Fantastic Op-ed piece in the Standard-Examiner today, by Steve Olsen of Plain City, former candidate for Utah's 1st District congessional seat. Lots of good stuff to perk up the ears of this lifelong Economic Conservative:
In early February, the Bush administration proposed a massive tax hike, following up on previous record hikes during its tenure to the most regressive, unfair tax in our nation’s history.And indeed it does... Read Steve's full essay here.
You may be asking right now: What planet is this guy living on? The Bush administration can be faulted for a lot of things, but raising taxes surely isn’t one of them.
The tax I’m speaking of is what I call the grandchild tax, otherwise known as deficit spending. Deficit spending is simply a deferred tax, and this tax is especially pernicious. Not only are the Americans who must pay it currently in diapers, but we’ve committed them to pay the interest on these taxes that will accumulate between now and when they start working.
The budget recently presented to Congress included record amounts of over $400 billion per year in deficit spending. This incomprehensible amount actually understates the problem, because Congress continues to use a dishonest sleight of hand by not including the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the budget numbers. Add this in, and the deficit over the next two years probably will exceed $1 trillion.
By the time President Bush leaves office, he will have been responsible for adding about $5 trillion to the national debt, thereby doubling it — during a time of prosperity in which we should have been paying down the debt in preparation for the baby boomer retirement bubble that is inexorably heading our way. Rather than providing serious solutions to approaching government insolvency, we’ve borrowed to the hilt and created new, unfunded benefits.
It gets worse. [...]
A mere ten years ago (except for the mention of GOP President Bush) the argument in today's article could have been the rant of any number of warhorse American GOP political figures, (directed at any number of Democratic party politicians), preaching the doctrine of government fiscal prudence and frugality, back then a mainstay philosophy of the Republican Party. Alas, the philosophical picture has changed drastically in the past decade, as Bush, and his pack of neoCON BIG GOVERNMENT SPENDERS have highjacked the political platform of the GOP Party, and turned the American political terrain (and economy) upside down.
Those of us who are fiscal conservatives shuddered when Dick Cheney said in 2002 that "deficits don't matter;" yet even then we could not imagine how horribly irresponsible Bush and his administration would become. In the ensuing years we've learned the sorry lessons of the Bush administration's misinterpretation of the lessons of Reaganomics. Once installed in office, Bush and his neoCON handlers made mincemeat of classic conservative economic policy. Like kids in a candy store, they were.
Now the Republican Party has become the party of reckless borrowing and spending; and now it's a few Democrats like Steve Olsen who carry the torch of financial prudence.
What a difference a decade makes.
Fantastic article, Steve. Thanks for reminding us that it's our grandchildren who'll ultimately bear the burden of reckless neoCON economic policy.
Don't let the cat get your tongues, gentle readers.
