Elizabeth Warren revived her cribbed “you didn’t build that” speech at #DemDebate
Cribbing concepts and some wording from a U.C. Berkeley professor, Warren expressed again her belief that individuals owe their success not to their hard work, but to the government.
In September 2011, a video went viral of Elizabeth Warren, in a pre-Senate campaign talking tour, excoriating factory owners for claiming they built their businesses.
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
“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.”
Warren, and in July 2012 Obama, argued that because business owners used the common infrastructure of society, such as roads, bridges, education and police, they owed society an obligation to pay back that debt. The concept of the self-made person was contrary to their view of society, where individuals owe their success not to their hard work, but to the government.
We covered the story in 2012, and how Warren and Obama cribbed the concepts, and some of the language, from U.C. Berkeley Lingistics Professor George Lakoff, Obama and Warren cribbed “build it” narrative from progressive Berkeley Professor.
Warren resurrected the “you didn’t build it” verbiage at the CNN/NY Times Debate on October 15, 2019. (transcript via Real Clear Politics, emphasis added).
ERIN BURNETT, CNN MODERATOR: Congressman O’Rourke, do you think a wealth tax is the best way to address income inequality? Your response.
BETO O’ROURKE (D-TX): I think it’s part of the solution. But I think we need to be focused on lifting people up. And sometimes I think that Senator Warren is more focused on being punitive and pitting some part of the country against the other instead of lifting people up and making sure that this country comes together around those solutions.
I think of a woman that I met in Las Vegas, Nevada. She’s working four jobs, raising her child with disabilities, and any American with disabilities knows just how hard it is to make it and get by in this country already. Some of those jobs working for some of these corporations, she wants to know how we are going to help her, how we’re going to make sure that her child has the care that she needs, that we strengthen protections for those with disabilities, that she just has to work one job because it pays a living wage.
And Senator Warren said show me your budget, show me your tax plan, and you’ll show me your values. She has yet to describe her tax plan and whether or not that person I met would see a tax increase. Under my administration, if you make less than $250,000 a year as a family, you will not see a tax increase. That family needs to know that.
BURNETT: I want to give Senator Warren a chance to respond.
WARREN: So I’m really shocked at the notion that anyone thinks I’m punitive. Look, I don’t have a beef with billionaires. My problem is you made a fortune in America, you had a great idea, you got out there and worked for it, good for you. But you built that fortune in America. I guarantee you built it in part using workers all of us helped pay to educate. You built it in part getting your goods to markets on roads and bridges all of us helped pay for. You built it at least in part protected by police and firefighters all of us help pay the salaries for.
And all I’m saying is, you make it to the top, the top 0.1 percent, then pitch in two cents so every other kid in America has a chance to make it.
BURNETT: Senator, thank you.
WARREN: That’s what this is about.
Here’s a video montage we put together of Warren’s debate comments (prior clips of Warren, Obama and Lakoff are available at the links)
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Comments
All I can say Professor is that you must have one tough stomach to keep up with all of Lizzie’s “doings.”
How long before Lizzie makes a horse her VP running mate and declares herself a god like those Roman emperors?
Neat visual round-up of the DEMS 57th debate so far this year.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/quid%20pro%20joe%20dems%2001.jpg
The front half of the horse would make the ticket a whole horse.
“Warren expressed again her belief that individuals owe their success not to their hard work, but to the government”
Tell me that that’s not an echo of Benito,
“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”
That this frightening woman is within grasp of the D nomination is testament to the successful field day that the the left has had in “public” education.
Whereas Lizzie made her fortune by pretending to be Sequoyah’s great-great-great granddaughter.
“You did not earn your wealth. You do not deserve your wealth. We are going to take your wealth.”
That is the entire line of thought.
There are a bunch of old, Russian peasant stories about the incredible difference one active individual can make. Have we gotten to the point where we have to re-activate folktales?
she has told so many stories I wonder if she knows the truth
But but but! That business owner DID pay his/her share of personal and business taxes for infrastructure which entitled his/her use of same: property taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, B&O taxes, et al. For every employee paying into SS, the employer pays too …
She sure does practice some “now you see it, now you don’t” kind of math.
People do pay for infrastructure, its called taxes. In one way or another corporate profits are taxed, and some would say, overtaxed. Moreover, there are practical issues with a wealth tax. One is that wealth is not a constant number. It changes on a daily basis, and can take large swings over the course of a year. So, which number serves as the basis for wealth? Also a 2% tax on wealth is way too big a number. On average wealth can yield 4 or 5 percent a year. At least one third of the 4% or 5% will be taxed away. Accounting for the 2% taxed on the wealth itself, the implicit tax rate on income from wealth can be as high as 80%. That is almost confiscatory. Why would anyone take any investment risk when most of it may end up being taxes away?
If she only believed that we should pay taxes to pay for firefighting, police and roads, she would be to the right of Rand Paul. But she believes because a business owner benefited from infrastructure and services available to all, that somehow justifies giving government permission to reach into the owner‘s pockets to pay for any program she can dream up.
Warren wouldn’t being saying this, if she had ever built anything worthwhile. The government is parasite. How do I know? They spend $6 trillion per year. When they run out of money no one notices except you might not be able to get into a park. Even welfare payments are a skimming scheme. They take your money, keep most of it, and give very little back.
So says a fake Indian, a fake sex victim, a fake socialist, and a fake professor of law.
Funny, I thought that the rich were already paying the lion’s share of taxes.
“Though the rich in the U.S. are doing well, they also pay the greatest share of taxes. The top 1% earned 21% of the country’s income, and paid 38.5% of federal individual income taxes. The top 1% paid a greater share of income tax to the U.S. Treasury than the bottom 90% combined (29.9%).”
