Posted on 03/09/2007 6:44:43 PM PST by LdSentinal
Periodically, I get e-mails from supporters of the presidential candidacy of Alpine Rep. Duncan Hunter who express disbelief, befuddlement or fury, or a mix of all three, at my flat contention that he is a populist demagogue and anything but a principled conservative. These folks cannot fathom any talk that he's not free-trade, small-government Ronald Reagan reincarnated.
Here's a typical example of Hunterista reaction to my comment that he's been against trade deals that have been important boons to our economy:
You're supposed to be a columnist, an informed person. This is not an informed statement.
OK. If you don't believe me about Duncan Hunter's RRRINOitis, here's what the influential, admired-and-respected-in-conservative-circles Club for Growth has to say about him:
Like most Republicans, he's strong on tax cuts, but he's been part of the big government spending spree of the last 6 years. He also has a protectionist streak in him. Here are some of the more troubling votes:
NO on NAFTA YES on No Child Left Behind YES on Sarbanes-Oxley YES on the 2003 Medicare Drug Benefit NO on CAFTA YES on 2005 Highway Bill YES on the 527 bill (like most Republicans, he flip-flopped, having first voted NO on McCain-Feingold) Hunter also went 0 for 19 on the Flake anti-pork amendments.
Despite being a member of the Republican Study Committee, Hunter frequently votes NO on their fiscally conservative annual budgets (2006, 2005, 2003...)
We gave him a 49% on the 2005 Club for Growth scorecard. That places him 187th within the House GOP conference, out of roughly 230 members.
National Taxpayers Union shows a more telling trend. He was strong in the early 1990s, getting "B's" and one "A", but as time went by, like most politicians, his score dropped. For the past few years, he's been getting "C's".
Those Cs are incredibly generous. As CATO noted last year, with Duncan Hunter cheering him on ...
... President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn't cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush's first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton's last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush's first term.
The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.
The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs.
And as bad as things are on the budget front, they're about to get a whole lot worse because of a pending nightmare that Duncan Hunter -- supposed tough guy, supposed truth-teller, supposed fiscal conservative -- has chosen to ignore. To borrow from what I wrote last year ...
... the single worst problem facing this country in coming years, with the possible exception of nuclear terrorism, is dealing with the massive fiscal impact of baby boomers retiring. As we slowly transition from a nation where there are 4 working adults for every adult getting Social Security and Medicare to a nation where that ratio is 2 to 1, we will face an incredible fiscal squeeze.
As a veteran member of Congress, Duncan Hunter knows this. He's heard the warnings, seen the bipartisan studies. So what did this self-declared fiscal conservative do in 2003? He voted to make the problem much, much, much worse by extending prescription drug benefits to seniors, three-quarters of whom already have coverage. The money that was saved by all the triumphant stands he claims to have taken is infinitesimal compared to the staggering long-term national debt he helped add with this one vote, which was tantamount to civic arson.
Yeah, right, our Duncan's a fiscal conservative. ... He loves spending your grandkids' money, and by the truckload.
Duncan Hunter is no Ronald Reagan. To those who say Ronald Reagan really wasn't Ronald Reagan -- that government didn't get smaller when he was president -- well, he tried harder than any president in modern times to get Congress to control spending and wipe out whole government agencies. By contrast, Hunter and the GOP Congress of 2001-2006 kept the national credit cards hanging on a string around their necks for easy and constant use.
"I know. But it does seem to be getting more brazen lately."
That's what amazes me. We have all this proof that conservatism wins everytime its tried and "moderate Republicanism" loses (see Ford '76/Bush '92/Dole '96) yet they sing the same old song.
Its like the last 30 years never happened. I mean Rudy makes Rockefeller look like a hard-core conservative!
Don't worry AuntB, I do my own research and where I see this "rampant spending" tends to be in the area of military spending. Personally I don't have a problem with spending money to make sure our military has the best of everything they need.
....But hey! He likes walls and fortresses around America, and that's good enough for the anti-free trade freepers who call themselves "The true conservatives".
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=5031
Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution:
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state. No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one State over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay duties in another."
". . . . While we earlier saw how 54 words in the U.S. Constitution established free trade among the states of the Union, NAFTA weighs in at over 2,000 pages, 900 of which are tariff rates. (Under true free trade, there is one tariff rate—0 percent.) The agreement does have trade-liberalizing features, to be sure. Consisting of a 10 percent reduction in tariffs to be phased in over 15 years, however, they are all but buried under the profusion of controls NAFTA also establishes.
In the first place, the benefit from those tariff reductions are jeopardized by the agreement’s snap-back provisions. Those permit pre-NAFTA tariff levels to be restored against imported items which cause or threaten serious injury to domestic industry. In other words, NAFTA supports free trade as long as it does not promote international competition which is too hot for favored domestic firms to handle. In addition, NAFTA’s rules of origin are designed to divert trade from the world’s most efficient suppliers to North America’s most efficient suppliers. This hobbles the international division of labor instead of expanding it, as true free trade does.
. . . . Free trade does not depend on international bureaucracies, yet NAFTA creates several of them. Its Commission for Environmental Cooperation was set up to enforce the environmental aim of sustainable growth. One tactic it uses is to prevent countries from trying to create a friendlier environment for investors by relaxing any extant environmental regulations. Such rules are to be enforced by trade sanctions and fines, with the latter to go into a slush fund for environmental law enforcement. NAFTA also created a Labor Commission, whose purpose is to level the playing field between trading partners with regard to labor costs. To repeat, free trade this is not."
