Democrats and like-witted pundits claim the S-CHIP reauthorization is a defining issue which will seal the GOP's electoral fate next fall. Unscrupulously using children as props in a soulless script replete with ironic appeals to an apparently socialist Almighty, these Denizens of Governmental Dependence gleefully assert the "politics" of S-CHIP will mask their policy's fiscal irresponsibility and trump Republicans' foundational principles.
If this were the case, the Democrats and their Left-wing smear groups wouldn't be threatening to spend millions to intimidate Republicans into abandoning our core beliefs and over-riding a promised Presidential veto. We must and will resist; and, so doing, we will triumph.
First, the S-CHIP bill (H.R. 976) must be vetoed. This politically motivated bill advances a government run health care system by arbitrarily spending $35 billion over the next five years to expand a social program originally targeted at poor children to now include children and adults in families making over $100,000 a year and people who already possess private health care insurance. In consequence, over 2 million people will be crowded out of their existing private health insurance and ensnared in this social welfare program. Moreover, despite purporting otherwise, this bill ensures many of these new enrollees will also be illegal immigrants, who need only show a valid driver's license to join. (Remember: in some states, most recently New York, one need not prove citizenship to receive a driver's license).
Compounding these problems, the bill refuses to prioritize federal spending and, instead, imposes a regressive tax disproportionately impacting the poor. Even with the new tax hike, the new S-CHIP program is unsustainable beyond 2013 and, thus, is fiscally irresponsible. This insult to the taxpayers is exacerbated when one takes into account the Democrats' Budget Resolution's promise of massive personal tax increases, many of which will be slated to fund S-CHIP or worse in future years.
At its core, then, the S-CHIP debate provides the following stark contrasts between the two parties' guiding principles:
1. Republicans believe Americans are sovereign citizens. Democrats believe Americans are hapless victims.
2. Republicans believe the federal government must serve sovereign Americans. Democrats believe Americans must serve a sovereign federal government.
3. Republicans believe in reducing people's taxes. Democrats believe in raising people's taxes.
4. Republicans believe social programs exist to make poor people self-reliant. Democrats believe social programs exist to make all people state dependents.
5. Republicans want poor people to escape the welfare state. Democrats want all people inside the welfare state.
6. Republicans believe America needs a fiscally sound social safety net that temporarily helps poor people and respects taxpayers. Democrats believe America needs a big government trampoline that permanently traps poor people and impoverishes taxpayers.
7. Republicans believe a social program's success is measured by how many people have escaped from it. Democrats believe a social program's success is measured by how many people have been added to it.
8. Republicans believe government should not use taxpayers' money to unfairly compete against taxpaying businesses. Democrats believe government should use taxpayers' money to unfairly compete against taxpaying businesses.
9. Republicans believe in free enterprise and our citizenry. Democrats believe in the welfare state and its bureaucracy.
If our Republican Party is daunted by the politics of S-CHIP and shrinks from reaffirming its defining principles, social welfare programs will never help poor Americans escape governmental dependence. Instead, the Democrats will continue their push to shackle Americans with a bureaucrat-centered health care system and other insidious forms of governmental dependence; and our Republican Party – the party of the Great Emancipator – will not only lose the next election.
It will lose its soul.
by Representative Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11)
Chairman, Republican House Policy Committee
Showing posts with label Fiscal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiscal. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Fiscal Predators: The Seduction of Governmental Dependency
U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter, Chair
The Republican House Policy Committee
The Left claims the Bush Administration manufactured a bogus war on terrorism to scare Americans into ceding their civil liberties to a police state. In reality, however, the Left is seducing Americans into surrendering their sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to the welfare state.
Breaking their promise to provide fiscal responsibility to federal spending, every week the House floor echoes with the Democrats’ siren paeans to whatever slice of “social justice” du jour will ostensibly excuse hiking taxes and spending. By now taxpayers should be versed in the Left’s tricks of their trade: refusing to reduce government spending; refusing to prioritize government spending; and sweetly alleging only to be taxing a targeted group they’ve unfairly demonized to purportedly “help” a targeted group of vulnerable individuals - the poor, the sick, the kids (excepting the unborn). But in truth, the Left has only helped themselves in the near and long term to more of your prosperity, liberty and sovereignty.
Bent to feast upon the taxpayers’ money needed to sate their craving for social and electoral engineering, in the 110th Congress these Fiscal Predators have already:
• Passed five-year authorizations of $887,473,870,000, of which $25,476,250,000 is mandatory spending.
• Passed over $80,000,000,000 in NEW TAXES.
• Budgeted for the largest tax increase in American history – between $217,000,000,000 and $392,500,000,000.
• Raised the federal statutory debt limit by over $850,000,000,000 from $8.965 trillion to $9.81 trillion.
• Refused to devote a dime of deficit or debt reduction in their legislation.
• Refused to enact real earmark reforms.
• Refused to propose any entitlement reforms to defuse the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
• Ignored the fact economic growth – not tax hikes and Keynesian spending sprees – increased federal revenues by approximately $6,000,000,000 and will decrease the federal deficit by 36.2% at the end of FYO7.
