Tea Party Dividing the Republican Party?

You may have seen an opinion piece posted on Foxnews by Bradley Blakeman, former deputy assistant to President Bush and now a professor at Georgetown University. It is linked here. Professor Blakeman is of the opinion that the "GOP has allowed the Tea Party and misfits like Donald Trump to hijack the party." He writes that the "Republican Party has let the Tea Party divide them and in the long term will do lasting damage to the party if they allow this divisiveness to continue." He is incorrect because his analysis is based on the wrong assumptions.

Now, I am not saying that every conclusion he has reached is wrong. He is correct in saying that "[a] lack of leadership and serious candidates has led to people like Donald Trump to make the Republican Party look like a sideshow." The GOP had the opportunity during Mr. Bush's presidency to groom contenders for the 2008 election, and simply blew it off. Obama, who appeared out of the shadows of obscurity and who has never released any substantive records about himself, is as close to the 'Manchurian Candidate' as anyone could be; he should never have been a serious contender for President. Yet he ran over McCain, because McCain simply couldn't excite the GOP base; they couldn't bring themselves to work for him, and most said they couldn't even hold their nose to vote for him.

So what did excite the GOP base in 2008? Sarah Palin. And what propelled conservative GOP candidates into office in 2010? The Tea Party. These are the people who are solidly in Quadrant I; main street, down-home conservative Americans. The Tea Party you deride as divisive and harmful IS THE CONSERVATIVE BASE OF THE GOP.

That is why so many of the conservative lawmakers have so much affinity for the "non-party Tea Party." They recognize what you do not. The Inside-the-Beltway Establishment GOP mentality has, to some extent, adopted the same attitudes as the liberals toward conservatism. In so doing, they have divided the party and left the conservatives without a real voice in the GOP; the Tea Party is the result. In short, the leaders of the GOP, thinking they are large and in charge, kick sand in the face of their own base- then they blame the base for being divisive when they don't take it.

You may have heard the saying, "With Democrats you get more of the same, with Republicans you get less of the same." Conservatives do not want more of the same- nor less of the same. Not hard-core socialism å la Obama, nor socialism-lite å la McCain or any of that bunch currently "exploring" their candidacy. That is what the Tea Party is telling the GOP; if the liberals running the Democrat party go hard left, as they did with Obama, the GOP needs to go hard right. Since the Sixties, American has been flirting with socialism; we are seeing the results and it's not pretty. American principles worked for hundreds of years and there is all kinds of historical documentation about what those principles are, and we want them back. The Republican base would get excited about a candidate who could seriously commit to this.

I do agree that the Republican Party needs to stop floundering. If the leaders of the GOP do not understand what the base wants, they need to figure it out. If the leaders don't agree with what the base wants, they are in the wrong job. The leadership needs to stop being divisive and get on board with the party base.

Driving Privacy Away

The Minnesota DOT is looking for a few volunteers. The purpose is to test a proposed per-mile tax for your automobile. DOT hopes to eventually add this tax because many new hybrid and electric cars won't need much gasoline, and therefore won't pay their share of gasoline tax revenues. MnDOT says that they would like to implement a user fee for each mile driven instead of a per-gallon tax to make sure these revenues stay constant. I suppose this would mean a tax bill in the mail every month or so for each of your cars. (And I don't really think the current fuel tax would be removed. Existing taxes don't disappear, but that's another story.)

This just sounds fair, right? After all, everybody should pay their fair share- and I do agree we should seek equitable distribution of taxation. However, I have a problem with this tax. The volunteers will be given smart phones with GPS application to keep track of their location, which is transmitted to the state DOT. If this tax is enacted, every vehicle will have to have GPS transmitters so a record of the location at all times of every vehicle can be kept by the DOT as a basis for mileage calculation and tax assessment.

Maybe you don't care if the state keeps a record of everywhere you drive, when and how long you were at a given destination. Remember, though, the modern car knows if there was a passenger in a seat unbelted and how fast the car was traveling; it keeps a great deal of information. This is the computer age, and its hardly a stretch to imagine the state comparing location and speed data against a database of speed limits and stop signs. Are you prepared to receive speeding and stop citations in the mail every month, too? Remember, a rolling stop, or even 1 MPH over the limit is a technical violation, and lots of states are trying to figure out how to cash in on low-level traffic violations.

We already see security cameras everywhere; we have the TSA screening and groping everyone (except perhaps Muslims in traditional garb- we know they're not dangerous, and we can't profile, you know). Are we really prepared to give the state a record of our whereabouts at all times?

America's creditworthiness and the deficit

You may not have noticed, but Standard & Poor, the group that rates the creditworthiness of businesses and nations has adjusted its rating of the United States. I found this article on Marketwatch, a business site.

