“My Hands Are Tied” – John Carney

Filed in National by on January 20, 2018

“It’s a simple math problem. Our long-term growth rate for state spending is two times the growth rate of our revenues. We have to find a long-term way to limit our spending growth.”

The more I think about Carney’s speech the more I seethe. The sentence above gets to the heart of it. Wealthy Delawareans are more wealthy than they’ve ever been. The corporations benefiting from our courts and tax payer generosity are notching record profits. And yet, in Carney’s mind there is just no way to increase revenue. It is simply impossible. Why mention it at all? Any and all revenue increases are off the table at the outset.

What a fucking limp dick douche the guy is. It is truly nauseating.

john carney hands tied

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Jason330 is a deep cover double agent working for the GOP. Don't tell anybody.

Comments (21)

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  1. His brain is tied. To the Chamber of Commerce cult. Where is a good deprogrammer when we need one?

  2. Geoff langdon says:

    It’s funny watching you rip your own guy. But some facts, Delaware used to with emphasis on used to have 20 of the richest American according to Forbes, now none. We are the only state with not one billionaire. Wealthier Delawareans are wealthier than ever before is fiction. And in a week, where Delaware didn’t even reach the short list for Amazon, and your solution is to raise taxes. I know it’s painful to admit but those corporations hire employees, give to nonprofits, and fund our government. Mbna, wtrust, dupont all bye bye. And why are significant expense cuts always off the table? Deal with it, Carney knows better

  3. jason330 says:

    Well it is funny to watch Republicans fly to the defense of Carney. (As I mentioned, that doesn’t bode well for Simpler).

    I guess you got me on the billionaire tally. But I’m sure you know that the merely sickeningly wealthy are doing super, and paying less (as a percentage) than ever. So yeah… let’s raise some taxes on the merely rich. He excise tax payers shouldn’t be having all the fun.

  4. Geoff langdon says:

    Paying less as a percentage, now that’s a whopper. The wealthy pay over 50 percent of the countries taxes, as well as produce far more for our society. A more relevant question is why the poor are poor and that has zero to do with taxes as they pay less than none. But it is so much easier to blame the rich than fix the issues of the poor. Start with crappy school run by guess who the state of Delaware

  5. jason330 says:

    I’m not blaming the rich. I’m blaming politicians for not allowing the rich to take part in helping support a system that has worked very well for them. For not allowing them to pay the patriotic rates that funded the post war increase in quality of life across all income bands. (That goes for corporations as well. Where is the patriotism?).

    And I know you to be a smart guy, so think you know full well that I meant a percentage of their wealth, not a percentage of revenue. That you took that flimsy out reseals the flimsiness of your argument.

  6. Geoff langdon says:

    You hate the rich, it’s never enough. They pay huge taxes on revenue and then they pay a percentage of their wealth at death. And they contribute huge sums of money to charities. You are in total denial that the liberal tactic is to point at the rich and try to blame them for a whole host of problems they have nothing to do with. Look at Delaware, you can’t fix the local schools after one blue ribbon panel after another, and the poor get no education, that’s a government failure. And why, not because the rich aren’t for it, no the democratic politicians aren’t for it in spite of what they say. It’s a disgrace, rant about that, Carney is at least trying there

  7. puck says:

    “The wealthy pay over 50 percent of the countries taxes, as well as produce far more for our society. ”

    An oldie but goodie.

    The top 10% hold 76% of the nation’s wealth, money that used to be in our paychecks. The taxes need to follow the money where it went.

  8. jason330 says:

    “Carney is at least trying there”

    Trying what? Putting the system under ever more pressure by buying into this austerity scam.

    It is obvious that there is a class war going on. It has been the rich (with the help of politicians like Carney) going to war with the middle-class and poor all to further enrich a bunch of people who have snagged ALL of the income gains over the past 25 years.

  9. Alby says:

    “The wealthy pay over 50 percent of the countries taxes, as well as produce far more for our society”

    The second part of this sentence is complete horseshit. Go pound that sand somewhere where they think finance is productive. They don’t produce more, let alone far more. They make more money. There’s an enormous difference.

    “They pay huge taxes on revenue and then they pay a percentage of their wealth at death.”

    Both parts of this sentence are horseshit. The taxes they pay on revenue are not huge by any measure. The US taxes wages at a higher rate than any other form of revenue; the other forms are mostly not available to the poor. Estate taxes are paid by few, and they are paid in lieu of taxing those who receive it, who would –under a progressive system — pay a higher rate on a one-time chunk of cash.

    But you’re too busy fluffing your corporate masters to understand any of that.

  10. bamboozer says:

    We all knew Carney would be a disaster and take his cues from the corporations, that he’s yet another DINO and corporatist stooge. We should ask ourselves why this is always what we get from the Dems in this state.

