Friday, September 23, 2011

Paying Your Fair Share

This video is of former White House financial reform adviser Elizabeth Warren, who is running for Edward Kennedy's former U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, at a campaign "house meeting" stop in Andover, Massachusetts, blasting Republicans for accusing Democrats of engaging in "class warfare."
The video was shot, edited and posted on YouTube by one of the house guests - not associated with the Warren campaign - who decided to become a "citizen journalist."

This video was initially passed person to person in Massachusetts through online social networks, but now the video has gone viral nationally and moved into the mainstream media.

The video captures Warren passionately refuting the Republication Party's meme that the Democratic policy that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes amounts to “class warfare” against the wealthy.

Warren speaks lucidly and eloquently to the sort of Rand-ian, “I am an island” Libertarian rhetoric that is so prevalent among Republican and Tea Party members of congress.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” Warren says in the clip, “Nobody.”

She shoots down the notion that the wealthy owe nothing back to society by pointing out that entrepreneurs and business owners rely on publicly built and maintained roads and bridges as well as a vast array of other public services like public schools and law enforcement. Warren explains that everyone paying their fair share is part of the American “social contract” to give back to the society that has given them so much:
“You built a factory out there? Good for you.

But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”


Elizabeth Warren announces her decision to run for U.S. Senate so she can fight for hard-working Massachusetts families

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