The Occupy Wall Street Brain Surgeons
The vibe I get from OWS is that they want to take the tax windfall from those darned “banksters” and either distribute it among “the 99 percent” or let the government apply it towards new spending programs. Case in point: Remember the cheery woman in OWS’s official online commercial who called for taxing the rich to fund education? That’s super, but it does little to help us cope with the explosion in mandatory spending that will eventually cannibalize the budget: Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt, and whatever’s left over for defense. In essence, these people seem to want to build Great Society II just as the government’s begun to crumble in earnest from the weight of Great Society I.
That’s why, as much as I goof on them, I can’t get as worked up about OWS as some of my friends on the right. Despite their alarming radical overtones, they’re basically committed to preserving (and expanding upon) the same unsustainable status quo we have now.