Here’s what the new Republican program is all about:
YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project – is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact. Vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington’s culture of spending into a culture of savings.
Here is the announcement for the new program:
And they announce what people vote to cut every week, and submit a bill to do it! Then they show the voting results.
Double-digit unemployment looms. The country is in a funk. The federal budget deficit is widening to an extent not seen in decades.
This scenario isn’t new. It also describes the U.S. in 1982. Somehow, the 1980s and the 1990s turned out to be pretty good years. So it’s worthwhile to compare current policy to the one followed then.
…Today, taxes are on their way up. Whether it will be abolishing some of the tax deductibility of health care or increasing taxes on soda, President Barack Obama and Congress are clearly signaling the direction in which they want to move. Most tax increases under discussion would make the rich, or companies, the first to pay. The justification offered for this is that the federal government needs the money and may know how to spend it better than the private sector, anyhow.
…In the early 1980s, the view on taxes was the opposite: get them down. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, enacted by Ronald Reagan, pushed tax rates down for wealthy and non-wealthy alike. The capital gains tax rate dropped to 20 percent. When Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the top marginal rate on income taxes fell to 28 percent.
The [health care] bill’s main financing comes from another tax increase on top of the increase already scheduled for 2011 under Mr. Obama’s budget. The surtax starts at one percentage point for adjusted gross income above $350,000 in 2011, rising to two points in 2013; a 1.5 point surtax at incomes above $500,000, rising to three in 2013; and a whopping 5.4 percentage points in 2011 and beyond on incomes above $1 million.
And what happens when you tax the rich?
House Democrats… claim that this surtax would raise $544 billion in new revenue over 10 years. America’s millionaires aren’t that stupid; far fewer of them will pay these rates for very long, if at all. They will find ways to shelter income, either by investing differently or simply working less. Small businesses that pay at the individual rate will shift to pay the 35% corporate rate. When the revenue doesn’t materialize, Democrats will move to soak the middle class with a European-style value-added tax.
It should be noted that a value-added sales tax disproportionately hurts the poor.
President Obama, in his FY2010 defense budget, proposed a $1.2 billion cut to missile defense funding and halted development on our long-range interceptors in Alaska and California.
…Rep. Trent Franks offered an amendment to restore the $1.2 billion cut from missile defense by President Obama. The Democrats argued that this cut was reasonable, but in the face of Iranian and North Korean activities, any significant cut to missile defense funding seems foolish. In the last two months, we have seen Iran test its long-range missile capabilities (under the guise of a space launch) and North Korea test a nuclear weapon and launch (unsuccessfully) a long-range Taepo-Dong II missile. The North Koreans now appear to be preparing to launch yet another Taepo-Dong II. In the face of all of these activities, the Democrat majority on the Armed Services Committee voted down the Franks amendment to restore missile defense funding by a vote of 36-26. This amendment was then voted on by the full House of Representatives and again defeated along largely party lines.
There were a number of other amendments related to missile defense that we discussed, including Republican efforts to fund the European Site and the Airborne Laser, but they were all shot down by the Democrats. For the sake of our nation’s security, we should be focused on shooting down enemy missiles, not on shooting down our own missile defense system. As North Korea and Iran push forward, every member of the House of Representatives has taken a stand on missile defense. Unfortunately, it seems that the position of the Democratic majority is clear: shoot down missile defense.
The Heritage Foundation post I cited is a guest post by Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri.
WINTERY KNIGHT 