Skip to main content

Why the Republicans Should Support a Tax Increase

Yes, that's right - the Republicans should support a tax increase.

Why? First, we are getting young men and women badly injured in battle, and when they return,they should get the finest medical attention available anywhere, period. And we now know that some of the VA hospitals are second rate. That is unacceptable, and we should be prepared to pay more in taxes so that our fighting personnel get the best.

Second, the dollar is quickly becoming a trash currency. When the Euro was at 8- cents, the dollar was likely overvalued. But now that the Euro has ripped through $1.50 and climbing, our currency is resembling the peso of the seventies. The deficits don't matter crowd has been proven decisively wrong; a key reason the dollar has sunk is eight years of massive spending higher than tax revenue. Since Congress and the Administration have proven to be spineless on spending restraint, we must raise taxes to begin to pay the bill. Otherwise, the dollar continues to sink, oil prices continue to rise, and the cycle reinforces. If we had a modest tax increase 4 or 5 years ago, coupled with a modicum of fiscal responsibility, we could have grown our way out of this mess. Now the gap is too big, and we'll have to incur several years of real pain to get our financial house in order.

The Republicans must be the fiscal adults here and deal with it.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stimulus Plan

Mr. President: The House stimulus bill is awful. Dangerous. Counter-productive. It has a very high probability of making things worse!. Your man Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be a tough guy: turn him loose on the House Dems - they are selling you down the river. Some simple tests: the spending will improve long-term productivity; the spending will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and the spending will happen fast; very, very fast. There may need to be some legislation to enable spending without years of environmental review. For example, spending on wind farms would improve long-run productivity and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But let's say the wind farm is a couple of miles offshore. You can't have environmental groups stopping the development to see if some fish will be harmed. This spending has to happen now. And, no tax cuts with the possible exception of AMT. People aren't going to spend any tax savings; they are going to pay their credit card bills or r...
10 comments
Read more

The Reasons We Think America is On the Wrong Course

I was listening to the Michael Medved show yesterday. He does a nice job at talk radio. But he was worked up because the CBS News Poll showed that 72% of Americans surveyed think the U.S. is on the wrong track. (When I went to CBS' site, it looks to me like the number is 69%, but that's an insignicant difference). Medved's view is that income for the poorest citizens are rising (recent government data), unemployment is low, stock market is high, no cold war, so why so pessimistic? Here are my answers: Several of our young men and women are being killed every day in a war that we are getting sick of. The deficit is some unimaginable, staggering number that my generation is imposing on my children. Social Security is bankrupt and both Congress and the Administration (both previous and current, and both Republican and Democratic) are unwilling to face the issue. There are virulent infectious agents in hospitals that are resistent to essentially all antibiotics, and the drug co...
2 comments
Read more

Romney/Thompson dream ticket?

The role of Fred Thompson in yesterday's SC primary is as murky as his next step. Did he divide the religious vote and thereby hand Huckabee a loss? Or would those votes, had he not been there, have gone elsewhere? My instinct is that more of those votes would have gone to Romney or McCain than to Huckabee. Fred comes across to me as the thinking person's conservative: thoughtful on positions, a sense of history, a Federalist, serious about the war on terror and prepared to take the long view on it. His addresses have content, not sound bites - which may, unfortunately, be a drawback in 2008. Mitt is quickly seizing the stage as the most knowledgeable in the field on economics, growth and job creation. With a war still consuming dozens of billions, it isn't clear that the race will be won on voters' views of candidates job creation prowess. However, he gives off as much energy as Fred seems to absorb - Mitt's electron shell could power Fred. So, Mitt may be drawi...
5 comments
Read more