Republicans: Let Democrats Shoot Themselves in the Foot
I have a sinking feeling that NYC Mayor Bloomberg and President-elect Obama will be sharing similar tax plans this year:
To illustrate the problem, the mayor said a 7.5 percent increase in income taxes for a family of four earning $50,000 to $70,000 annually would mean they would pay an extra $116 a year.
That “does put in perspective what might have to change,” Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg defines the “rich” as a family of 4 making $70K a year in the world’s most expensive city. You have got to be kidding me. But that’s not all by a long shot. Mayor Mike wants to eliminate property tax rebates, hike property taxes, fire 1,000 cops, raise sundry fees, and hire more meter maids to, as liberals would quaintly put it, raise more revenue.
I’m so glad the Republican Party supported the liberal Bloomberg. He not only embarrassed the party by turning independent, but he continues to damage the Republican brand with liberal policies. It would have been better to have a Democrat in office to push these liberal policies and let them own them.
That’s right. If Republicans are going to rise from the ashes, they have to let liberals own their policies. This will be especially important for Congressional Republicans. If they follow the moderate “reach across the aisle” meme and provide a fig leaf for the failed Democratic policies soon to be pushed by Pelosi, Reid, and Obama, they’ll be slitting their own throats.
There’s nothing in Obama’s priorities that Republicans should support. Are Republicans going to “compromise” on higher taxes? Is muzzling talk radio via the Fairness Doctrine a good idea after the media just kicked the “moderate” McCain in the teeth? How about adding 10s of millions to Democratic coffers by supporting card check for the unions? Will the GOP add 20 million new Hispanic voters after they just broke 2 to 1 for Obama even though John McCain has been front and center on all their issues?
There’s nothing to do now but let the Democrats kill themselves. They’ll overreach. They’ll kill an already bad economy with higher taxes. Be disciplined, take some media flack, get out of their way, and get ready to run against them when even a blind monkey could tell their policies have failed.
Archived in: 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Card Check, Congress, Democrats, Economy, Election Post-Mortem, Fairness Doctrine, Immigration, Income Tax, John McCain, Liberals, Media Bias, Michael Bloomberg, New York City, Property Taxes, Republicans, Talk Radio, Taxes, UnionsNovember 6, 2008 at 11:53 pm | Trackback
21 comments
Where did Bloomberg say he defines that as ‘rich’?
One always in search of the rhetorical or logical flaw - overlooks the point, as usual.
$50K to $70K gross in NYC probably qualifies as “poor” or lower middle, which amplifies the irony of the conventional wisdom that the “rich” need to be taxed. I get the point, even if our strange, hyper-literal friend doesn’t.
My guess is, these people already qualify for some kinds of subsidies or givebacks…confirming the usual process of the bureaucracy shuffling money from, and then back, to the earners, and taking a cut along the way.
I have customers around here from NYC, with their second and third homes along the River Valley. Rich, they are. Liberals all. They’ll avoid Bloomberg’s tax increases. Believe me.
Right Hotspur, which in NYC is anyone buying their clothes at Wal-Mart.
Commutation in to the city so that one may pay the city income tax starts at $300/mo. At least double that if one parks at the station AND is a resident of that town; if not, one and a half time more and be early.
Bloomberg’s mecca for all things liberal. Next will be a tax on plastic grocery bags, then paper bags, then cardboard boxes.
Wall Streets crash gutted NYC’s tax base; the pleated pants and suspender crowd found they can live else where on less, paying less taxes and are working for smaller brokerage houses. What is left behind are the no speakas, the no workas, and fat mommas with seven kids all named Vinel.
Let the Donks, liberals and fredct pay for them.
The main point of the criticism of Bloomberg’s plans is a point that’s fair to be made, but the pot shots taken at Obama’s proposal and the untruthful implications are disingenuous - or, as you would label them I suppose, lies.
Amazing though that anything that smacks of even an attempt at fiscal responsibility & balanced budgets is now an anathema to the base instincts of conservatives.
Fred. Fish. Barrel.
Base instincts…now THAT’s funny. How sharper than a child’s tooth is a thankless serpent. Only trying to help you clarify your own confusion, and you’re mean to us.
Your first paragraph absent the first conditional is a real doozy.
Explain.
Starting with your amazing last paragraph, can you clarify the essential spending in the NYC budget for us, or is that just an ideological brickbat for you. Well, when one spends..repeat, spends, repeat, spends more than one’s income, one incurs a deficit. That simple formulation should be available even to you.
By the way, freddo, you sound really out of sorts.
It’s the Meloofah oblongata, that causes difficulty with constancy from moment to moment.
The word is shoot. Explain to me how the last 7 Bush years wasn’t deficit spending? Repeat tax and spend conservative republicans, tax and spend conservative republicans, tax and spend conservative REPUBLICANS. Now when your done crying try doing something constructive instead of complaining. What solutions do you offer to the financial problems? How about we stop spending billions of dollars in Iraq as quickly as possible and use that money in the USA? Typical conservative republican whiners with no solutions but plenty of fear to pass around. I believe you need another glass of the Rush Koolaid.
