Dakota Beacon

If you are a person who believes in self-reliance, accountability, and facing the consequences for decisions and actions, then you probably believe as 80% of Americans do, that taxpayers should not be penalized for Congress’s irresponsible behavior. But liberals? Liberals are another matter altogether.

A recent Rasmussen poll shows that 20% of Americans are willing to pay higher taxes to reduce the $14.25 trillion National Debt. (For a truly scary sight, go HERE to see the real-time erosion of Americans’ economic security by Congress’s politically-motivated insanity.) As this post is being written, paying off the debt would require almost $130,000 from each and every taxpayer, a group which constitutes only about half of Americans. The other half lives, at least in part, off of taxes paid by taxpayers.

It is curious that all believable polls for the past decade (for instance these two–1, 2) have shown that about 20% of Americans self-identify as “liberal.” Admittedly, we have insufficient data to directly link the particular 20% of Americans who’d be happy to continue enabling irresponsible spending with the 20% who call themselves liberals. Still, it would be mindless to simply default to the “it’s just a coincidence” crutch in straightforward cases such as this one.

We could, however, look at a bit more evidence to tie the suspiciously identical percentages together.

Another Rasmussen poll found that 17% of Americans actually blame people who don’t want to pay higher taxes for the growing federal budget deficits. In the words of the poll summary, the remaining 83% of Americans believe that “the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.” So more than four out of five Americans take an adult view of Congress’s decidedly non-adult behavior.

But now then, the number 17 is suspiciously close to the number 20. Perhaps the people in the 20% who are willing to pay higher taxes, and the 17% who blame the growing debt on people who are not willing to pay higher taxes, and the 20% who call themselves “liberals” are pretty much the same group of people?

We can also consider the sentiments of dedicated liberals such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Senate’s head scowler says that Republicans’ efforts to cut 2011 federal spending by $32 billion, an amount equivalent to 0.2% of the national debt, is “draconian.”

draconian: of, relating to, or characteristic of a severe or cruel code of laws

Over-the-top exaggeration and vilification of opponents are indeed behaviors flaunted by liberals. The liberal animal will never change. The critter has long been, is now, and will always be in favor of turning the responsibility for running one’s life over to pseudo-intellectual know-it-alls entrenched in a huge, overly-powerful government funded by money earned by people who do not want pseudo-intellectual know-it-alls running their lives.

Overbearing sanctimoneousness is the liberal way.