I was once an elected Republican. There isn’t much that the Republican Party has to do with trash collection, but I was a Republican on the Macon, Georgia City Council and I supported trash collection privatization. It wasn’t the Republican thing to do. It was the conservative thing to do. It was the right thing to do. Multiple times it had been tried and multiple times it had saved taxpayer dollars.
There aren’t a lot of Republican positions at the local level. There aren’t a lot of Democrat positions at the local level. There are conservative and liberal positions. There are positions that believe the private sector can do better and positions that believe the public sector can do better.
In Congress, there used to be clear and distinct Republican and Democrat positions. But in the past decade, about the only thing separating the GOP from the Democrats is the rate of spending. Republicans spend less, but they still spend a lot. Oh, and they love babies in utero.
Republicans used to believe in free enterprise, the private sector, and low taxes. They believed in getting government the heck out of the way. They still talk like that, but they don’t seem to actually be operating like that. Senate and House Republicans seem to be in a bidding war to increase revenue in Washington. What’s worse, they are mendacious enough to call it “increasing revenue” instead of “tax increases,” when it amounts to the same thing. The Republican Party of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have taken a party that once believed in starving the beast and transforming it into a party that believes in feeding the leviathan lest the leviathan consume them. They operate out of fear — fear of losing their remaining power, fear of blame, and fear of the unknown.
I am absolutely in favor of simplifying the tax code. I am absolutely in favor of getting rid of loopholes. But I am absolutely opposed to engaging in machinations of the tax code designed to increase spending through closed loopholes and the like. Increased revenue should come through simplifying Washington to spur economic growth. Get Washington out of our lives.
While the Republican Party in Washington says that, it sure seems not to be living up to that. Consider this so called fiscal cliff.
The fiscal cliff is actually a bipartisan compromise that congress critters and their friends in the press have now given a spooky name to scare the American people lest Washington have to take the medicine it prescribed itself. The Republicans were complicit in this arrangement.
Republicans and Democrats punted and punted on the Bush tax cuts and they arranged a debt ceiling increase that would, should a committee designed to fail actually fail, force draconian cuts that both sides could scream about and demand be rejected. So Washington would get a debt ceiling increase, but would not actually have to suffer the pain of cuts. Republicans and Democrats collaborated to design a medicine so vile they could ask the public’s forgiveness if they chose not to take it and design a more sugary medicine instead.
But one way or the other, the medicine must now be taken.
No comments:
Post a Comment