The headline is two Twitter hashtags that indicate what a younger, coarser generation would term “WTF,” and we couth Gen Xers would respond to by rolling our eyes.

The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Best of the Web Today had two items Thursday that should make you run for your favorite pain reliever, in tablet or adult-beverage form.

The first is from Massachusetts, whose Democrats, like Wisconsin’s, have been grinding their teeth ever since a candidate stole a U.S. Senate seat from its birthright in the Democratic Party. One harbinger of such wins as the win by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wisconsin) over Russ Feingold in 2010 may have been the special election to replace the deceased Sen. Edward Kennedy, won not by a Democrat, but by Republican Scott Brown. (To quote a favorite BOTWT phrase, Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.)

Brown now faces Democrat Elizabeth Warren in November 2012. Moveon.org has been touting Warren heavily, touting this diatribe, a paraphrase of which I predict will end up in the mouth of Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin:

BOTWT reader Brett Amos sent this in and adds:

What amazes me is how so many people linking this quote celebrate the sheer ignorance of it. People who build factories pay a variety of fees that also pay for roads, schools and many other things. … Then for the life of the building there will be ongoing assessments (taxes) by the city and county that will be used to pay for city and county services and roads. The fee schedule for my city alone is 28 pages long.

Someone who builds something pays his fair share, especially here in California. Moreover, someone with the wherewithal to build in California has paid taxes on his (probably larger than average) personal income and residence. That developer also paid the salaries for the construction workers and then the employees that worked in the building who in turn paid income tax, sales tax, and if a homeowner, real estate tax.

Yes, almost everyone pays for roads, police and fire, but a developer has paid far more for such things than the average citizen. How much worse off would a community be that didn’t have someone to build buildings and pay employees that then pay taxes? It isn’t very hard to find communities that are dead or dying because they couldn’t find businesses to locate there. The liberal myth that businesses don’t pay their fair share is what drives those businesses to other states or countries.

That is merely about factories. The benefit to society of a healthy, profitable business far exceeds whatever government could collect from that business in taxes. One reason communities seek the factories about which Warren sneers is that businesses are net contributors to a community’s tax base, while residential developments are negative net contributors, given that if you build houses, you also need to build roads, schools, etc.

The other item comes from my home town:

Reading Is Hard

• “Tommy Thompson vs. Spoiled Brats of the GOP”–headline, Capital Times (Madison, Wis.), Sept. 20
• “WOW the Capitol [sic] Times calls Tommy Thompson ‘the spoiled brat of the GOP’ “–tweet,@emilyslist, Sept. 21