Sometimes Its Tough To Get On Board
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
My liberal friends, referring to newly elected president O, tell me I should "give him a chance" or that I need to "warm up to" or "get on board with" the new administration.
I don't get that. I mean, seriously, why should I?
O was one of the more liberal U.S. Senators. His political ideology is antithetical to mine.
If John McCain was president, do you suppose all my liberal friends would be "on board" with him and his policies? Of course not.
Yet I - and everybody else, for that matter - am supposed to get behind O and his policies. Well, I can tell you with a high degree of certainty there is a very low likelihood of that.
Besides, my concerns and criticisms with regard to the O administration aren't sour grapes about the election, they're rotten grapes about the state of our constitutional republic.
It's pretty simple. I want a smaller and less intrusive government, lower taxes and a lot less corruption.
It is those simple premises that made me so critical of W's administration.
W and the alleged "conservatives" did OK on the revenue side of things. Even in a soft economy, the treasury took in a record $2.7 trillion in fiscal 2007.
But instead of being frugal, limiting spending and balancing the budget, they amassed huge deficits by enacting the biggest expansion of government since the dawn of time.
They blew it.
Comes now the new guy, who, by even the most optimistic assessment, plans to outdo them.
You see, I hold the view that massive government spending and huge deficits are a major part of what got us into the current financial crisis.
Selling off giant sums of debt to foreign governments, devalues the dollar. Investors flee to commodities. (Seen the price of gold lately?)
A devalued dollar affects all of us. It means a decline in buying power. If the dollar is devalued by 20 percent, your $100 bill will only buy $80 worth of goods and services.
You lose 20 percent of your purchase power. This is an overt decline in your standard of living.
And your investments - stocks, bonds, annuities, CDs savings accounts - suffer the same fate. Overseas trading partners raise prices to offset dollar devaluation, making U.S. dollars buy even less.
All of this has a profound effect on the economy. It's just bad all the way around.
To be sure, there was a housing bubble that burst and there were problems in the financial sector.
But I can say with certainty, if our government had its fiscal house in order, the current economic downturn would have been less severe.
So for a guy like me, who believes government overspending was a primary cause of the economic crisis, it's tough to embrace a plan of government overspending as a solution.
I believe deficit spending by the government caused the problem. O believes deficit spending by the government is the solution.
How can I get on board with that?
"Oh, so what would you have done?" you ask.
Well, I would have eliminated the individual income tax for any household making less than $250,000 per year, lowered capital gains to 10 percent and lowered the corporate tax rate to 15 percent for two years.
Then I would have sat back and watched the economy turn around and a pile of wasteful government programs die on the vine.
On the the corruption.
Demos liked to bandy about the phrase "culture of corruption" during W's administration.
And rightly so.
I called for Rep. Tom Delay to resign.
How about Mr. Family Values himself, Sen. David Vitters of Louisiana and his hookers?
Bob Ney, Tom Feeney, John Doolittle, Duke Cunningham, Rick Renzi, Don Young, Larry Craig, Ted Stevens. All those guys - all senators or representatives - were either investigated, indicted, convicted or pleaded guilty.
Those Republicans - and some others that have slipped my mind, I'm sure - all deserved to be members of the Corrupt Culture Club and don't deserve to be in office, although some still are.
But now it seems the Demos are trying wrest control of the club from the GOP. It must be true that power corrupts.
There's that recently seated senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, who's now the the target of an ethics probe.
Burris told everybody he didn't try to raise money for Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevic, who appointed Burris to fill O's vacant senate seat.
Now Burris admits he tried to raise money for Blago. Blago, as you know, was arrested in December and impeached in January for trying to sell O's senate seat to the highest bidder.
Then there's O's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. This guy is as shady as the Council Oak.
A column this week by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann shows how Emanuel was on the Freddie Mac board of directors back when Freddie was lying about its earnings and helping plunge the U.S. economy into recession.
Emanuel and his Freddie board buddies were blamed for ignoring warnings about Freddie's pending implosion. That kept Freddie's CEO and other officers out of hot water.
Emanuel was paid $460,000 for his services, and when he ran for Congress in 2002 Freddie's political action committee ponied up $25,000.
Associated Press this week had a tidy little list of current Demo chicanery.
n The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is the subject of a House ethics investigation. It's partly focused on his fundraising practices for a college center in his name, his ownership financing of a resort property in the Dominican Republic and his financial disclosure reports.
n Federal agents raided two Pennsylvania defense contractors that were provided millions of dollars in federal funding by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
n Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota, abandoned his bid to become health and human services secretary and the administration's point man on reforming health care over tax problems and potential conflicts of interest related to working with health care interests.
n Nancy Killefer stepped down from a newly created position charged with eliminating inefficient government programs because of tax problems.
n Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was confirmed after revealing he had tax troubles.
n O's initial choice for commerce secretary, Bill Richardson, stepped aside due to a grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors.
n While the Senate voted overwhelmingly to confirm William Lynn as deputy defense secretary, O had to waive his ethics regulations to place the former Raytheon lobbyist in charge of day-to-day operations at the Pentagon.
So this is what I'm supposed to "get on board with"? This is what I'm supposed to "warm up to"?
It ain't gonna happen.
Oh yeah, I know. It's OK. It's no big deal. It's just politics. Let's talk about real issues.
No.
I disagree. This is precisely the problem with our country. The graft, the corruption, the greed. It drives bad policy. It drives paybacks and pork. It drives deficits. It hurts everyone of us.
It's never OK.
There's no Republican corruption or Democrat corruption. There's no conservative corruption or liberal corruption. There's only American corruption.
I wasn't "on board" with the conservatives and their crazy spending and corruption and I'm not "on board" with the liberals and their crazy spending and corruption either.
