Barber Shoppe Gazette Articles Are Also Indexed Online At ... ELECTION 2006 / LIBERAL GAINS WILL RESULT IN CONSERVATIVE LOSSES
Liberal Democrats have no plan to restore American Heritage, Tradition And Values.
This is what the voters want. This is what they will get.
Democrats Will Reverse 5 Years Of Conservative Gains
[Edited From The Original]
~ Original By Donald Lambro
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 19, 2006
The Democrats' election-year agenda, which says what they will do now that the voters have put them back in charge of Congress, will seek to overturn or change just about everything President Bush and the Republicans have done since 2001.
Key parts of their agenda call for repealing the bulk of the administration's tax cuts, ending the ban on federal funding for new lines of stem-cell research and limiting some of the investigative, prosecutorial and surveillance methods in the counterterrorism USA Patriot Act.
Many of the details of their agenda may not have been that widely known among rank-and-file voters, but opinion surveys show that ignorance may not matter as the election concludes. On just about every major issue -- Iraq, terrorism, the economy, health care, immigration and ethics in government -- voters said they trust Democrats more than the Republicans to do a better job of handling them, according to recent polls.
But a top election pollster questions whether the Democrats' agenda played that much of a role in the election's outcome and whether many voters even knew whether they have offered alternatives to Mr. Bush's policies. At the same time, a Democratic defense-policy strategist thinks his party's national-security proposals were excessively watered down to appeal to a broader electorate.
"The Democrat win, will have all the elements of a Forrest Gump victory. In other words, things swirling around them over which they were barely aware," independent pollster John Zogby said, referring to the slow-thinking movie character who always succeeded, but without any grand design in mind.
"There will not be a proactive agenda that wins this for them. I don't know if the electorate sees the Democrats as having an alternative to the Bush plan. They've put it out, but the party's leadership hasn't led with it," Mr. Zogby said. "They have pretty much sought to avoid a discussion of Iraq."
This would stand in contrast to the 1994 congressional sweep by Republicans who ran on their comprehensive, highly detailed "Contract With America," giving them a more-sweeping mandate than is likely for the Democrats.
Any Democratic agenda would still be constrained by Mr. Bush in the White House and his veto power.
Democratic leaders call their agenda "A New Direction for America," but much of its details are what Republican leaders call "boilerplate" Democratic dogma that the party has been proposing for years, such as raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25, rolling back the Bush tax cuts, expanding new stem-cell research, raising taxes on oil companies and boosting government spending for college-tuition loans and Pell Grants.
On the war in Iraq, the Democrats' agenda calls for "a tough, smart plan to transform failed Bush administration policies in Iraq" and for a "phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq."
To combat terrorism, it proposes to "double the size of Special Forces to destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorist networks like al Qaeda" and to "rebuild a state-of-the-art military capable of projecting power wherever necessary." Both provisions, national-security analysts say, have been at the heart of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's military reforms ever since the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Michael O'Hanlon, a national-security analyst at the Brookings Institution who often advises Democratic congressional leaders, says that although the agenda's phased redeployment "is not cut and run, I would rather see Democrats offer some more ideas about what we could do in Iraq to make things better."
"At least this [agenda] avoids the problem of being too extreme. They are generally trying to be responsible and reasonable. But it's still thin gruel, given how much we need good ideas," Mr. O'Hanlon said.
Democratic officials, however, said their agenda was a key factor in their consistent lead in the election polls.
"We have talked about it in campaigns across the country and we'll keep talking about it," said Stacie Paxton, a Democratic National Committee spokesman.
On the agenda's Iraq proposals, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's chief spokesman, Brendan Daly noted that even former Republican Secretary of State James A. Baker III "now says we need significant changes in strategy in Iraq."
A major domestic-policy plank in the Democrats' agenda is a rollback of the tax cuts, which has become the party's campaign mantra. But there is division within the party's ranks over how far they should go in attempting to repeal the across-the-board tax cuts that lowered tax rates for low-to-moderate income workers and doubled the child-tax credit that affects mostly middle-income families.
Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York, who will likely become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee now that the Democrats have won the House back, has said that he could not think of a single Bush tax cut that he supported and suggested that all of them should be repealed. But Mrs. Pelosi, who has become speaker, said last week that the tax-cut rollback would only affect people earning $250,000 a year or more.
"But the consequences of repealing all the Bush tax cuts would hit people in much lower income-tax brackets and millions more who were removed from the tax rolls by Bush's reforms," said Scott A. Hodge, chief executive of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
"There are about 15 million more taxpayers off the tax rolls today, compared to the end of the Clinton administration. Almost all of those people have incomes below $50,000 a year. Many have children who not only receive the $1,000-per-child tax credit, but also the refundable earned-income tax credit for families in need of additional income," Mr. Hodge said.
"They would all be back on the tax rolls if you repealed the Bush tax cuts," he said.
Copyright © 1999 - 2006 News World Communications, Inc.
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2 comments:
HOBSON'S CHOICE - A VIEW FROM ABROAD
The three main parties go to great lengths to convince us that they are totally different and that only they have the ability to look after the country properly. The Tories have traditionally told us that they will promote efficient small government and minimise the tax burden, the Labour party tell us they will provide for the weak and protect public services and the Liberal Democrats tell us they will protect the rights of the individual. Seems ideal: we have a Capitalist party, a Socialist party and a Liberal party. What more could we possibly ask for?
