Higher taxes on higher profit or lower taxes on lower profit?

"I'd rather pay higher taxes on higher profit than lower taxes on lower profit."

That comment by a businessman in today's news sends a clear message to Republicans: "we're not buying the same old line this year." Did you hear that, McPalin team? We are not buying.


I think Americans finally understand the GOP's game. Every four years for at least 44 years, the GOP walks out the same old line: "Vote for us because we will lower your taxes and reduce the size of government. The only problem: they never do. It's a nice promise and they count on the voters with short attention spans and even shorter memories buying it.

I remember when Barry Goldwater and Bill Miller tried to sell it in 1964. Even Nelson Rockefeller, the acknowledged leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party in the early 1960s was promising not to raise taxes. (Yes, there was a liberal wing of the Republican Party in those days.)

Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew tried it, too, in 1968 and 1972 with better success. They even threw in a promise of victory in Vietnam with, "Peace is at hand." (They were smart enough not to say "victory is at hand" as John McCain does today.)

In 1976 Jerry Ford and Bob Dole would have used it to better effect if the aftermath of the Watergate scandal had not cleared the way for Democrats Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale to be elected.

Then came Reagan in 1980. The former Democrat, former actor turned Republican, understood what to do with the old line. He and George H.W. Bush got elected twice on the line. Voters generally have forgotten that Reagan/Bush tripled the national debt as they lowered taxes (because they did nothing to reduce spending) and the size of the government almost doubled on their watch. Oh well, maybe nobody noticed.

Reagan -- the fiscal conservative -- never balanced a budget. He never came close to balancing a budget. He never came remotely close to even thinking about balancing a budget. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the GOP, paid for his massive expansion of the federal government by pawning off the expense on the next generation. And he used his communication skills to tell us this was all somehow OK.

Bush 41 and Dan Quayle got their chance in 1988 and simply continued the Reagan "borrow and spend" years but Bush made one fatal mistake. He emphatically stated, "Read my lips: no new taxes." He forgot that you are not supposed to lay that sacrosanct campaign tenet in concrete, you are only supposed to promise lower taxes. But those Bush boys were never very good with the English language. When taxes went up and Bush 41 did not veto them, voters turned him out because he could not erase the words he had put in the consciousness of every voter.

Democrat Bill Clinton was the first President since Lyndon Johnson to present a balanced budget to the Congress and the American people. When he left office after two terms of consistent growth and prosperity, he left a $230 billion surplus for the next administration.

In 2000 Bush 43 came into office with his co-president, Dick Cheney (still hard to know who was the real President but that's another blog entry). Bush 43 and Cheney went back to 1964 and picked up the mantra: "we promise you lower taxes and smaller government." And they added, "Who knows better than you how to spend your own money? Certainly not the government." Sounds so sweet, doesn't it? They didn't believe it, of course, but sure thought the electorate would.

The GOP must think we are all infants...or idiots? 91.4 PERCENT OF THE FEDERAL BUDGET GOES TO DEFENSE, SOCIAL SECURITY, MEDICARE, MEDICAID AND INTEREST ON THE NATIONAL DEBT. The GOP will not speak of these locked in spending items. Only Defense can be called discretionary but the GOP certainly does not see it as discretionary.

It is up to us -- as Sarah Palin likes to say -- to "call them out" when they promise something we and they know they can't deliver and indeed, have no intention to even attempt to deliver.

As Obama says, it's time to declare, "Enough."

The truth is this: The fiscally conservative party has indebted this country since 1980 with a mammoth amount of debt. Bush 43 will leave office on January 20, 2009, having doubled the national debt from 5.4 trillion dollars to 10.6 trillion dollars.

Just typing those record debt numbers is depressing to me. I'm ready for someone who will speak the truth to us, not the tired old mantra of discredited political ideology.

Not one of us wants to pay higher taxes, we just want to pay our fair share of taxes when it is warranted. That is patriotism in action. And we are all patriots -- at least we believe we are -- when we ask government to keep greed in check by regulating financial markets, care for the elderly by providing a small measure of support through Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid programs, pay for the infrastructure that provides safe roads and bridges and levees, secure our borders from those who would do us harm, and most importantly, provide for the common defense. There's more, much more we Democrats AND Republicans expect of our government, but you get the picture. We will pay taxes, we will pay higher taxes if needed, but we insist they be taxes fairly apportioned among the citizens and expended only in ways that are transparent and fully accountable.

What is it with Republicans?

Every Republican walking down the street these days has two phrases you hear repeatedly: “Obama is going to raise your taxes.” The second phrase is: “McCain will cut your taxes.”

So, that’s it? Is it really that simple? Hardly. It is insulting to ask voters to base their vote on such simplistic nonsense, especially since the record of recent Republican presidents demonstrates they are profligate spenders whose borrowing and spending make liberal members of Congress blush.

Look at the record of Ronald Reagan, that great Republican icon. He said he wanted a balanced budget but America didn’t get one until Bill Clinton took office. Reagan never even came close to even thinking about balancing a budget during his 8 years in office. Instead, he tripled the national debt, growing the debt from $1.5 trillion to over $4 trillion by the time he left office.

Today, George Bush makes Reagan look like a piker. Under George Bush, the national debt has soared from $5.8 trillion in 2001 to almost 10 TRILLION DOLLARS today.

Maybe, “my friends” in the Republican Party, you would be willing to raise taxes to pay some of the $406 Billion needed annually to pay the interest on the debt run up on the watch of your Republican Presidents? ( 25% of the notes are held by foreign interests, up from 13% in 1988, so we owe a lot of money to “our friends” overseas who don’t like us one bit.)

Bush holds the record for annual spending and has proposed a budget of $3.01 trillion dollars for fiscal year 2009 which starts October 1, 2008. Barry Goldwater and Everett McKinley Dirksen would not know these guys.

So when somebody says, “Obama is going to raise your taxes,” say to them, “I’d rather pay more taxes to a President who will actually balance the federal government than keep sending the same taxes to someone else who cares only about spending more than he takes in and passing the debt to my kids.”

Incidentally, George Bush finally has submitted a projected balanced budged….for the year 2012!

Too Late, Newt

By now, you may have read media accounts of Newt Gingrich's recent strategy letter to House Republicans. In it, he calls for "real change to avoid a real disaster." Sorry, Newt, too late.

Newt is calling for "real change in legislative, communications, and campaign strategy and involves immediate, real action, including a complete overhaul of the Congressional Campaign Committee." Too late, Newt.

John Boehner, Republican leader from Ohio, added his two cents: "Republicans can only succeed this year by being agents of change and reform. The American people know that Washington is broken, and we have to convince them that we can fix it."

Too late, John. The American people have your number. We've seen the money laundering of Tom DeLay. We've seen the Bush Administration's reckless disregard for the US Constitution. We've seen your profligate spending in everything from misadventures overseas to earmarking special projects for your friends here at home. We've seen your spending up close and it is not pretty. Not even liberal Democrats, your favorite whipping boy, spend money the way you guys have spent it for the past seven years. You are not Republicans. Barry Goldwater wouldn't know you. You might best be described as the GOOP Party (Grand Old Opportunists Party) for that is mostly the course you have taken.

On one thing we do agree, there has been a "catastrophic collapse of trust in Republicans" as Newt has correctly noted, and in the end, that will be the problem that will keep John McCain from winning in November.