And don't ask me to be.
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My liberal friends, referring to newly elected president O, tell me I should "give him a chance" or that I need to "warm up to" or "get on board with" the new administration.
I don't get that. I mean, seriously, why should I?
O was one of the more liberal U.S. Senators. His political ideology is antithetical to mine.
If John McCain was president, do you suppose all my liberal friends would be "on board" with him and his policies? Of course not.
Yet I - and everybody else, for that matter - am supposed to get behind O and his policies. Well, I can tell you with a high degree of certainty there is a very low likelihood of that.
Besides, my concerns and criticisms with regard to the O administration aren't sour grapes about the election, they're rotten grapes about the state of our constitutional republic.
It's pretty simple. I want a smaller and less intrusive government, lower taxes and a lot less corruption.
It is those simple premises that made me so critical of W's administration.
W and the alleged "conservatives" did OK on the revenue side of things. Even in a soft economy, the treasury took in a record $2.7 trillion in fiscal 2007.
But instead of being frugal, limiting spending and balancing the budget, they amassed huge deficits by enacting the biggest expansion of government since the dawn of time.
They blew it.
Comes now the new guy, who, by even the most optimistic assessment, plans to outdo them.
You see, I hold the view that massive government spending and huge deficits are a major part of what got us into the current financial crisis.
Selling off giant sums of debt to foreign governments, devalues the dollar. Investors flee to commodities. (Seen the price of gold lately?)
A devalued dollar affects all of us. It means a decline in buying power. If the dollar is devalued by 20 percent, your $100 bill will only buy $80 worth of goods and services.
You lose 20 percent of your purchase power. This is an overt decline in your standard of living.
And your investments - stocks, bonds, annuities, CDs savings accounts - suffer the same fate. Overseas trading partners raise prices to offset dollar devaluation, making U.S. dollars buy even less.
All of this has a profound effect on the economy. It's just bad all the way around.
To be sure, there was a housing bubble that burst and there were problems in the financial sector.
But I can say with certainty, if our government had its fiscal house in order, the current economic downturn would have been less severe.
So for a guy like me, who believes government overspending was a primary cause of the economic crisis, it's tough to embrace a plan of government overspending as a solution.
I believe deficit spending by the government caused the problem. O believes deficit spending by the government is the solution.
How can I get on board with that?
"Oh, so what would you have done?" you ask.
Well, I would have eliminated the individual income tax for any household making less than $250,000 per year, lowered capital gains to 10 percent and lowered the corporate tax rate to 15 percent for two years.
Then I would have sat back and watched the economy turn around and a pile of wasteful government programs die on the vine.
On the the corruption.
Demos liked to bandy about the phrase "culture of corruption" during W's administration.
And rightly so.
I called for Rep. Tom Delay to resign.
How about Mr. Family Values himself, Sen. David Vitters of Louisiana and his hookers?
Bob Ney, Tom Feeney, John Doolittle, Duke Cunningham, Rick Renzi, Don Young, Larry Craig, Ted Stevens. All those guys - all senators or representatives - were either investigated, indicted, convicted or pleaded guilty.
Those Republicans - and some others that have slipped my mind, I'm sure - all deserved to be members of the Corrupt Culture Club and don't deserve to be in office, although some still are.
But now it seems the Demos are trying wrest control of the club from the GOP. It must be true that power corrupts.
There's that recently seated senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, who's now the the target of an ethics probe.
Burris told everybody he didn't try to raise money for Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevic, who appointed Burris to fill O's vacant senate seat.
Now Burris admits he tried to raise money for Blago. Blago, as you know, was arrested in December and impeached in January for trying to sell O's senate seat to the highest bidder.
Then there's O's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. This guy is as shady as the Council Oak.
A column this week by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann shows how Emanuel was on the Freddie Mac board of directors back when Freddie was lying about its earnings and helping plunge the U.S. economy into recession.
Emanuel and his Freddie board buddies were blamed for ignoring warnings about Freddie's pending implosion. That kept Freddie's CEO and other officers out of hot water.
Emanuel was paid $460,000 for his services, and when he ran for Congress in 2002 Freddie's political action committee ponied up $25,000.
Associated Press this week had a tidy little list of current Demo chicanery.
n The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is the subject of a House ethics investigation. It's partly focused on his fundraising practices for a college center in his name, his ownership financing of a resort property in the Dominican Republic and his financial disclosure reports.
n Federal agents raided two Pennsylvania defense contractors that were provided millions of dollars in federal funding by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
n Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota, abandoned his bid to become health and human services secretary and the administration's point man on reforming health care over tax problems and potential conflicts of interest related to working with health care interests.
n Nancy Killefer stepped down from a newly created position charged with eliminating inefficient government programs because of tax problems.
n Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was confirmed after revealing he had tax troubles.
n O's initial choice for commerce secretary, Bill Richardson, stepped aside due to a grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors.
n While the Senate voted overwhelmingly to confirm William Lynn as deputy defense secretary, O had to waive his ethics regulations to place the former Raytheon lobbyist in charge of day-to-day operations at the Pentagon.
So this is what I'm supposed to "get on board with"? This is what I'm supposed to "warm up to"?
It ain't gonna happen.
Oh yeah, I know. It's OK. It's no big deal. It's just politics. Let's talk about real issues.
No.
I disagree. This is precisely the problem with our country. The graft, the corruption, the greed. It drives bad policy. It drives paybacks and pork. It drives deficits. It hurts everyone of us.
It's never OK.
There's no Republican corruption or Democrat corruption. There's no conservative corruption or liberal corruption. There's only American corruption.
I wasn't "on board" with the conservatives and their crazy spending and corruption and I'm not "on board" with the liberals and their crazy spending and corruption either.
And don't ask me to be.
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