Free Trade I guess
Yes, I've seen your Hunter's fiscal responsibility...that explains why he votes for things like the Prescription Drug Program. Hunter is part of the spendaholic GOP...he's isn't the answer, he's part of the problem.
I don't know why California and some other locals have so much reported difficulty, but I have never actually witnessed it.
I have witnessed some cultural problems, such as trashy property, and some rather strange behaviors that seem to be related to bringing their habits here, and having to learn new ones, but that learning is occurring.
Come to think of it, every ethnic population that has ever immigrated into this country has historically had the same sort of problems. We have always dealt with them fairly, with some exceptions like the Irish.
What I see, is more American snobbery with foreign populations, and this is largely due to a crappy attitude about outsiders.
The fact is, that America needs these young backs for our labor pool, and since the opportunities are there, they come.
We have serious issues with uncontrolled numbers, and their legal legitimacy. This affects the process of cultural merging, blending and normalization that we call assimilation. T%his must be brought under control or we will have isolated cultural outcast populations that will indeed cause havoc, and I believe this is what you are referring to.
The problem has solutions that you and others are unwilling to do, and so you are actually responsible for the problems you now face.
As soon as you realize this, and act appropriately, you will mitigate these things over time.
I hope this addresses your incorrect assumptions that I don't understand what is going on, but I doubt you will accept my line of reasoning, and frankly, I don't care if you do, or don't because you have indeed lost this issue, and it is now out of your control. You are on the sidelines now, and that is why Immigration was a major factor in Republican defeats last November. The public has had enough of the rhetoric, and wants appropriate actions to be taken and the deadlock ended.
Now it shall be done, without your political participation which you so readily gave up.
I agree, and the same goes for Huckabee, Thompson and any other third tier wannabee that has limited appeal and even less name recognition.
Clinton managed to pull it off, as a direct result of a huge vote split caused by Perot.
This is not going to happen again, anytime soon. At least not this cycle.
I guess you must have missed all that.....
But that's OK, I get these Constitutional quotes all the time from the isolationists.
Ohio and Iowa have a grand tradition supporting isolation, but this part of the Republican party was jettisoned along with Pat Buchanan.
Rudy donated $80,000 of the $100,000 speaking fee.
When was the last time you AuntB gave 80K to charity.
How telling that you side with them.
So what?
So what? LOL!
We don't need no stinking first amendment, right?
You can't be serious.
A large majority of the countries spending problem is the result of entitlements. They make up the majority of the federal budget.
To that we added the huge, massive, liberal Prescription Drug Benefit.
Hunter voted for that. Hunter has a spending problem.
People have jobs again. They're just making much less than what they were previously making. They're having to live with two or three weeks vacation when they had previously worked their way up to four or five weeks vacation. They're looking at a retirement with some paltry pension instead of the comfortable pension that they could have had if they'd been able to continue their previous jobs.
Bad things are bound to happen in the economy occasionally, and we can't stop every bad thing from happening. However, we can admit that these kinds of big losses in the salaries and benefits that average Americans earn is a bad thing and not a good thing. A candidate who thinks that workers losing their jobs and having to take other jobs at lower salaries with lower benefits is a candidate who is much less likely to receive my vote.
For the workers to be taking these kinds of cuts in salary and benefits while top executives and the drones who shuffle papers for the top executives enjoy record high compensation is also wrong. Again, maybe the government can't do anything about the situation without causing greater harm, but I don't trust anyone who thinks that it's great for workers to be taking losses while top executives receive tens of millions of dollars to quit the company after doing a poor job. People who are receiving these record compensation packages should not be asking government to make any kind of changes in policy just to let them dump American workers for someone a little cheaper overseas or someone who has been working a little cheaper because he's in the country illegally.
Finally, when we trade a machinist's job for a telemarketing job, we are making our country a little less secure. We can thrive very well as a nation without any telemarketers. If necessary, we can maintain a war effort without a single telemarketer in the entire country. We cannot sustain a war effort if we don't have plenty of machinists to make the things needed by a nation at war.
Bill
I agree. I wouldn't settle for Rudy in the primaries.
Thats a great poem!!
Except that's not true, either. Per capita income, measured in real dollars keeps rising.
You protectionists are not entitled to make up facts to bolster your faulty arguments.
That's the sad part. I have. (I will document the calls, if you like...I've kept records). I truly want to help him not look like an idiot on his website.
I have been polite, helpful...and nuthin'.
Another example of why he's not ready for prime time.
There are more people living in San Diego than in your state of Ark.
You are talking about a few hundred at most in your area.
In San Diego we have tens of thousands of illegals
plus the southern border runs along Mexico.
You are comparing a leak in a sink vs. a major flood.
They are receiving health care, etc. at tax payer expense. Over 60 hospitals in Calif. had to close due to this along with many ERs.
The Drug Cartels and their crimes of drugs, kidnappings, murder and beheadings along with other gangs with automatic weapons.
Illegals are killing people here at a rate more than the soldiers in Iraq.
I saw first hand here over 50,000 Mexicans marching and rally with their flag, Chea t shirts, and signs, Gringo back to Europe, this is our country. and Marxist signs.
They had set up at their rally Marxist lit.
Hmmmmmm...for some reason I think Mayor Guliani missed those votes in Congress. But spend like made Hunter didn't.
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