Posted by
Bob Wood aka TrekTek on Wednesday, November 05, 2008 7:00:02 PM
Joe the Plumber understands free markets because he’s operated a business. But without proper economic education or real world experience, young people are left in economic darkness...
Unlike Ronald Reagan (who majored in economics at Eureka College), Sen. McCain missed critical opportunities to play the role of “Educator in Chief.”
Take, for example, Sen. Obama’s “soak the rich” tax proposals. Sen. McCain missed huge opportunities to teach the American voter a lesson that Ronald Reagan pounded home often: businesses don’t pay taxes! (emphasis mine) Oh sure, on paper they pay taxes, but in reality they merely pass taxes along to consumers or cut jobs to make up the difference.
Here’s how Ronald Reagan taught this principle during an interview with Reason magazine:
Who pays the business tax anyway? We do! You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes. And if they can’t be passed on to the customer in the price of the product as a cost of operation, business goes out of business. Now what they’re going to do is make it easier for demagogic politicians–and you’ve got plenty of them in the state legislature–to say to the people, look, we need money for this worthwhile project but we’re not going to tax you, we’re going to tax business, now that we can do it by a one vote margin. So they’ll tax business and the price of the product will go up and the people will blame the storekeeper for the rise in the price of the product, not recognizing that all he’s doing is passing on to them a hidden sales tax.
If people need any more concrete explanation of this, start with the staff of life, a loaf of bread. The simplest thing; the poorest man must have it. Well, there are 151 taxes now in the price of a loaf of bread–it accounts for more than half the of a loaf of bread. It begins with the first tax, on the farmer that raised the wheat. Any simpleton can understand that if that farmer cannot get enough money for his wheat, to pay the property tax on his farm, he can’t be a farmer. He loses his farm. And so it is with the fellow who pays a driver’s license and a gasoline tax to drive the truckload of wheat to the mill, the miller who has to pay everything from social security tax, business license, everything else. He has to make his living over and above those costs. So they all wind up in that loaf of bread. Now an egg isn’t far behind and nobody had to make that. There’s a hundred taxes in an egg by the time it gets to market and you know the chicken didn’t put them there!
They didn’t call Ronald Reagan the Great Communicator for nothing...
Reagan understood that you have to teach voters why Leftist policies are wrongheaded. He also understood that you have to pound home a message before it will stick.
Rebuilding the conservative message will demand that the next generation of conservative leaders do the same.
Sorry to break the bad news to Joe the Plumber. But the winner of Campaign 2008 is Peggy the Moocher. ...
Who is Peggy the Moocher? (video link mine)
She's Peggy Joseph, a voter in Sarasota, Fla., who exulted earlier this week at a Barack Obama rally that this was "the most memorable time of my life." Why? As she told a Florida reporter on a YouTube video that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands: "Because I never thought this day would ever happen. I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know. If I help [Obama], he's gonna help me."
The conservative message and the concept of the free enterprise system is totally lost on our electorate. Someone needs to teach them, or the conservative movement will be dead forever. While the financial markets were melting down in mid-October, the Republican message was that we needed to clean up Wall Street and protect Main Street. The real message that government was the true cause of the problem was lost, and government needed to be cleaned out. We should have been quoting George Bernard Shaw (often attributed to John F. Kennedy) "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Or more simply, as my California friend Fred says, "We need a lot less people voting with their hand out waiting for government to fill it."
Both of the presidential candidates voted for the $850 billion bailout-and-pork bill. And on top of that the $85-plus billion to AIG; the $25 billion to automakers; and the $200 billion in capital and credit lines to Fannie and Freddie. Who's next? New York, California, Massachusetts, and all of the other Peggy the Moochers lining up with their hands out.
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of
CNSNews. In "
Wanted: Small Government," Jeffrey outlines the history of government spending but makes this observation:
Up until the 1930s, the United States maintained a small federal government that mostly focused on the limited number of things the Constitution authorized it to do.
Americans were responsible for their own food, clothing and shelter, and if they could not take care of themselves, they looked to their extended family, their neighbors, their churches and local governments to give them a helping hand.
Charity in America in those days did not mean the federal government compelling you to hand over some of your property to the state so the state could hand it over to someone else.
Americans did not believe in spreading the wealth -- they believed in earning it. The term compassionate conservative had not been coined.
That is precisely what the conservative movement is all about - Americans taking responsibility for their lot in life. Then along came Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1940's. Mr. Jeffrey details the intervention of government making it very difficult for the average Joe (the Plumber, or otherwise) to provide for himself and his family.
That year, according to historical data published by the White House Office of Management and Budget, the entire federal government spent only 3.4 percent of gross domestic product. Because federal tax receipts equaled to 4.2 percent of GDP in 1930, there was a federal budget surplus equal to 0.8 percent of GDP...
Federal spending in 1940 was 9.8 percent of GDP. Federal tax receipts were 6.8 percent. The Treasury borrowed 3 percent of GDP to make up the difference.
In fiscal year 2009, according to OMB's estimates, the federal government will spend 20.7 percent of GDP while taking in 18 percent of GDP in taxes. The Treasury will borrow 2.7 percent of GDP, much of it from foreign creditors, to make up the difference.
And that does not include the bailout!
More of our lives are controlled by the federal government, and we are more dependent on the federal government. With that dependence we have given up much of our freedom. The Government Accountability Office informed the Senate in January that it estimated there was a $53 trillion gap between the entitlement benefits the federal government has promised to pay over the next 75 years to people now living in the United States and the tax revenue that can be expected to pay for those benefits.
Then-Comptroller General David Walker said that for the government to cover this gap, every American household would need to put up about $455,000. Our economy - both government and personally - can not handle this. This trip toward national bankruptcy can not be sustained.
We conservatives need to find a way to reign in the interference of government in every aspect of our daily lives. The goal must be to force government to live within the powers enumerated by our Constitution by closing down programs and agencies. Our government worked very well until the New Deal. As we scale back government and its relentless spending, we need to keep it from making future promises that it can not afford to keep while protecting those promises that have already been made.
Your comments are welcome...