Taxes

I really love the new ad from the Republican National Committee. It accuses all Democrats of wanting to raise taxes to pay for their outrageous spending. It says that, if the Democrats are elected, spending and taxes will go through the roof.

Huh! The Democrats are big spenders?

This one suddenly eclipses Senator John McCain’s outrageous statement that Bill Clinton is responsible for the North Korean nuclear test as my nominee for the October Chutzpah Award. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning nerve or gall. An example of chutzpah is the teenager who kills both his parents and then asks for leniency from the judge because he is an orphan.)

Let’s look at the facts. Since January 2001, when Republican George Bush took office as president with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a split Senate, which became controlled by the Republican two years later, the United States Government has spent $2.8 trillion dollars more than it has received in revenue. That means that the “fiscally responsible” Republicans have increased the national debt, which you and I and our children and our grandchildren and probably our great-grandchildren will have to pay off, by about 48%. How can they blame this on the Democrats when they have controlled the White House and the Congress while this new debt was piling up? Let’s all recognize that it is the Republicans who are the big spenders in Washington.

The Republicans claim they are fiscally responsible. They claim they have lowered taxes. Come on RNC. Are the actions of Mr. Bush and his Republican congressional cohorts really resulting in lower taxes? Hell no! They have merely moved the tax burden from themselves to a future generation. Eventually some one has to pay off that debt. Their spend now-pay later philosophy is the farthest thing from fiscal responsibility I can think of.

Despite this the RNC has the chutzpah to blame everything on the Democrats. I suppose the big bad Democrats armed with assault rifles, thanks to the National Rifle Association, forced the Republicans to approve all those bloated appropriations acts. And what about Mr. Bush? Did he veto even one of those huge appropriations and insist that the Congress be fiscally responsible? Did he suggest that because we are in a major war perhaps we need to delay the tax cuts for his wealthy friends?

Returning the Republicans to power for two more years of uncontrolled deficit spending makes no sense. It is time to throw the rascals out