Good for Newt
“My goal, with your help, is that by the time President Obama lands in Chicago, we will have repudiated at least 40 percent of his government on the opening day.”
- Newt Gingrich @ CPAC, Conservative Political Action Committee
“This campaign is a mortal threat to their grip on the establishment, because we intend to change Washington, not accommodate it.”
- Newt Gingrich @ CPAC, Conservative Political Action Committee
I thought his speech was OK, having finally gotten to watch it on replay. At times it was “brilliant”. He had some good ideas. At other times it was rediculous. He had some bad ideas. That’s Newt, full of ideas, full of ways he can fix government, full of ways he can use government to fix our lives, full of ways government will somehow make things better for all of us.
His attack on unemployment insurance was odd. He’s correct that 99 weeks is too long, but he attacked the people receiving the money, saying they were being paid to sit around doing nothing. You are supposed to prove you are searching for work to take unemployment. And for the first 26 weeks, you receive unemployment BECAUSE you had been working, and your employer paid into an insurance fund precisely to pay you if they laid you off.
I wish Gingrich had more clearly attacked government for extending the payments, than making it sound like the workers who had been laid off were lazy. I don’t think that’s what he meant, but it took me off his message.
I’d also prefer a 0% corporate tax to a 12.5% tax. OK, apparently some foreign country is 12.5%. That’s Newt the idea guy, buried in details and trying to over-analyze anything. Why should it be 12.5%, and not 10%, not 15%,? Just say get rid of the tax, because it is all passed on anyway.
And his comment that GE would “pay their tax” got applause, but I don’t want GE to have to pay “their tax”, I want all companies to not pay tax the way GE didn’t.