"I'd rather pay higher taxes on higher profit than lower taxes on lower profit."
A businessman made that comment in the news the other day and it sends a clear message to Republicans in the 111th Congress: "we're not buying the same old line from you."
We are not buying.
Every four years for at least 44 years, the GOP walks out the same old line: "Stick with us because we will lower your taxes and reduce the size of government." The only problem: they never do.
I remember when Barry Goldwater and Bill Miller tried to sell it in 1964. Even Nelson Rockefeller, the acknowledged leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party in the early 1960s was promising not to raise taxes. (Yes, there was a liberal wing of the Republican Party in those days.)
Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew tried it, too, in 1968 and 1972 with better success. They even threw in a promise of success in Vietnam with, "Peace is at hand." (They were smart enough not to say "victory is at hand."
In 1976 Jerry Ford and Bob Dole would have used it to better effect if the aftermath of the Watergate scandal had not cleared the way for Democrats Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale to be elected.
Then came Reagan in 1980. The former Democrat, former actor turned Republican, understood what to do with the old line. He and George H.W. Bush got elected twice on the line. Voters generally have forgotten that Reagan/Bush tripled the national debt as they lowered taxes (because they did nothing to reduce spending) and the size of the government almost doubled on their watch. Oh well, maybe nobody noticed.
Reagan -- the fiscal conservative -- never balanced a budget. He never came close to balancing a budget. He never came remotely close to even thinking about balancing a budget. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the GOP, paid for his massive expansion of the federal government by pawning off the expense on the next generation. And he used his communication skills to tell us this was all somehow OK.
Bush 41 and Dan Quayle got their chance in 1988 and simply continued the Reagan "borrow and spend" years but Bush made one fatal mistake. He emphatically stated, "Read my lips: no new taxes." He forgot that you are not supposed to lay that sacrosanct campaign tenet in concrete, you are only supposed to promise lower taxes. But those Bush boys were never very good with the English language. When taxes went up and Bush 41 did not veto them, voters turned him out because he could not erase the words he had put in the consciousness of every voter.
Democrat Bill Clinton was the first President since Lyndon Johnson to present a balanced budget to the Congress and the American people. When he left office after two terms of consistent growth and prosperity, he left a $230 billion surplus for the next administration.
In 2000 Bush 43 came into office with VP Dick Cheney. Bush 43 and Cheney went back to 1964 and picked up the mantra: "We promise you lower taxes and smaller government." And they added, "Who knows better than you how to spend your own money? Certainly not the government." And everyone nodded in agreement.
We all know we want to be in charge of spending our "own money," but the statement is misleading because, as citizens, don't we all "owe" a fair share to the government to provide for our general welfare and common defense? The question should not be about who has a right to spend his "own money." It should always be about how much of our "own money" we should be asked to send to our government to take care of the programs and services we have asked (or demanded) that government provide.
The truth is this: The once fiscally conservative party has loaded down this country since 1980 with a mammoth amount of debt. Bush 43 will leave office on January 20, 2009, having increased the national debt from 5.4 trillion dollars to more than 11 trillion dollars.
Just typing those record debt numbers is depressing to me. President-elect Obama is speaking the truth to us when he says we are likely to have deficits in the trillions far into the future. We don’t like to hear it, but it is the truth...and we need to hear the truth from our leaders no matter how distasteful that may be to our ears.
Not one of us wants to pay higher taxes, we just want to pay our fair share of taxes when it is warranted. That is patriotism in action. And we are all patriots -- at least we believe we are -- when we ask government to provide oversight to financial markets, care for the elderly through Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid programs, domestic infrastructure that provides safe roads, bridges and levees, and secure borders -- to name a few of our expectations.
There's more, much more we Democrats AND Republicans expect of our government, but you get the picture. We will pay taxes, we will pay higher taxes if needed, but we insist they be taxes fairly apportioned among all citizens and expended only in ways that are transparent and fully accountable.