Posted on 05/19/2010 5:24:00 AM PDT by Scanian
WASHINGTON, Pa. -- Bill Steiner had a simple explanation for Tuesday night's result in Pennsylvania's 12th District.
"It's Murtha's ghost," said Steiner, about a half-hour after Republican Tim Burns had conceded to Democrat Mark Critz, former aide to the late Rep. John Murtha. "People were afraid to change."
Murtha died in February, three weeks after Republican Scott Brown had won the Massachusetts Senate seat held for more than four decades by Ted Kennedy, and the GOP clearly hoped to carry that momentum into the special election to fill the House seat that Murtha had held since the mid-1970s.
What happened and why? The answer supplied by Steiner, a conservative activist from Westmoreland County, was elegant in its simplicity, if not entirely sufficient to explain Critz's 12,000-vote margin of victory in an election that the Burns campaign had expected to win.
Clearly, Democrats did damage to Burns with a blizzard of TV and radio ads accusing the Republican of wanting to impose a 23-percent sales tax "on just about everything we buy" -- a blatant distortion of Burns' qualified support of the Fair Tax, a proposal that would eliminate the income tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
If you're going to get a "fair tax" considered, you'll have to take into account that everyone pays sales taxes. A large percentage pay no income taxes.
I'd be willing to to get on board something like that, but only with guarantees that we probably cannot get that the income tax will be killed and stay dead, otherwise we'll end up with both, as in Japan.
No one has proposed it as such, but general policy has actively encouraged it.
Tax breaks for companies that "ship jobs overseas" is actually a good idea. It might encourage them to keep the jobs in the US instead of moving them.
I'm square in the middle of all that at the lowest level. Google "India SEZ". That's the kind of competition that US firms are up against if they do not give in and outsource jobs.
So, India is grabbing jobs from the US by creating Special Economic Zones that offer incentives (like tax breaks and decreased regulation - we're exempt from many international tariffs) for business to move there. Fight fire with fire. Lower taxes on businesses operating in the US and ease some of the other burdens.
The flight of jobs out of the US is one that no one has seriously addressed. You can say "I stand for smaller government and lower taxes", but unlike Republicans of the recent past, you have to make it stick in practice. Make it attractive to do business somewhere and businesses will show up.
A large percentage pay no income taxes.
OOO! Great point! Especially in that depressed area!
I know...I know..its not supposed to impact those who don’t pay taxes now....
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