tradition, according to the Colonists, since they violated the rights of free Englishmen to make their own fiscal rules through representatives in Parliament -- were themselves the specific issue on which the Colonists staked their lives and their honor. They would not be browbeaten or oppressed or enslaved, they would not be taxed.

They would not be hijacked and mugged to serve ends about which they had not been consulted. And the Crown knew what they were saying; but it needed the money.

Let's remember why we defied King George.

More. Byron York: Union curbs rescue a Wisconsin school district

  VDH: Liberal Frankensteins. From Greece to California, the liberal dream is dead.

  More. Thread at Memeorandum. Politico with the Dems'quotes. Minnesota by law balances its budget. There's a difference between projected deficits and actual ones. Also, most people know property taxes are local, but Dems conveniently ignore this. Pawlenty earlier rebuttal at NRO: 

Pawlenty defends his record, saying that all his two-year budgets were balanced, as Minnesota law requires. “The last one in that series ends this summer, and it’s ending in the black. That’s before any tinkering with the current legislature or the new governor,” he says.

Instead, Pawlenty blames the projected deficit on spending increases, which are anticipated to be 20 to 27 percent. “I would never have tolerated that,” he says. “Nor should that even be part of the projection in the budget forecast. If they have an increase of a more reasonable nature, there’s no deficit at all.”

Pawlenty rejects Carlson’s charge that he is responsible for Minnesota’s property-tax hikes, noting that while he slashed the money that the state provides to local governments, it was they who chose to raise property taxes in response. Instead, they could have cut the number of public employees or reformed public-employee compensation.

What a concept, hmm. In this economy we need shared sacrifice. That means public employees as well who often make more than the private sector taxpayers struggling to pay the tab.

..."Public servants" should not be our masters.