Hoping to repeat the success of their 1994 \u201cContract With America,\u201d House Republicans last week rolled out their \u201cPledge to America,\u201d an extremely modest legislative agenda that calls for limiting federal spending, permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts, and repealing President Obama\u2019s signature health care law.<\/p>\n
And then \u201creplacing\u201d it … whatever that means.<\/p>\n
\u201cAcross America, the people see a government in Washington that isn\u2019t listening, doesn\u2019t get it, and doesn\u2019t care,\u201d said House Minority Leader John Boehner as he and other Republican leaders — in their shirtsleeves — released the 21-page document at a news conference at a hardware story and lumber yard in Sterling, Va.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018A Pledge to America\u2019 offers a new way forward that hasn\u2019t been tried in Washington: an approach focused on cutting spending instead of accelerating spending, and eliminating uncertainty for the private-sector innovators and entrepreneurs who create jobs,\u201d Congresscritter Boehner said.<\/p>\n
The phrasing is odd, apparently in an attempt to rebut Potlatch President Barack Obama\u2019s claim that today\u2019s Republicans seek to take the country back to the \u201cfailed policies of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, the GOP does need to renounce the go-along-with-tax-and-spend agenda that it increasingly fell into from 1988 right up through the lost-my-veto-pen administration of George W. Bush. In dumping \u201cRepublicans in Name Only\u201d like Delaware\u2019s Mike Castle, instead nominating true fiscal conservatives like Nevada\u2019s Sharron Angle, it has already made important early strides in that direction.<\/p>\n
But low taxes and minimal government red tape made America great from its founding at least through 1912 — why claim that\u2019s anything new or untried?<\/p>\n
Why buy the rhetorical bull that pretends \u201cgoing back\u201d to the smaller-government principles that made America a beacon of freedom for centuries somehow means we\u2019ll have to give up cell phones, color TV, and indoor bathtubs?<\/p>\n
The GOP \u201cpledge\u201d calls for a reduction in federal spending to fiscal 2008 levels except for the Pentagon and Homeland Security; for citing specific constitutional authority when introducing legislation, and for requiring all bills to be posted online three days before votes — a pointed barb at Democratic measures including the 2000-page Obamacare legislation, of which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said \u201cWe have to pass it so we can find out what\u2019s in it.\u201d
\nDemocrat response was not impressively thoughtful.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it sounds familiar, it\u2019s because it\u2019s the same litany that got us into this mess — tax cuts for the rich that costs millions of dollars,\u201d White House chief spokesman Robert Gibbs said.<\/p>\n
But tax cuts don\u2019t \u201ccost\u201d Americans anything. Only taxes \u201ccost\u201d Americans. Leaving more Americans with more of the money they\u2019ve earned — their own money — can only help the private-sector economy, while the notion that all money starts out belonging to the government, which thus sustains a \u201ccost\u201d when it \u201callows\u201d some Americans to keep more than they need to barely subsist on, is pernicious socialism, if not a sign of an outright mental disorder.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for House Speaker Pelosi, who has run up the biggest deficit in the nation\u2019s history, said in an e-mail, \u201cCongressional Republicans are pledging to ship jobs overseas, blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires; turn Social Security from a guaranteed benefit into a guaranteed gamble … and take away patients\u2019 rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Democrat plan, on the other hand, is to allow the unreformed Social Security Ponzi scheme to go bankrupt within decades — Medicare and Medicaid sooner — while Obama Health Gauleiter Katherine Sebelius is already threatening to punish health insurers who publicly admit Obamacare is driving up their costs and their customers\u2019 rates.<\/p>\n
While the Democratic rhetoric aims to make it seem radical — and thus gives it fat more credit than it\u2019s due — the GOP plan is in fact mighty short on specifics.<\/p>\n
It will \u201cput government on a path to a balanced budget,\u201d we\u2019re told. But why a \u201cpath\u201d? Why not slash federal programs so spending drops below revenues within 60 days? Why exempt the bloated Pentagon and all the blue-gloved airport goons? All we need in Afghanistan are some well-fortified Predator bases. Keep the Navy; bring home the Army and shrink it to what we can afford. Close TSA completely. Our airplanes would be perfectly safe if all law-abiding Americans were encouraged to carry their loaded sidearms aboard.<\/p>\n
And \u201cciting a constitutional authorization\u201d for a bill is a meaningless sound bite, unless it specifies, \u201cAnyone using the justification that \u2018It advances the general welfare\u2019 or \u2018it indirectly impacts interstate commerce\u2019 will be promptly stripped naked, tarred, feathered, set afire, and floated out to sea on the evening tide.\u201d<\/p>\n
We weren\u2019t on a toboggan ride to insolvency and fiscal and currency collapse in 2006? Surely slashing spending back to pre-1988 levels (at least) to balance the budget immediately would be preferable. (I believe pre-1964 is the minimum required, while pre-1912 would be better.) Surely closing whole droves of counterproductive federal agencies that cripple the private sector with perverse red tape would be preferable. Surely it would be better to pledge to get rid of the death tax and the \u201ccapital gains\u201d tax — both forms of double taxation on proceeds realized by investing post-tax dollars — completely.<\/p>\n
(Environmentalism is a religion. The EPA is barred by the First Amendment. Close it on Feb. 1, 2011.)<\/p>\n
The argument is that the current \u201cpledge\u201d shows House Republicans soberly analyzed what modest steps in the right direction they\u2019re likely to be able to move forward during two more years when a misguided socialist America-hater, bent on destroying the free market economy, will still occupy the White House — that they would rather under-promise than stand accused of failure.<\/p>\n
But I believe this shows the \u2018Republican establishment\u201d is nearly as out of touch as the Democrats. (Still proposing \u201ccap and tax\u201d, \u201ccard check,\u201d national energy taxes, Value Added Taxes, and \u201ctax hikes on the rich\u201d in the middle of a Great Recession? No, let\u2019s not settle for \u201cout of touch\u201d: the Democrats and most Republicans who have been in office more than a few years are clinically insane.)<\/p>\n
We need gold and silver currency real soon. The Federal Reserve should be closed, and \u201cfractional reserve banking\u201d outlawed as fraud. Every restriction on creating new jobs — starting with the IRS and their \u201cwithholding tax,\u201d but not neglecting the EPA, the ADA, and the MInimum Wage Act, should be repealed immediately, along with the death tax and the capital gains tax.<\/p>\n
The fact that today\u2019s supposedly \u201cradical, extreme, right-wing\u201d Republicans don\u2019t even MENTION these things, let alone vow to do them, means that the most \u201cextreme\u201d vision of smaller government now offered by the Republican party will look like tea time at the peacock pavilion within a decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hoping to repeat the success of their 1994 \u201cContract With America,\u201d House Republicans last week rolled out their \u201cPledge to America,\u201d an extremely modest legislative agenda that calls for limiting federal spending, permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts, and repealing President Obama\u2019s signature health care law. And then \u201creplacing\u201d it … whatever that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-election"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-9G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":602,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions\/602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}