It doesn't seem to have bothered enough journalists to be rated as big news, but it is. Now, it's important to understand that the current credit rating didn't change. While that's good, what is bad news is that the creditworthiness outlook was lowered. S&P is saying that, for now, the US is a good credit risk, but that the outlook for the future is "negative." Because of our massive debt, and the low likelihood that our government is actually going to reduce and manage its borrowing, we have been downgraded from "stable."

If you don't think that is a big deal, think again. The federal government does not seem to think it should repay debt; it has borrowed money for decades. Both Republicans and Democrats have been guilty. Yes, I know Clinton supposedly ran surpluses- that isn't true, but this isn't the place for that discussion. The point is that as the debt mounts, so does the portion of tax income and borrowed money needed to pay that interest.

What the federal government does do, is pay interest on the debt. Right now, the Obama administration is planning their budget on interest rates at 3.2 percent And as the creditworthiness goes down, the interest rate goes up, just like you have with your own credit score. That is a very big deal indeed, because a lowered credit rating is what drove Greece, Portugal, and Ireland into the EU bailouts; they simply couldn't afford to borrow money at the high interest rates.

If we don't get our finances in order, who will run to the rescue and bail out the United States?  

Kris Kobach at Kansas University

I attended a lecture by Kansas Secretary of State Kobach at Kansas University on Tuesday, April 12th. Unsurprisingly, there were a number of college students and others protesting the conservative's policies of "hate."

It is interesting that these protesters are demonstrating in support of illegal activity. I can't think of any country in the world which has the type of open borders policy these folks advocate. Mexico certainly doesn't. More importantly, this is one of only two jobs the U.S. Constitution requires the Federal government to do. Article IV, Section 4, The United States shall... protect each of them from Invasion.... Surely a group of several million people sneaking into the country illegally might fall into that category; the language of the Constitution does not specify ARMED invasion.

Even more interesting, they are promoting activity that runs directly counter to their own interests. As Sec. Kobach pointed out, the presence of illegal aliens (the correct legal title) drives down wages for legal workers and drives taxpaying individuals out of the workforce. Some of these protesters are going to find that they cannot find a decent job at a decent wage due to the very thing they support.

Also, according to one study, Sec. Kobach noted that households headed by illegal aliens consume an average of over $19,000 per year in government (taxpayer) services. If you pay taxes, you are paying to support low wages for your fellow Americans just to enrich some business owners. States, counties and municipalities are running substantial deficits, and Sec. Kobach pointed out that America cannot continue to operate as a welfare state without some of these immigration reforms.

Sec. Kobach also noted that the laws proposed support policies that were passed in 1996 in Federal law. These laws would not send illegal aliens to prison, which many foreign countries do, but only require that the individuals be sent home.

It would seem to me that it is unreasonable to expect America to have an open borders policy in an age of global terrorism. If we are going to tolerate pat-down searches of little children, we should surely expect our security agencies to keep our border secure from those who may actually wish to harm us. I hope we can move our legislators to take steps to solve the immigration problem.   

Reform and the 2012 Federal Budget

       Ryan's Express. That's what one Foxnews writer called Rep. Ryan's proposed 2012 budget. I like that name. Seeing that we Americans are well over a trillion dollars in current debt and have likely more than 170 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities to our various entitlement programs, we need to grow up. We need to become conservative with our finances and tough on spending. That's not easy with so many liberals in important government positions or living off entitlements. Pelosi, Reed, Obama, Keynesian economists all believe the socialist fantasy that you borrow and spend your way to prosperity. (Warning: don't try that at home; it only works in liberal fantasyland.) Or, in their fantasy world they will tax the rich- as if the rich are saying, "Please take my money." California tried this, and found that the rich are actually saying, "I'll move to a tax-friendlier place."

       Liberals don't really understand conservatives. While many of us conservatives would like to retire earlier, we will work longer if that is what it takes to keep the country solvent. We aren't the French, or even worse, ungrateful liberals who live in the bounty of the United States and simultaneously hate their country for being bountiful, claiming that America "stole" its prosperity rather than earned it. It will be the liberals rioting in the streets, as in Wisconsin, when reforms have to be made.

       But if we are working longer and harder, we want to see the government cut spending at the same time. Otherwise, Americans will sacrifice and the goverment will respond as it has in the past forty years: "Thanks for your hard work. We'll take that money and relieve you of the burden of spending it yourself."

      Responsible government will be the other necessary component of necessary reform. It may be that it will be necessary to modify the 16th Amendment to prohibit unfunded mandates and, during peacetime, to limit the percentage of the budget the government can borrow and to set a maximum tax rate available to the goverment.