I’m not a Rush fan, avious, and Hannity is a dolt. Why do you clowns always drop this charge?
Spending is out of control, and Bush had a lot to do with it…just tell me when Congress was frugal. We can also argue about Iraq on the grounds that the war was wrong or right. I have wavering opinions about it, and have had a serious personal involvement with it. It’s a separate issue.
Either way, it can’t be reduced to money unless you’ve already decided it was a blunder…just be honest. The money spent there made available here doesn’t make that spending sensible or prudent.
Our solutions generally involve reductions in spending rather than tax increases….a futile preference considering the bloated administrative state and the inability to define its limits, or the range of human needs the state can/should satisfy.
Prescription drug benefits are one such. You libs were on board with Bush, and I didn’t hear any complaining about it. When does it stop?
Where in any posts did you see the words conservative and republicans used on spending. RINO’s yes, spending like Democrats and Bush in there with them.
Since 2006, the Donks could have voted to pull the plug on the war funding, but they NEVER had the gonads to do it. Pelosi, Frank, Durbin and Reid didn’t have the balls to cut the spending.
As for the sub prime debacle, the first troubles never brought forth an investigation because it was all jackasses, no GOP. They weren’t going to frog march one of their own up to Henry Nostrils. Now with Dodd, Obama, Clinton and Frank caught up Congress is paying off all their lobbying buddies and screw everybody.
NOW that one, THE ONE, bringing CHANGE seems to be picking all the old hacks from the Clinton regime to CHANGE the way things are done in DC.
Right, real change we’re getting! SOS from a batch of elitist criminals.
Either the mantra “Change was BS, or Obama is truly an empty suit.
fred: “but the pot shots taken at Obama’s proposal and the untruthful implications are disingenuous…”
Me: It’s not my fault that Obama and his supporters can’t keep the tax level straight. Even his own vice presidential candidate can’t stay on script. It’s not outlandish to assume Obama’s definition of rich is “flexible” given his inability to articulate it with any consistency.
And, the tax scenario Bloomberg articulates is his and not mine.
avious: “Repeat tax and spend conservative republicans”
Me: Spend, yes. Tax? What taxes did they raise?
avious: “What solutions do you offer to the financial problems?”
Republicans tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Democrats stopped it. How do you explain that?
Unless you listen to NY media you may be unaware, but Bloomberg has mandated substantial spending cuts across all NYC government departments, totaling up to around 10% by the end of next year,.
The cuts have already been under serious attacks via newspaper and radio ads from those groups effected (education associations, hospitals, etc). He’s also insisted repeatedly in public that agencies do everything to ring out as many dollars as possible - including new sources of non-tax revenue, such as finding creative advertising opportunities on transit, etc (the MTA is looking into ads on the inside of subway tunnels for instance).
But all that together is not going to cover the entire shortfall. The definition of ‘essential’ services is of course debatable, but in a Democratic/liberal town like NY, I don’t think you’d have much trouble finding support for modest tax increases to keep social services and programs for the less fortunate going. If Bloomberg did slash those to the bone, he would not be serving the will of the voters who elected him.
On the other hand, when Democratic mayors and governors propose spending cuts - often in ways that are clearly non-essential and even redundant services - the conservative blogs and talk radio hosts & callers do nothing but rant and rave about how horrible and inappropriate the cuts are.
Simple fact is that social services are essential services to many northeastern voters & residents. They’re certainly more essential than - for instance - two fully-staffed state parks within a few miles of each other in a lightly populated area of the state. But unless the answer is to cut foodstamps or other similar programs, conservatives will often listen to no other reasonable means to get to a worthy end of a government living within its means. Which is more essentially, a parent being able to continue to feed their children, or someone getting to pick from two lakes instead of one to go fishing at on a Saturday afternoon?
And I understand why social programs are apparently the only ‘acceptable’ cut - conservatives have a (justifiable) opinion that these programs are bad ideas fundamentally. But if the people are willing to pay the cost of them - and repeatedly vote in politicians who agree - then retaining these programs as the costs of the others *is* the will of the people.
Argue with the people all you want about the wisdom of the programs, but don’t take cheap shots at politicians for doing what the people elected them to do - even after they have gone to significant lengths to trim spending across the board.
OP, yes, the scenario is Bloomberg’s, but implying that it means he thinks they are ‘rich’ is pulled from nowhere. Rather he’s giving the example to show that, yes, everyone will have to pay a bit more to get the city through this rough spot while maintaining the services they are used to and wish.
While Dems are tax and spend, more often than not, Reps and simply borrow and spend. If I had to pick one, actually paying for hat you’re doing wins every time, rather than acting like some subprime borrower who figures his debt will be paid off by some unspecified windfall some unknown time in the future.
Heh. Getting the city through a “rough spot”, as if it’s temporary.