However if we take a closer look we find that not only are they prepared to sacrifice their principles at the drop of a hat, but that they will also adopt identical policies if they think it will help them at the polls. Our hard won democracy is therefore reduced to what goodies each party can offer and the more difficult issues are collectively ignored:
LABOUR: WELL-MEANING BUT A CERTAIN ROUTE TO DESTRUCTION
The Labour party is rooted in a public sector mentality: well-meaning and virtuous ideas which are self-defeating. Its activists want to see more spending on health, education and welfare. They want higher salaries for public sector workers and more rights in the workplace. Above all, they want to tax the rich and redistribute resources to the poor. All of which probably seems like a good idea to large number of people. However, the politics of envy is no solution and any democratic country which has gone down this path has suffered economic disaster leading to even worse conditions for the poor and fewer resources for public services.
Tony Blair has been careful not to advocate this route explicitly but he has allowed Gordon Brown, the favourite to become the next leader, to accomplish it by stealth: a bit more tax here, a bit more regulation there, all tempered with empty promises to reform the public services. Above all, the architects of New Labour understand power. The immediate electoral benefits of such policies matter far more to them than the implications for our economy or our society in years to come. Mr Blair has taken the same attitude to the European Union: the personal kudos he gains by going along with his fellow European leaders far outweighs the economic decline and loss of self-government that such plans will inevitably entail.
The ‘Old’ Labour of the activist base and the ‘New’ Labour of Blair and Brown thus lead to the same place. On the surface the Labour message is appealing but if we are genuinely concerned about the future of our country and its people we need to face people with reality rather than empty promises.
We must realise that we will become a third-rate economy with a dysfunctional society and a shell of a government unless we look beyond New Labour spin. Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan in the 1950s claimed that we had “never had it so good” at the very time that we were first starting to fall behind our competitors. Labour spin-masters are now simply copying what their Tory predecessors started.
THE CONSERVATIVES: AN EQUALLY CERTAIN ROUTE TO DECLINE
The Conservative party has become steadily more inclined to adopt the fashions of the day, never more so than under David Cameron. Their shallow 'hug a hoodie' politics and faux environmentalism may play well in the colour supplements but they will never address the far-reaching changes that our society needs. Despite espousing values that resonate with people on many issues, history shows that the Conservatives will always compromise our future for political gain.
After the war the Conservatives persevered with Labour’s welfare agenda, resulting in so-called ‘Butskellism’ (named after the consensual views of the Conservative minister Rab Butler and Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell). The seeds of the three day week, the 1970s stagflation, the IMF crisis and the ‘Winter of Discontent’ were all sown in the welfare state policies of the post-war era. In the post-Suez tunnel vision that afflicted British foreign policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Tories saw ‘Europe’ as the answer to our problems. While the Conservative party has sometimes been critical of the EU it was they who took us into the EEC and subsequently signed the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. Now we have Mr Cameron's attempt to brush the issue under the carpet.
During Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister the complacency and state corporatism that she inherited was for once challenged. However, many social problems were not addressed and the Conservative establishment soon reasserted itself. In recent years the party has reverted to its post-war role of accepting the apparent consensus and promising not to stray from it too fundamentally.
In short, the Conservatives will tax as much as Labour but say they will try to spend the money a little more wisely. In other words, they will continue along the same path of decline.
THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: OH DEAR!
And what can we say of the Liberal Democrats, except that they are certainly not liberals and are quite unconvincing as democrats. They can not be compared to the classical liberals of the nineteenth century who believed in a progressive and free society built on shared values, self-restraint and personal responsibility. Today’s so-called liberals feed on the group rights culture and a high tax and spend philosophy that pays lip service to economic viability. Even their recently scaled down ambitions for income tax, compensated for in part by hefty new 'environmental' taxes, would leave us with an enormous and ultimately unsustainable public sector. And not only does parliamentary democracy not figure highly in their plans, Westminster would almost be irrelevant in the Liberal Democrat world of multi-tiered layers of government doing the bidding of the EU and the UN. If the Liberal Democrats ever became anything more than a protest vote then they would undoubtedly cause great damage.
CONCLUSION:
The present choice for the voter is indeed a poor one. All three parties have polished their vote catching skills at the expense of principled leadership and each party, in its own way, has given in to the view that Britain is and will remain an irrelevance in the bigger picture. None of the parties can tell us how to stop our domestic decline and none of the parties can tell us how to measure up to world class economies.
So who is to blame ?
Although there is growing distrust of politicians it is matched in equal measure by apathy and self interest. Voter turnout may be falling but this does not prevent the usual suspects from using the same old tricks to win elections. Although many people realise that the unremitting breakdown in our self-reliance, our skills and our society cannot continue indefinitely, a significant number apparently could not care less. At the end of the day we can hardly criticise politicians for reverting to spin if we are prepared to accept it. Despite all the evidence of our decline, it sometimes seems that we do not press our politicians too hard in case we might not like the answer. It will only be when we demonstrate our willingness to listen to the plain truth about what needs to be done to get our country back on the rails, that our politicians will at last pluck up sufficient courage to put their cards on the table.
The New Party has no wish to denigrate the efforts of those politicians who are doing the best they can to help their country. We are simply pointing out that our so-called “adversarial” system no longer functions properly as the main political parties have all resorted to politically expedient policies and spin to avoid confronting the electorate with too many of life’s harsh realities.
IS IT ANY WONDER?
Considering that the Bush Republicans allowed 30 million illegal Mexican aliens into the country, Liberal Democrats registered them to vote, tyrannical Liberal judges ruled that illegals have a "right" to vote, and that paperless, un-traceable, un-recountable electronic voting machines are equipped with two-way modems enabling votes to be added, altered or deleted, is it any wonder the 2006 election results are skewed in favor of Liberal Democrats?
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