Election ‘08: A Choice Between Prosperity And Ameri-Sclerosis
(IBD)
Post-Bush Boom
Election ‘08: The Republican Party released Wednesday the economic policies that its candidates will run on this fall. The plan gives voters a choice between prosperity and Ameri-sclerosis.
The GOP plan — which focuses on four areas: energy, taxes, pork and long-term growth — is welcome, as the party had been wandering in the wilderness for a while.
Or, as former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said in Monday’s Washington Times, “the left is cleaning” conservatives’ clock, because the party has lacked the energy to get behind the sensible thinking that resonates with voters.
But if the Republican economic proposal is any indication, it seems as if it has remembered it is the only party that provides a realistic hope of smaller government and greater economic growth.
While the Democrats, even with their fixation on “change,” can’t break away from their leftist orthodoxy, the Republicans are offering voters a distinctly “progressive” alternative, progressive in that if it is followed, it will advance, rather than set back, the economy.
With gasoline prices having gone past $4 a gallon and giving no indication they’ll turn back soon, the Democratic Congress, which thinks that seizing oil companies’ profits will cut prices at the pump, clearly has no answers to rising energy prices.
But the GOP, should it regain its congressional majority, promises that it will: allow drilling of untapped domestic oil reserves; let the private sector develop the country’s enormous oil shale resources; end the menu of local and regional gasoline formulations, which have cut supplies by disrupting our fuel distribution system; sever the web of federal regulations so that some badly needed fuel refineries can be built; and push nuclear energy.
The Republicans promise, as well, to stop the tax hike — it would be the largest in our history — that’s coming unless the Bush cuts are renewed. If the Democrats can let the cuts sunset in 2010, 48 million couples will be hit with an average annual increase of $3,007. And another 116 million taxpayers will owe, on average, an additional $1,800 on their taxes each year.
Other tax-related plans — additional tax breaks and the choice of a two-tiered flat tax that’s filed on a single page — are welcome parts of a (largely) inspired package of GOP ideas.
For the long term, the Republicans are talking up free trade, tax cuts for entrepreneurs, reforming Social Security and Medicare, rules to tie spending increases to economic growth and tort reform.
More immediately, the GOP says it will crack down on pork. When they were given control of Congress in the 2006 elections, Democrats promised to kick the pork habit. Yet federal waste has actually grown under Democratic leadership.
The Republicans say they’ll do what the Democrats couldn’t. We admit that breaking lawmakers’ bipartisan addiction to pork isn’t easy. But Republicans have one advantage the Democrats don’t have: At its core, no matter how some in the party have strayed, the GOP philosophically stands for smaller government.
Roll Call reports that “Democrats continued to dismiss the GOP agenda as unimaginative.” But what could lack imagination more than the Democrats’ blind and unyielding devotion to socialist economic themes? What could ruin an economy quicker and more thoroughly than the reckless, depleted and failed policies of Big Government run by small men?
The Republican plan isn’t perfect. Too many bones — more spending on education, renewable energy, tax incentives for conservation — are thrown to centrists and undecideds. And there’s not enough emphasis on additional tax cuts.
Still, it’s far better than any plan the other party could offer.
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Just Words’
Pay close attention to the last comment!!
Below are a few lines from Obama’s books;
his words,
From Dreams of My Father:
“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.’
” I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mothers> race.’
‘There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”
‘It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.
“I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own
image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself ,the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela”
From Audacity of Hope: ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.’
WHAT A WONDERFUL REPRESENTATIVE OF THIS COUNTRY, IF THIS JERK IS EVER ELECTED.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:02 amAmen!
June 12th, 2008 at 5:59 amThe US needs to build, Build, BUILD! Refineries, nuke plants, coal to oil, drilling rigs … we are falling behind the rest of the world. China is causing the oil prices because they can afford the high prices. We need to take some of the business away from China, build more manufacturing here and bring the jobs home. I am hoping it is not too late but NOBODY is talking about these initiatives. Since oil prices can crush the entire world completely, we should make sure we will get through it. And anyone who says we can wait is wrong. If we start building now, it will be years before we get benefit from it but if we don’t, we will need the infrastructure even more at the time we would be getting the benefit. Clinton said no to drilling ANWR 10 years ago, if he had signed the bill we would be getting the benefit at this time and we may not be in this problem. What will the problem look like in 10 years from now if we don’t start NOW?
June 12th, 2008 at 7:59 amIT IS THE ECONOMY STUPID.
This election will be based on the economy. The tremendous success of the Bush administration in homeland security and the spectacular success of OIF has taken the war and security off the front burner.
Perfect.
The price of fuel can be laid on the d’rats. Continue to offer legislation to expand the development of our own fossil fuels and when the majority donkeys defeat it, get out on the steps in front of the Capital and pound them with it. Repeat.
Change the lexicon used in the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts. Label it what it will be, a MASSIVE TAX HIKE. Get out the word on what it will do to the middle class and lower income brackets. Use dollar amounts to describe the impact especially in the 60K households range.
Pound out the impact on the average household, the d’rats will dramatically raise taxes and are opposed to efforts to affect the price of oil in a way that matters, as in basic supply and demand, that is a simple concept which the masses can understand and it will thwart the ignorant ‘big oil’ rant the collectivists and neo-commies cling to.
Keep it simple and pound it down their throats.
This could create what I hope will happen, that McCain will ride in on ‘reverse coattails’ and will have to deal with a conservative majority in Congress.
Am I dreaming?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:37 am