Few of you may have made it down to the Tea Party Patriots convention in Nashville, as the $500 cover charge is not exactly an amount that everyday Americans can just drop on any festival or convention.
If you didn't get to go, I hope that you did read up about it following the event, as there were some groundbreaking revelations during the Q&A session with Palin. You've probably seen the snapshot of her obviously glancing at her hand as she is answering questions.
Though this act may seem like a big, embarrassing display of ignorance on her part, I think that we should hold back the urge to sink our teeth into this gaffe. I know it is tasty, and it's just sitting there, but it will grown about as many legs as the Obama teleprompter attacks did. (BTW, never forget that Ronald Reagan was an avid user of the prompter, as well).
Anyway, a much tastier morsel and clear evidence of the Tea Party movement being the grass-roots realization of the past two decades of GOP fiscal irresponsibility, and Sarah Palin delivers it to us in the palm of her hand.
I don't see much discussion about the content upon Sarah Palin's "palm pilot", which is saddening considering how revealing it was.
For those who missed it, Palin had the following list scrawled onto the palm of her hand:
Energy
Budget Cuts
Tax (meant to substitute for Budget, I suppose)
Lift American Spirits
This brings me to my point, and shows it as more evidence of the lack of fiscal responsibility in the GOP and that it also exists within the Tea Party Movement. This is the premise that simple "tax cuts" will solve all of our budgetary and other problems. During the Taft Administration in the state of Ohio and then-GOP-led statehouse, a plan to phase-out the state income tax was enacted, and widely championed by the congresspeople who now had secured their seats by "giving people back their tax money". The part that wasn't enacted, but should have been, was the government program cuts that needed to be made to pay for the lost revenue produced by this tax cut. Knowing that the state government had numerous popular programs, the government at the time (all GOP led) cowardly declined to lay out a plan to pay for the tax cuts through cutting jobs and other spending in government. They were fully aware that, in a close election, the fall-out from these cuts (service quality drops, unemployment increases, layoffs, losses of services) would be unpopular even though cutting taxes was popular. In the end the decision was made to do what all good Republicans do: cut taxes and not spending, thus creating a deficit. The key element in this plan was that the phase-out guaranteed that the impact wouldn't hit the state budget very hard until much later, when the result could be blamed on someone new.
In 2001, President George W. Bush called for sweeping tax cuts. The GOP-led congress followed suit, carefully crafted the bill to avoid having to abide by PAYGO restrictions (which they later disposed of to make way for more spending), and created a package that left a $700Billion hole in the federal budget which has not been plugged to this day. In six years of GOP rule, the Congress could not find time to pay for the tax cuts that were enacted on 2001, because they were too cowardly to cut spending. Instead, after entering the minority and have continued to blame the Democrats for all of their spending, as if they actually cared about that.
This past budget cycle in Cincinnati, all conservative members of city council persistently rejected budgets proposed to them, and spoke out publicly in opposition to the cuts being made, but never provided their own alternatives. Following a shift to a 5-4 conservative majority on city council, a budget was only able to be passsed through making a considerable number of grant applications, one-time plugs by selling some city assets, and other band-aids just so that the budget can be under again next fiscal year.
It is fiscally irresponsible to create new spending (tax cuts) without reconciling the changes with your outstanding commitments. This fiscal irresponsibility was rampant in the Bush administration and the GOP-led Congresses. It was rampant when the Ohio statehouse was stacked with GOP majorities and a GOP governor was in power. These are the policies that former Lehman Brothers employee and Wall-Street insider John Kasich espouses. He recently proposed to resume the phase-out, using the same cowardly reluctance to recommend where the cuts should occur.
In all of these cases, strict adherence to a fear of taxes or use of reduced taxes to solicit votes and popularity created a situation where our budgets at every level had been permanently budgeted in a "bull market" scenario. None of these budgets could hold up if tax revenue suddenly dropped off due to an unemployment spike, or interruption in revenue generating sources such as trade, property values, etc...
With the housing bubble burst and the global economic recession, we saw first-hand the effects of this short-sighted, short-term thinking that strives to shoestring everything. In the real world, when you bid lowest-price for a product, you typically get the lowest value product. The saying goes: "You get what you pay for". Well, during all those good years, we failed to save money to hedge ourselves against a recession because it was more fun and profitable, in the moment, to get those taxes back. Unfortunately, as long as we keep demanding lower taxes, without accepting the consequences (and the results of the Little Miami School District are another indicator that we haven't learned), we will end up with nothing because we will pay nothing.
Well, this brings me back to my point, and that is the "1950's-era palm pilot" that Palin is making use of for answering her questions. You'll notice that the word Budget is scrawled out of Budget Cuts and replaced by Tax [cuts]. This is clear evidence that Sarah Palin doesn't get it, and is still using the politics of the past two decades (cut taxes, not budgets) to placate her audience. In all the criticsm of Palm-gate, I am surprised that nobody has brought up the implications of her simplistic, one-sided budgeting policy where revenue streams are cut so then the budgets just cut themselves. You betcha!
NOTE: I initially posted this article here, at the Cincinnati Enquirer. I'd appreciate the click-through and "Recommend" it if you enjoyed the article.