McCotter Asks: “Is this largest tax increase in American history going to be the last?”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI-11), House Republican Policy Chairman, recently spoke on the House floor about the Democrat Majority’s budget, which if passed would be the largest tax increase in American history, $683 billion.
“Mr. Chairman, I come from Michigan, a State that respects honesty, even when one is in error, so I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the integrity, if not the ultimate decision, that we heard from the gentleman from New Jersey.
“We heard a lot about change over the course of a year or two, and I too must be honest. We have seen change in how Washington budgets. We have seen change. We have gone from bad to worse.
“Now, as I recall sitting in Michigan, living there with my wife and children, I have seen a similar instance out of my State government which, in a one-State depression, faced the choice of allowing working families to keep their money and protect their budgets or raising taxes and protecting the State budget.
“They started with the smokers. They went after them. They took their money. Nobody likes smokers. Who cares? Then they had a one-time-only property tax advance. They never did tell us when the property tax relief comes, but I am sure one day it will. It is only once. And then they raised our income taxes. They raised our income taxes because by then it was for the greater good. And whose family budget wants to stay in the way of the greater good? Certainly not somebody like me, somebody whose children are looking at college, somebody whose mother may be getting older and may need care, somebody who worries that their dreams of their future for their children might go up in ashes in a State that is mismanaged by a government that cares more about itself than it cares about the sovereign citizens who elected it.
“And then I come out here to do their work as their servant and I see the same thing. I see the same thing. I hear the same talk. I see the change that was promised and delivered. The sad part is the promise was implied.
“I remember hearing the government spent too much. Got to stop. The government spent too much. We are going to change that. I didn't hear the part where you said the government spends too much. We are going to spend more.
“I heard people talk about working families struggling, and we are only going to tax the rich. We are only going to tax the rich. Evidently we must not be doing too well. There is not enough rich to back up the promises. So what do we do? The largest tax increase in American history on everybody. Well, that is a change. I concede the point. It is a change.
“But I was shocked again with both the honor and the erroneous conclusion of the gentleman from New Jersey. I never in my life expected to see a Member of Congress apologize for not raising taxes on the American people. That is a change. I grant you that.
“The question is then, if the American people need to have their taxes raised to come into prosperity, surely you know what the ultimate number is. How high, how fast until we get to prosperity? How much more of my money has to go the Federal Government before I can dream for my family and feed them? Surely somebody must know that number.
“Is this largest tax increase in American history going to be the last? Are we then going to reach the American Dream? Are we going to have our liberty and economics to pursue that dream through our own works, or will government have to do that for us? Are we going to get bureaucrats as life coaches? What is going to be necessary? Give me a number. I haven't heard that number. I haven't heard that percent.
“I think the one thing that we do need to change immediately right now in rejecting this budget scheme to bloat, to soak your family budget, to bloat the Federal Government's budget, is I want to hear somebody admit that America's economic prosperity comes from our free people, not from the growth of government, for that is a truth to hear that would be a refreshing change of late.”
Showing posts with label Taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taxes. Show all posts
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Even Stimulus Didn't Help Approval Ratings
It is a solid step toward preventing a national recession. Interestingly, however, after the passage of this bi-partisan legislation which returned tax dollars to American families, the public gave Congress a record low approval rating. Let’s hope some members don’t re-think their commitment to civility and bi-partisanship.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
S-CHIP and the Politics of Principle
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
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
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.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
McCotter to Democrats: “Match Rhetoric with Results on Earmark Reform”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 20, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. - Today Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), Chairman of the House Policy Committee, signed a discharge petition which, if it acquires 218 Congressional signatures, will help put full transparency and disclosure into House tax and authorizing bills. If the discharge petition is successful, House Democrats would be compelled to bring Minority Leader John Boehner’s H. Res. 479 to the floor for an up-or-down vote. H. Res. 479 would require taxpayer-funded earmarks in all authorizing and tax bills to be publicly disclosed and open to House debate.
“This isn’t Washington’s money. It is the taxpayers’ money, born of their hard-work’s perspiration and shorn from their hard-earned prosperity,” said McCotter, an original co-sponsor of H. Res. 479.
“Any and all attempts by politicians to imprudently spend the people’s money must be publicly exposed and immediately stopped.”
“I call on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to match their rhetoric with results on fiscal discipline and earmark reform. If not, they will be signaling their intent to continue wasting the people’s money and breaking the public’s trust,” said McCotter.
###
September 20, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. - Today Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), Chairman of the House Policy Committee, signed a discharge petition which, if it acquires 218 Congressional signatures, will help put full transparency and disclosure into House tax and authorizing bills. If the discharge petition is successful, House Democrats would be compelled to bring Minority Leader John Boehner’s H. Res. 479 to the floor for an up-or-down vote. H. Res. 479 would require taxpayer-funded earmarks in all authorizing and tax bills to be publicly disclosed and open to House debate.
“This isn’t Washington’s money. It is the taxpayers’ money, born of their hard-work’s perspiration and shorn from their hard-earned prosperity,” said McCotter, an original co-sponsor of H. Res. 479.
“Any and all attempts by politicians to imprudently spend the people’s money must be publicly exposed and immediately stopped.”
“I call on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to match their rhetoric with results on fiscal discipline and earmark reform. If not, they will be signaling their intent to continue wasting the people’s money and breaking the public’s trust,” said McCotter.
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