We have one of the most progressive federal income taxes of any First World country. If memory serves, the Top 1% of the income scale pay 39% of the federal individual income taxes collected while earning 19% of the total national personal income.
Or stated the other way, 99% of the population pay 61% of the individual personal income taxes but earn 81% of the total national income.
The bottom 50% only pay (maybe) 4% or 5% of the total federal individual income taxes collected. (I forget exactly what they earn – quite a few of the lower part of the income scale collect various forms of means-tested welfare. Accurately calculating taxes for a nation of 327 million people is no small task, admittedly.)
Warren and her ilk want those who take no risk, to reap all the rewards.
Of only they’d learned the story of The Little Red Hen as a child…
“If” only… ??♂️
Anything you built, well . . . you didn’t build that, society and your benevolent government did, and you’re just loitering around and taking the credit. Right.
So, basically, she’s claiming that any government which maintains public works or provides any services is socialistic, and we’re all socialists but just don’t realize it.
This is the same trick Marx and Engels pulled in the Communist Manifesto. Much of the verbiage of the Manifesto is an attempt to convince the reader that he’s already a communist but doesn’t recognize it . . . yet. Warren has substituted the superficially benign “socialist” for the more accurate “communist”. I don’t think she’s a good enough liar to pull it off.
So first, God created government. Government built roads to…???? Businesses sprung up to build… what? Why?
No. God created the universe then created man. Man, faced with needs, created solutions to address those needs. Self-government was the order of society for hundreds of thousands of years before large impersonal governments were created and people lost control. Now governments and science are competing for the title of “God the Creator”. Intellectual drivel.
That’s what happens when people take freedom for granted.
Warren, in her claims of “You didn’t build that”, is essentially claiming that everything I accomplished in my life is not my doing. That raises an impossible situation. What she is saying is that me earning my college degrees, the patents I have obtained, the papers and books I have written, the other accomplishments I have made, and the overall good I have done for so many in the various ministries I have worked, are not my accomplishments. If that is indeed the case, then could someone please explain to me how these things would have come about if I didn’t do anything?
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As is so clearly shown by all those people sitting idly by in America who are accomplishing nothing of any importance, if people do not make the effort, then nothing will ever happen. These statements by Warren should be an insult to everyone’s intelligence because of their inherent dishonesty and yet so many on the Left are desperate to believe it all.
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Yes, everyone’s accomplishments are built upon those that preceded them, but that is simply the way things work. In the real world we call this progress and those who do a very good job of this are remembered for their greatness.
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Warren’s claims are nothing more than sour grapes. She and her ilk on the Left are tired of accomplishing less than some others so she feels the need to belittle what others have done. (This resentment is often manifested in attempts to cheat in ways like claiming to be a certain minority in order to get a leg up on others.) Should this surprise us? Not really because the entire thinking and behavior of the Left is built upon envy and greed. They are envious of what others have done and they want to take away everything for themselves that which others have earned by their skill and actions. We call this socialism and it should be intuitively obvious why socialism always fails no matter how it is implemented.
Grandma Warren is so utterly dishonest.
Property taxes pay for public schools at the local level. The factory owner usually pays way higher property taxes than the rest of us, but his/her kids do not go to public schools.
It’s similar with roads and infrastructure. Commercial vehicles pay considerably more. Go ask someone with any kind of trucking business how much they pay only in tolls.
And then there’s the progressive income tax.
I am not rich myself (hopefully, one day, who knows). But basic decency dictates that you don’t take what is not yours. Elizabeth Warren is not only a fraud but also a thief. A vote for her is, as fscarn suggested above, a vote for Mussolini.
FAUXCAHONATS never built anything she games the system so she projects everyone else does.
She can take a long hike off a short pier.
WE built our company, Liawatha, not you.
WE have gone without a paycheck in down markets, not you.
WE gamble on our inventory every single day, too much, too little, not you.
WE pay horrible taxes, as a Chapter S Corp, not you.
Go sell another flipped house with your daughter; go pretend to represent women with Dow breast implants while taking money under the table; go run for President on our money; YOU BUILT THAT.
Filthy piece of lying, bitter pond scum.
” that’s what this is about. ”
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bs–there are consumers(and we are all consumers to various extents)and there are producers–what have YOU produced, fauxcohontas?–how many jobs or products have YOUR efforts/activities created?–how much loss or stress have YOU sustained in the pursuit of an idea or a purpose?–how much PERSONAL risk have you ever taken in the achievement of a particular idea/goal?–yet those of us who are truly producers are expected to share with the likes of YOU because you say so?–because you’re(in what passes for your own mind,at least)entitled?–can answer for myself at least, ” Never. ”
you and all your ilk, lizzie, are grifters only–a pathetic(and expensive)drain on our national prosperity and creativity–a blight and an embarassment to intelligent people
This from someone who perpetrated a fraud to get onto the staff of Harvard Law School, then received over $325k annually to “teach” ONE STINKING COURSE.
I hope she is the nominee, she’ll become Mike Dukakis 2.0.
This may be one big scripted event… so well scripted that the candidate contestants don’t realize they are all going to lose. Sort of a berate and switch with the real candidate waiting in the wings. I hope they get some pay for playing their part in this charade. Michelle O will be the savior of the Party should the Dems fail to dislodge Trump. She promises the two-fer that Bill and Hillary wanted to sell.
Lots of folks have been saying that since 2017.
Now, however, MOST of the public school children who Michelle tried to starve to death are of voting age.
Schools want out of Michelle Obama’s lunch rules, kids say ‘Yuck’
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/schools-want-out-of-michelle-obamas-lunch-rules-kids-say-yuck