  11. Share the wealth….

    “California Democrats want businesses to give half their tax-cut savings to state ”

    http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/California-democrats-want-businesses-to-give-half-12508742.php

  12. Alby says:

    “It is obvious that there is a class war going on.”

    And which side Mr. Langdon is on.

  13. RE Vanella says:

    Hey, Geoff. Class war’s been on for about 400 years. We’ve just decided to fight back now being there’s way more of us.

    My feelings about “the rich” are probably similar to your feelings about the homeless, the sick, the addicted, food stamp recipients and the foreign born. So I’m not surprised you’d recognize our distain.

    Think of it like this:

    “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

    They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

    Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”—FDR, 1936

  14. Tom says:

    The best feeling is not having to file DE income taxes this year. Delaware is DOOMED…

  15. RE Vanella says:

    Yeah… Fucking dummy. We’re doomed.

    N.B. Tom… You’re not a fucking dummy and we’re totally not making fun of you. You owned us. Really, sleep tonight knowing, you’re absolutely not retarded, and we are really, really scared.

    Hahahaha.

  16. RE Vanella says:

    I can’t stop laughing. It’s true.

  17. RE Vanella says:

    So, if you’d like a real lesson on the capitalism and the economy, here’s the world’s leading scholar on Marx’s ‘Capital’, Prof David Henry, giving a talk at the London School of Economics on his new 2014 book ‘The 17 Contradictions of Capitalism’.

    (Maybe one of you fellas can make this it’s own post?)

    https://youtu.be/AULJlwoI3TI

  18. RE Vanella says:

    Here’s a important point from the Q&A (around 1:13 mark).

    “The theory of distribution is not a passive element in the dynamics of capitalism in the terms of rent extractions. We are much closer now to forming a rentier economy in which rents and the appropriation of rents is becoming absolutely central to what capital is about. This is interesting because Keynes looked forward to the euthanasia of the rentier. And of course if you follow Keynesian policies that’s where you would very much end up. But since we’ve had this other kind of capital which has been emerging since the 1970s actually we’ve got the reconstruction of the rentier. And the rentier is now constituted not only by the rentiers of the finance capital, because interest can be seen as a form of rentierism, it’s also based on land and property markets. Everywhere you go in the world land and property markets have become crucial, most of all in China. If there is going to be a blow up in China it’s likely to be in property markets. So the rentier is becoming significant. But the rentier is also becoming very significant in intellectual property rights. So suddenly you find yourself in a situation where some heads of American corporations say we don’t need to produce anything anymore. We just need to produce the knowledge and sit there as a rentier. And if you’re not a rentier on the knowledge you’re just a rentier by forcing monopolies. So you have these rentier emerging in agribusiness like Monsanto and Cargill with monopoly power over seed plasma and all the rest of it. This is just an extraction of monopoly rents.”

  19. Alby says:

    @REV: I don’t have 90 minutes right now, but I would like to point out that we see this tendency everywhere. Consider music — people now pay monthly fees for access rather than purchase copies of individual works for ownership, mainly because the producers of those works saw so much erosion due to pirating.

    One of the points the Langdon types don’t acknowledge, or even realize, is that without the framework of regulation and law provided by government, the fruits of most of their “productivity” would have little or no value.

    If we’re going to keep capitalism around, the rich must acknowledge that they are prime beneficiaries of the system they built, and they must pay the costs for its upkeep.

  20. Dave says:

    ” We should ask ourselves why this is always what we get from the Dems in this state.”

    And then we should answer that question by saying “Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the universe tends toward entropy (S > 0) ultimately reaching a state of inert uniformity.”

    And because Progressivism operates mainly under the First Law, which is transformative (energy can neither be created or destroyed, only changed).
    So you can have to keep spinning the plates on the stick or they fall (pedal to the metal, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, or whatever metaphor floats your boat).

    But mostly because in general, change is difficult for people and it is a long, almost evolutionary process for them. Progressives mostly don’t want anything to do with evolution and tend to favor revolution as the mechanism to effect change, which puts them at odds with the majority.

    Even though most people might share progressive values, what they don’t necessarily share is the how to get there. Imagine, if you will, a race to the finish line. Most people are tortoises. Progressives are hares. Everyone wants to get to the same place, but at a pace they are comfortable with. In short, most people are incrementalists, which is anathema to progressives, who want everything they believe in to happen right now.

  21. RE Vanella says:

    Coincidentally, Jeremy Scahill interviewed Prof Harvey and it’s up on the Intercept today:

    https://theintercept.com/2018/01/21/marxist-scholar-david-harvey-on-trump-wall-street-and-debt-peonage/

    Also, with regards to “value,” there’s a very important distinction between use value and exchange value. Marx lead with this in Volume one Chapter 1. Very important concept. Without understanding this people just go down the same ideological checklist and sound ignorant. Like what we have from Geoffrey here…