No Means. No.
By Mitch Berg
Sheila Kihne has a request for the GOP and, I suspect, those of us who support it:
One note though to the GOP–Can we PLEASE, PLEASE get rid of this talking point “Government should live within its means.” The government–via its power to tax– has unlimted means.
That’s true. “Means” change. If you get laid off, your “means” change. If the economy tanks, government’s “means” change as well – or at least they should.
If I were a Dem, I’d throw that back so easily and argue for tax hikes. They’re doing just that by the way. I’m on the Organizing for America email list and Obama issued a message today about “government living within its means.” STOP. Educate people about the conservative worldview which takes things much farther down the path than year to year, biennium to biennium budget cycles. When we explain how we think to people, we can change minds. When we play the Dem game of coordinated talking points, then let’s at least ensure they’re a bit more bulletproof.
That’s the problem with the legislative process – it forces people to think one election cycle at a time. It’s worse than normal in Minnesota, where our “deliberative chamber”, the Senate, is merely a smaller House that runs a little less often, and is tied to demographic districts just like the House (rather than the US Senate, in which small states get the same representation as the big ones).
The Republicans are chipping away as fast as they can with their little chisels against this monstrosity of a government. Believe me- I’m frustrated that they’re not using sandblasters because time’s a ticking. But small victories still matter in the larger battle of ideas.
And that’s the big conundrum of this next few weeks. Some are getting impatient with the GOP, in St. Paul and in DC. They want to see the Tea Party Mandate exercised NOW. And there’s a point to that; John Boehner is almost certainly being too timid in his budget cutting; we’d likely win a budget shutdown this year.
But we took a long time to get into this mess; one budget bill isn’t going to get us out.
March 28th, 2011 at 7:42 am
OK, since when does the power to tax and borrow mean government has unlimited means? Is Ms. Kihne somehow unaware that the size of the economy is finite, and that increasing taxes tends to reduce the size of the overall economy?
Oh yeah, she’s a liberal; that’s exactly what she thinks. What do they teach in schools these days? (oh, yeah; Keynesianism….go bury some of your money in an abandoned coal mine, Ms. Kihne, and see if people digging it up stimulates your personal economy….I’m guessing “no”)
March 28th, 2011 at 7:50 am
Bubba,
Ms. Kihne is very, very conservative, and she’s making basically the same point you are; the economy IS finite (at any given time), and the more you sap from it with taxes, the more finite it gets.
March 28th, 2011 at 8:01 am
She’s not stupid, she’s arguing against a stupid slogan.
“Live within your means” doesn’t help when the response is “raise taxes and we’ll have plenty of means.”
What Conservatives really want is “live within your limits” or “manage within your mandate” or some such catchy slogan meaning there is no Constitutional basis for most of government spending so it doesn’t matter how much tax money the government could raise, the money can’t be spent for those purposes.
We need a contest.
March 28th, 2011 at 8:06 am
The economy may be finite, but its potential is infinite. This is the message that should be made by Republicans. Take oil as an example. Great Leader Obama is praising Brazil’s pumping oil while barring Americans from doing the same thing. We have billions of barrels in reserve, by ideologues stand in the way of accessing them. It is stupid and short-sighted.
As Ronald Reagan said “Government isn’t the solution to our problem. Government IS the problem”.