Posted on 05/27/2005 11:05:40 PM PDT by CHARLITE
I ALWAYS thought we Republicans stood for smaller government, low taxes and balanced budgets. Maybe our new slogan should be: “Giving you a bigger government, slowly.”
Thirty-two years ago, I served with a governor who reminded us that “low taxes were the result of low spending.” Mel Thomson would not be happy today with the many Washington Republicans who make Bill Clinton’s balanced budgets put us to shame.
In 1990 when I left Congress, we had put in place a Newt Gingrich reform for the budget called a “paygo” requirement. It said that any new legislation that called for an increase in direct spending or tax cuts had to be offset by other provisions that decreased spending or increased taxes. Failure to comply with “paygo” meant mandatory across-the-board cuts in programs. This helped restrain spending and helped lead to a balanced budget under the later Clinton years. But in 2003 under a Republican Congress and White House, this reform was done away with.
You may say, “but we have a War on Terror to fight.” True. But did we not say in the 1960s to President Lyndon Johnson, “You cannot have the Great Society and a Vietnam War?” We said then that a choice had to be made between guns and butter.
Where are we now? It was under Republicans that a new government entitlement was created in a time of war. In November 2003, we created the new Medicare drug benefit. We were promised it would cost a mere $395 billion over 10 years. But by January 2004, the figure was upped to $534 billion. This February the new program was revised upward again to $724 billion, or 83 percent over the original sticker price. And, guess what, the full benefits do not even begin until next year.
Sen. Judd Gregg was the rare Republican with the guts to call a spade a spade. He said earlier this month, “We made a huge mistake with the drug benefit. It’s $8 trillion of unfunded liability.” The drug benefit took the fastest growing segment of our population — the elderly — and gave them a free ride on the fastest-growing item in medicine — prescription drugs.
As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the other day, our swollen $400 billion to $500 billion deficits will “cause the economy to stagnate or worse” unless the situation is reversed. The key is to curb entitlement programs that will cause my grandson to have a lower standard of living in order to pay for our generation’s recklessness.
In New Hampshire, Medicaid is gobbling up our state budget as well as budgets of other states across the nation. Nationally, one in every six Americans is on Medicaid — at a total cost of $300 billion a year.
Our Republican Senate in Washington just made the problem worse by backing a highway spending bill $11 billion over what President Bush wanted. More than 40 Republican spenders joined 46 Democrats to prove that Congress does not see the problem of big deficits and big spending. Many of those yes votes are from people running for President up here. Fortunately, of the nine Republicans to vote on May 17 for the $11 billion lower number, our senators, Gregg and Sununu, were on the right side.
But that same week our two representatives, Charlie Bass and Jeb Bradley, voted against a lousy 1 percent cut in the budgets of the Interior Department and other agencies. Only 90 congressmen had the courage to vote to cut 1 percent.
Representative Chris Cox, R-Calif., recently pointed out examples of how votes are bought with your money — $100,000 to enroll District of Columbia sanitation workers in Dale Carnegie public speaking sessions, $160,000 to provide the government in Montgomery County, Md., with eight large-screen plasma television monitors, $250,000 for air-conditioned garbage trucks in Newark, N.J.
What is amazing is that these items are funded by homeland security dollars. That program has become a big slush fund for fire and police departments across the country that are in little danger of a terrorist attack.
The next time you see our senators and representatives, remind them that they need to vote to cut, cut, cut. Forget the bacon for New Hampshire, we are getting enough of the pork. Our guiding principle across the country should be: Ask not what you can spend for your district, but what you can cut to reduce the deficit.
Chuck Douglas is a former Republican U.S. representative from New Hampshire.
The prescription drug benefit will destroy our economy. It will morph into a socialized health-care system that will be so expensive that taxes have to be 50-60% like it is in Europe. You can thank George Bush for that. His zeal to be re-elected came at the expense of our economic freedom and shifted trillions of dollars of liability to the future generations.
He said, what will you do for a job?
I said, I will bring twenty jobs with me. I can do that.
Unfortunately, NH will not exist when I get there.
The troops are uneasy... LoL....
Theres goin to be a STAMPEDE.!!...
Tip over the chuck wagon...
Move the horsies over yonder...
Da' sheeple are restless tonight...
Them coyotes comin across the Mexican border are spookin the herd..
Ain't gonna happen. Chuck Douglas went through a very messy, very public divorce in 1999:
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/02-99/02-18-99/a02sr013.htm
It's not the native people that have screwed things up in New England. It's the hippies and "intellectual" Marxists that have moved in. If you look into the political landscape of NH ME and even VT about 50 or 60 years ago you will find that these are solid Republican states. If you go back even further you find that one of our most Conservative Presidents (Calvin Coolidge)came from VT. This was when most of New England was rural and agricultural. The people were staunchly self sufficient and one of their strongest values was the drive to do for yourself. If something broke you fixed it -- If you needed something you made it or found a way to earn the money to get it. You did not think anyone owed you anything. It was good.
The Liberal elitists became enamored of Marx and Lenin and screwed up their cities and caused crime and corruption to rise, the economies to fail and the people to become dependent on government services. They even took away the need to think by regulating absolutely everything.
When their Utopian experiment failed miserably these eletes escaped to the areas that were not yet ruined by their policies because they could afford to do so. Because they could not give up on their only article of faith (Socialism) they proceeded to screw up where they escaped to just like they did to where they escaped from.
In order to stop this cancer from spreading I propose a minuteman project that is county based. If you live in a red county that is bordered by a blue one you must keep any blue voters out of your county.
The advantage of this is that it will force the elitists to live in the mess they have created and either learn that their religion of socialism is dangerous and wrong or cause them to die in the filth they have created.
Perhaps we could get Snake Pliskin to keep them from escaping from New York.
Or we could just shoot them.
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