The Pledge was designed to appeal to the Tea Party movement & indeed some of the provisions accomplished this. The question is did it go far enough to convince voters that establishment Republicans (i.e.; non Tea Partiers) can be trusted after they started the entire spending snowball rolling under Bush. Principal author of the Pledge Californian Kevin McCarthy acknowledged that the Pledge was not intended to be all encompassing & is just a start so it may be too little too late.
After speaking @ several Tea Parties I have wondered who makes up the Tea Party - & in particular are they new people (voters) or just ones who are now more vociferous than ever before but bring no new voters to the booth in which case we are in the same electoral predicament as in 2008 - all things being equal. Only time will tell - November 2.
So we don't know how many Tea Partiers there are but Tom Morrison could not have explained more clearly what they are looking for - when he wrote before the Pledge was released that "Tea Partiers want a political party that is absolutely committed to limited government & a substantial rollback of federal spending & entitlements. If that's not politically feasible until the nation is closer to the brink of bankruptcy so be it. Our most recent generation of Republicans paved the way for the progressives to vastly expand the power of Washington under President Obama. There is absolutely no Tea Party appetite to repeat that mistake."
It is an upside down world when Bush 43’s legacy is he left a deficit while Clinton raised taxes and left a surplus. Is it really that simple?
ReplyDeleteBlog Reply - It is not quite that simple - you have to add the Congress factor. Clinton had the Contract with America Congress who really produced the surplus. Bush was a spender & the more statist the Congress became under Bush the bigger the spending appetite & deficits got. BO is a bigger spender yet & so is his current Congress. Please remember that the deficit is not the important thing though - it is the amount of spending. Professor Friedman would rather have a budget of $1 trillion with a $500 billion deficit, than a budget of $2 trillion with no deficit. He believed that the burden borne by the American economy is measured by what government spends & disposes of, not by whether it calls its receipts "taxes" or "proceeds from bonds."
Well said!
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