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Friday, October 3, 2008
Who’ll be hit by tax surge? You, of course
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you listened closely to two exchanges in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate, you’ll know precisely what those of us in Middle America most despise about Washington.
One was on taxes. You don’t have to be smarter than a fifth-grader to know that Barack Obama’s campaign promises add up to a massive amount of new spending, probably in the range of $800 billion. Maybe more. Maybe far more.
Nor do you have to be very smart to understand the pretense behind the claim that “the rich and greedy corporations and Big Oil” will pick up the tab. The thing about the left is that they’re convinced you won’t mind getting soaked if “the rich” are getting wetter. It’s that class warfare that, election after election, is the primary weapon in the arsenal of the Democratic Party.
Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) had the Obama Democrats nailed in his GOP convention speech. They tell you, he said, “not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they are not going to tax your family.” And then he zinged: “No, they’re just going to tax business. So unless you buy something from a business, like groceries or clothes or gasoline, or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small business, don’t worry. It’s not going to affect you.” He went on.
“They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the other side of the bucket. That’s their idea of tax reform.”
Sarah Palin can’t be Thompson or any other experienced Washington insider. Her job Thursday night was to talk directly to the people in Middle America, to convince them that she understands their problems and can represent them as an outsider in Washington.
While she could have used a few more of Thompson’s distillations of the effects of an Obama presidency, the next-day consensus was she had met the challenge. The elitists who were dead certain she would come off like a South Carolina beauty queen in her responses were dead wrong. She passed the third, and probably final, test of this political season. She held her own in debate with a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Senate. She aced the first two tests — her initial introduction and her first major address to the nation at the GOP convention. And she held her own on the third, confounding the critics who were poised to capture the responses they thought would cause her to destroy herself. Didn’t happen. And in that sense, she won.
The first of the two exchanges that reminded us of what we hate about Washington had to do with Senate votes to raise taxes. “Barack Obama and Senator Biden voted for the largest tax increases in U.S. history. Barack had 94 opportunities to side on the people’s side and reduce taxes, and 94 times he voted to increase taxes or not support a reduction, 94 times,” Palin said.
Biden, the stern lecturer, experienced in the games of Washington, set the record straight, explaining to the young newcomer from the Alaskan frontier the processes and procedures of the insiders. “The charge is absolutely not true,” Biden declared. “The vote she’s referring to, John McCain voted the exact same way. It was a budget procedural vote. It did not raise taxes. Using the standard that the governor uses, John McCain voted 477 times to raise taxes. It’s a bogus standard.”
Ah, that’s Washington. They may indeed propose $800 billion in new spending programs, but it takes a forensic audit to find their fingerprints.
The same is true on Iraq. Obama voted against funding troops there after promising that he would not do so, Palin said. “And Sen. Biden, I respected you when you called him out on that. You said that his vote was political, and you said it would cost lives. And Barack Obama at first said he would not do that. He turned around under political pressure and he voted against funding the troops.”
To which Biden replied: “John McCain voted to cut off funding for the troops. Let me say that again. John McCain voted against an amendment containing $1 billion [for] those things that are protecting the governor’s son and pray God my son and a lot of other sons and daughters.” He did it, Biden acknowledged, because of an amendment to set a withdrawal deadline.
What America saw Thursday night was the consummate Washington insider lecturing the hockey mom on why this doesn’t mean that — and why nobody there can ever be held accountable. They spend without fingerprints. They tax without fingerprints. Yes means no.
Biden gave America an insider’s explanation of why nothing works there. Give me the Washington outsider any day.
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Election shenanigans, gas debacle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
If Election Day voting is chaotic, don’t automatically blame Secretary of State Karen Handel, who’s in charge. The McCain-Palin campaign expects mischief, stemming from voter registration efforts by a group called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In Colorado, a battleground state, some individuals were registered as many as 40 times. Registration duplication and fraud were noted in other battleground states, too.
Memo to Charlie Crist, governor, state of Florida: Just a hunch, but all those 112,000 ex-felons being registered to vote under a law you signed last year, legislation pushed by People for the American Way, ACORN, the NAACP and the Brennan Center for Justice, are probably not voting Republican. But no need to be partisan to think restoring the voting privilege to ex-felons is not a good idea. Potential criminals should know that some choices have lasting consequences.
The collapse of Columbus-based Bill Heard Enterprise and its 15 dealerships in seven states undoubtedly had multiple causes. But trying to sell cars in volume to people with bad credit is a suicidal business undertaking. If the bad-debt crisis doesn’t get you, the predatory-lending police will. You can’t put bad-credit risks in homes, cars or anything else and expect to be able to charge for the risk incurred.
A tax on car insurance to pay for a statewide trauma network, being considered by Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, a 2010 candidate for governor, is a quick way to take himself out of competition. His reasoning is that wrecks feed emergency rooms. Yes, but so do heart attacks, falls from ladders, bad guys using knives, guns and sticks, and plane crashes. Should we tax health insurance, accident insurance and criminal court dockets, too?
The gas debacle in metro Atlanta is why you never want to turn decisions about any aspect of our lives over to bureaucracies except in the direst of circumstances — like, for example, a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. The utter waste of time and money is appalling. The standard rule should be: When a hurricane heads toward the oil rigs and refineries, suspend boutique gasoline requirements for metro Atlanta. Automatically. Let us use any gas we can get.
You have to hand it to U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Macon). He’s in a close race in a competitive district — and he was one of two Georgia congressmen to vote in favor of the $700 billion bailout package. He was right.
The Chinese are about one tainted-food scandal away from banishment from my food cupboard. Latest is Chinese-made Cadbury chocolate, none of which was sold in this country, recalled because some factories there added melamine, a chemical used to make plastics, to milk. Melamine, rich in nitrogen, was apparently added to watered-down milk to fool quality-control tests for protein.
Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings, an impeached former federal judge, apologizes for remarks made on a panel discussion sponsored by the National Jewish Democratic Council. Said Hastings: “If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through.” The observation is too incoherent and idiotic for the untrained intellect to decipher.
The left finally gets one of its goals: same-day registration and voting. Judges in Ohio uphold the one-week register-and-vote process that runs through Monday. The dream of the left has long been to run a bus sweeping up people off the street to vote. The problem now is that they register, but then don’t go to the trouble of voting.
In nonpartisan races, especially judicial, the law affecting ballot listing should be changed. Now candidates are listed alphabetically. Since, in the absence of meaningful debate, voters often choose the first name on the ballot, placement should be random or by lottery. Give the “W’s” a fair shot. One race for the Georgia Court of Appeals has seven candidates. A Fulton County Superior Court race has eight.
Headline: “Lithonia mayor recalled.” Not fondly, as it turns out. The word should be fired, as she was by voters.
Boy, get these lefties off the ledge. If Sarah Palin wins, they’ll jump.
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