Yet despite these alarming acts of fiscal irresponsibility, it appears the Left’s seductive spending is enticing the American electorate.
Earlier this year, in the Christian Science Monitor analyst Gary Shillings reported 52.6% of Americans receive “significant income from government programs… That's up from 49.4% in 2000 and far above the 28.3% of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55%, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.” Future attempts will prove even more difficult. En masse, the aging baby boomers are hitting “entitlement age,” and beginning to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Compounding the problem, under the “progressive” federal income tax, a full 50% of the lowest earning Americans provide only 3.5% of federal tax revenues. In consequence, soon over half of all Americans will view future tax hikes and massive spending increases as bargain, if not a boon. And, by the way, since the Republican Party strayed from its root principle of fiscal discipline, the electorate empowered a new Democratic majority to handle America’s treasury. Combined, these events conspire to supplant free enterprise with wealth redistribution as Americans’ unifying economic philosophy and system.
The fiscal tipping point is passing. Like it or not, in our capitalist system money is not only a measure of your prosperity; money is a measure of power and, thus, your liberty and sovereignty in relation to the subservient national government. Thus, whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators raise taxes, it reduces your prosperity and your liberty; and whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators increase spending, it expands their power and diminishes your sovereignty over it. If nothing is done – and done quickly – to tether the Fiscal Predators and reaffirm the historic fact our free people engaged in free enterprise are the foundation of our national prosperity, Americans, who were once the masters of their fate, will be fated to be mastered by their once subservient government.
For the sovereign citizens of a free republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition government only exists to protect our God-given rights, this portends a less than divine descent into Hell.
The Republican House Policy Committee
The Left claims the Bush Administration manufactured a bogus war on terrorism to scare Americans into ceding their civil liberties to a police state. In reality, however, the Left is seducing Americans into surrendering their sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to the welfare state.
Breaking their promise to provide fiscal responsibility to federal spending, every week the House floor echoes with the Democrats’ siren paeans to whatever slice of “social justice” du jour will ostensibly excuse hiking taxes and spending. By now taxpayers should be versed in the Left’s tricks of their trade: refusing to reduce government spending; refusing to prioritize government spending; and sweetly alleging only to be taxing a targeted group they’ve unfairly demonized to purportedly “help” a targeted group of vulnerable individuals - the poor, the sick, the kids (excepting the unborn). But in truth, the Left has only helped themselves in the near and long term to more of your prosperity, liberty and sovereignty.
Bent to feast upon the taxpayers’ money needed to sate their craving for social and electoral engineering, in the 110th Congress these Fiscal Predators have already:
• Passed five-year authorizations of $887,473,870,000, of which $25,476,250,000 is mandatory spending.
• Passed over $80,000,000,000 in NEW TAXES.
• Budgeted for the largest tax increase in American history – between $217,000,000,000 and $392,500,000,000.
• Raised the federal statutory debt limit by over $850,000,000,000 from $8.965 trillion to $9.81 trillion.
• Refused to devote a dime of deficit or debt reduction in their legislation.
• Refused to enact real earmark reforms.
• Refused to propose any entitlement reforms to defuse the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
• Ignored the fact economic growth – not tax hikes and Keynesian spending sprees – increased federal revenues by approximately $6,000,000,000 and will decrease the federal deficit by 36.2% at the end of FYO7.
Yet despite these alarming acts of fiscal irresponsibility, it appears the Left’s seductive spending is enticing the American electorate.
Earlier this year, in the Christian Science Monitor analyst Gary Shillings reported 52.6% of Americans receive “significant income from government programs… That's up from 49.4% in 2000 and far above the 28.3% of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55%, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.” Future attempts will prove even more difficult. En masse, the aging baby boomers are hitting “entitlement age,” and beginning to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Compounding the problem, under the “progressive” federal income tax, a full 50% of the lowest earning Americans provide only 3.5% of federal tax revenues. In consequence, soon over half of all Americans will view future tax hikes and massive spending increases as bargain, if not a boon. And, by the way, since the Republican Party strayed from its root principle of fiscal discipline, the electorate empowered a new Democratic majority to handle America’s treasury. Combined, these events conspire to supplant free enterprise with wealth redistribution as Americans’ unifying economic philosophy and system.
The fiscal tipping point is passing. Like it or not, in our capitalist system money is not only a measure of your prosperity; money is a measure of power and, thus, your liberty and sovereignty in relation to the subservient national government. Thus, whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators raise taxes, it reduces your prosperity and your liberty; and whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators increase spending, it expands their power and diminishes your sovereignty over it. If nothing is done – and done quickly – to tether the Fiscal Predators and reaffirm the historic fact our free people engaged in free enterprise are the foundation of our national prosperity, Americans, who were once the masters of their fate, will be fated to be mastered by their once subservient government.
For the sovereign citizens of a free republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition government only exists to protect our God-given rights, this portends a less than divine descent into Hell.
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