One thing is for sure: today's Republican Party isn't Ronald Reagan's Party. They worship the Gipper by being for everything he was against.
Those who wish to raise taxes are not republicans, but then again, what about those who won't cut spending, or at least freeze it?
Wait, I was confusing republicans and conservatives, sorry.
And he's currently our party's leader.
This, along with Bush's assault on the First Amendment, are among the many reasons I don't support him. I don't support Big Stupid Government politicians, period.
The GOP is no longer the party of limited government.
That legacy seems to have died with Reagan.
RIP
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1169549/posts
How many times have GOP leaders proposed real spending reductions and elimination of unneeded government programs??
Here's the full article:
A Dime's Worth of Difference?
Four Republican senators are determined to raise your taxes.
BY PETE DU PONT
Monday, July 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
An important and serious argument is going on in Washington about whether taxes on Americans' incomes should stay where they are or dramatically rise, and whether government spending should continue its accelerating growth. We know what Democrats think. They despise tax cuts and believe government spending should be higher. Washington Republicans, on the other hand, are unsure of themselves. They used to be for lower taxes and smaller government; now they seem to want bigger spending even if it means higher taxes, abandoning Reagan conservatism for '60s liberalism. In other words, this is a battle for the heart of the Republican Party; the outcome matters, and it seems to be in doubt.
With the help of three liberal Republicans (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island), and one who should know better (John McCain of Arizona), the Senate, with 51 votes, adopted a rule that if passed in the House will end all the Bush tax cuts and ensure that no new ones are enacted.
Pay as you go, or "Paygo," is a budgeting rule requiring any revenue lost as the result of a tax cut, or spent through the enactment of new entitlement programs, to be paid for either by raising other federal taxes or reducing other federal entitlement spending. Paygo rules don't apply to the growth of existing entitlement programs; they increase automatically every year. Social Security grows about 5% annually, and it is exempt. Medicare grows about 9%, Medicaid about 7%; they and President Bush's new drug benefit can all continue to grow without limitation. Existing entitlement programs total about $1.3 trillion in annual spending, and are expected to double in the next 10 years. They are all unaffected by Paygo, on autopilot.
But tax cuts aren't exempt. Under the Senate's Paygo the existing Bush tax cuts would one by one expire over the next few years unless they get 60 votes in the Senate. New tax cuts would require 60 votes to pass unless accompanied by equivalent spending reductions. So entitlements like Social Security or Medicare would have to absorb very large reductions to pay for tax cuts. Obviously that would cause political pain and suffering, helping Senate Democrats reach their goal of making sure that tax cuts never happen and higher government spending always happens.
In March Paygo came before the House. It fell just one vote short of passage, in part because members couldn't agree on including or excluding tax cuts. Then last month came an effort to put in place some other spending controls. Appropriations subcommittee chairmen threatened to remove pork-barrel projects from the district of any congressman who voted yes. Considering that the 2004 highway bill contained 3,000 hometown projects costing $10 billion--bridges, horse trails, museums, garages--in hundreds of congressional districts, that's a real threat. One might conclude that House Republicans are moving towards FDR's Harry Hopkins view that "we shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect."
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue there is White House opposition to the tax-cut portion of Paygo, for the president's men understand that would be the end of economy-expanding tax cuts. There is lip service to applying it to spending, and no wonder. The Bush administration has been the biggest-spending presidency in 40 years--since Lyndon Johnson. Overall spending has grown from 18.4% to 20.2% of gross domestic product. Some of that is post-9/11 defense spending, but nondefense discretionary spending has grown 43% since President Clinton left office. The administration championed an $86 billion farm subsidy bill, a huge education expenditure increase for the No Child Left Behind program, and the $534 billion health care and prescription drug bill signed into law last December.
Make no mistake about how Paygo would be applied in the future: a 60-vote majority, very difficult to muster, would be needed to continue the Bush tax cuts when they begin to expire in 2005 and 2006. But on the spending side we have already seen that Paygo would regularly be waived. Three times since the four liberal Republicans ensured its adoption, each has voted to waive another 60-vote requirement for new spending programs, including a $35 billion entitlement expansion for disabilities education. How do you suppose they will vote if John Kerry is elected and pushes his $653 billion catastrophic care insurance plan?
Paygo is simply a plan to raise taxes back to the pre-Bush level (or higher) and make sure they are not reduced in the future. That enough Republicans would vote for Paygo to ensure Senate passage recalls third-party 1968 presidential candidate George Wallace's suspicion that when it comes to money, "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between Democrats and Republicans.
If the Paygo battle allows that to become a truth, the Republican Party won't matter much any more.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.
bump
jmstein7;lowcountryjoe
An updated missive from my roommate, includes links:
It won't pass in the House.
That's difficult with these type threads that attract all the old third party fanatics.
They can't remain civil for long and conservatives can't suffer their lack of common sense.
They don't even have a clue about political parties. They think political parties are debating societies searching for the ultimate truth. Winning elections is not part of their experience.
When the president can say, as he has, that "if someone is hurting it's the government's job to be there," he is actually saying there is a free lunch, that government has inexhaustible resources from which to draw, and that government's beneficence should be showered on the "hurting." This is the nonsense talk of someone who has never thought seriously about economics, someone who doesn't understand why Hayek and Friedman were right and Keynes and Marx were wrong.
GWB hasn't thought seriously about too many things I'm afraid. He's entirely too shaky in too many areas and it's really beginning to bug me.
Oh, glorious... a Bush-bash fest in the middle of a critical election season.
1992 redux...
Taxes should be linked to the percentage of the Constitution the government is willing to uphold. Right now, the government is adhering to about 10% of the constitution, so pray for a 90% refund.
The car that cost $4000 in 1960 now costs, what...$20,000? THAT is what happens when your government does not maintain a sound, gold-based currency as Constitution requires.
Face it. The government is easily corruptible and already corrupt, and its adherence to the Constitution is superficial and spotty at best.
So a tax decrease is out of the question?
Why do you think I believe in term limits!
I always HATE voting for Snowe and Collins, both RINO'S of the highest order, but I absolutely refust to vote DemocRAT. No way.
So, Maine is stuck with these two fence sitters. And I hate it. We voted them into office what seems like years ago, and now they have a leash around our necks.
I, for one, am sick and tired of it.