In all fred’s flacking for the humane and boundless social contract, he scratched the fender on Leviathan’s Caddie by writing that conservatives have a justifiable objection to “these programs”…Of course, fred constructed his comment to frame the tax expenditures for “these programs” as “social programs”, and then inserted the assumption that people are willing to pay for them.
What to make of the rest of fred’s pamphleteering? It’s a press release.
The usual PS:
Fred’s thought beggining with “Argue you all you want….” is a diamond in the crown. The wisdom of state spending is the fault or virtue of the people, depending on your view of the expenditure. The same logic was used to support the slave system. Ruben James might hate the shackles, but he’s not running away, he has three squares, a little stove and a roof over his head. He’s therefore voting for his condition.
What a crock. The lib mind at “work”.
Damn. My taxes are so high I can’t afford an “r”.
Its not temporary? NYC is in permanent decline? Please. When the national economy recovers, so will Wall St and NYC. And then we can add that one to your prediction that the Dems would never nominate anyone but Hilary Clinton to your pile of… um… genius.
The conservative public - and too often republican politicians pandering to them - are like a doctor who only prescribes one course of treatment no matter the disease. And the public has caught onto the quackery. Lower taxes are not the one and only prescription no matter the disease.
May I remind you that when Reagan faced substantial deficits, the father of the modern conservative movement himself signed off on some tax increases. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year’s reduction. The reform act of 1986 raised corporate taxes significantly.
The idea that tax increases are always wrong, no matter the tax, no matter the situation, no matter the economy, no matter the steps taken to cut spending in advance, is economic quackery. The American people have realized it, you might want to consider it yourself.
Interesting history lesson.
Para One. The tax increases are permanent…which is the right response to your silly “rough patch” remark.
Para Two: What? My, my you are prickly today, freddie. State a proposition you don’t like, attribute it to someone you don’t like, and then refute it. As that all you’ve got? What does that have to do with the post?
Para Three: Reagan wasn’t the father of the conservative movement, and the rest? So what? What does that have to do with the post?
Para Four: Boy, freddo, the Lincoln-Douglas bit all over again. Repeat Fred Principle One. Re-classify your enemy, argue with nobody, ignore previous remarks and groom your coat after the fray.
What a thinker.
fredct, do you always argue from fantasy? Perhaps, you remember the troubles NYC had in the ’70’s, withheadlines “Ford to NYC, drop dead” then Abe Beame tried to slap a transfer tax on Wall St stock sales (the Exchanges) and they threatened to move to NJ. THAT stopped fast.
Now to today, turkey. Where is Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns? Lehman Brothers? Wall Street? Many of the pleated pants and suspender crowd left, went to small brokerages in Omaha, Asheville, KC, and other smalled and less taxing places. They can work from there make less, but live where is costs less to live.
fredct, they already moved. NYC lost, loses. match and game. The computer wins.
Manhattan is an island of white faces surrounded by boroughs of mau-maus.
Believe what you want, but up until 2002, I repo’d cars and did bail enforcement in NYC and surrounding environments. Like most liberal cities, it is a sh**house with pockets of civilization heavily gated against the “ones we care about the most.”
Would you care to explain what Argentina just did with peoples retirement plans. This fits with the two CA clowns in the House that proposed the same thing here. It’s off topic, but that shouldn’t bother you.
Optimistic Patriot has it just about right. Repubs need to be the Opposition and oppose EVERYTHING the Dems want to do. The Obama ‘08 victory is a one-time deal: No more Bush to run against, no more history making, and all of the other reasons people voted for him, blah, blah, blah. I love the realignment stories nowso predictably beginning to appear in the MSM. There was no realignment. There would be no Obama Presidency with out the MSM Massacre of Bush and then McCain. End of story. Next time Obama can play the Bush role and we’ll see how well he does then. The Dems will self-destruct, there are so many factions grabbing for a piece of their pie that they stand no chance to succeed. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
Fred’s last comments, like most of his comments, strike me as the automatic output of a feedback loop from a standard lefty education. While I’d argue the realities with him while he argues with a stereotype in his own head - what he believes, and the world he wants, is around the bend anyway. We can’t change that.
According to Michael Barone, Obama got 66% of the under age 30 group, 54% of those in their 30’s, was even with McCain for the 40 to 65’s, and McCain got 53% of those 65 and older. Obama got 69% of first-time voters. This is significant.
NYC is doomed, but I don’t even care about that. Raise their taxes to whatever is needed to wash all the dynamism from the local system and let them live with the result. If, as fred claims, the people voted for all the social programs (an ludicrous claim, which assumes 100% awareness of, and agreement with, the workings of govt and expenditure) they’re paying for, let ‘em have it. Who cares?
Individuals make mistakes, populations make mistakes, civilizations make mistakes…even birds confronting approaching storms make mistakes and die. The sensible and aware survive, the ambitious and imaginative prevail, and the dullards get washed away. That’s also true.