A Strib article about how Amy Klobuchar would balance the budget today. Whee! I saw her promise not to vote to raise congressional pay until the budget was balanced again. Oh, how we’ve come a long way when that’s become a Democratic promise! I like it when my fellow partisans embrace fiscal responsibility. Makes me happy. Anyway some of the ideas Amy has are:
Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for those in the top 1 percent of families by income. Finding savings in federal health care spending, mainly from allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies.
Eliminating “wasteful spending,” including the use of no-bid contracts.
Reinstituting the pay-as-you-go rules that formerly required all new spending or new tax cuts to be offset by spending cuts or new tax revenue.
These all seem reasonable. The piece ends on a fair and balanced note:
[Mark] Kennedy’s campaign manager, Pat Shortridge, said in statement: “Amy Klobuchar’s massive tax increase will destroy tens of thousands of Minnesota jobs and hurt the budgets of countless Minnesota families. Washington is taking in plenty of revenue. It just plain spends too much.”
Setting aside the fact that letting temporary tax cuts lapse for the richest 1% will not hurt the budgets of countless Minnesota families (first of all, there are right around 2,039,706 households in Minnesota according to the state Department of Administration, which is well within the threshold of being countable… obviously), there’s also this from Reason:
Total real discretionary outlays will increase about 35.8 percent under Bush (FY2001-06)
And the president has never vetoed an appropriations bill to date. Appropriations bills come from Congress. Where Mark Kennedy has been.
Washington is spending too much because Republicans are there. And Mark Kennedy, contrary to what he may say, is a very loyal Republican. See? This is from the Washington Post:
CQ did score Kennedy as voting in agreement with Bush’s wishes on 98 percent of the roll calls in 2003 and 97 percent in 2004, before dropping to 87 percent last year, as he began to prepare for the Senate race.
So, Mark, when are you going to stop bringing home the bacon? I mean, if you’re committed to the government’s fiscal health, surely you’ll do the right thing, show some political courage and offer up, say, Minnesota’s federal transportation money in lieu of asking, say, Donald Trump to pay his taxes. Right?
I mean, Mark, it’s fine if you’re going to run against irresponsibility. But, dude, you were the one being irresponsible in the first place. So wouldn’t it be nice and quirky and worthy of that flannel shirt of yours to apologize for your first- and second-term “youthful indescretions” before, um… you know… implying that Klobuchar (and Democrats) created the federal budgetary mess?
Party of personal responsibility, my ass.