Bush's Economy - Another Surprise Visit

The economy is good, if you're a stockholder, if you're a CEO, it's the best it's ever been. Republicans have all but eliminated your taxes and are trying to shift the rest of them to the backs of those of us who aren't benefitting from the economic recovery - wage earners and middle class families.

Class warfare? Damned right it is. The Republican elitists want you to believe what's good for the corporation is good for America and in some respects, they're right. The welcome the Elitist in Chief, President Bush, received on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange today should give some indication of the results of his policies. Stocks are trading at all time highs, meanwhile your health care costs continue to rise, people continue to lose coverage and by the way, in real dollars, you're making much less than during the past Presidency.

Bush's remarks indicate how out of touch he is. All the changes he outlined in his remarks were to the benefit of employers, not employees. Tell me how many people feeding a family can even afford the tuition to go back to school, much less the time. Meanwhile, Republicans want to link further tax cuts for business to an increase in the minimum wage. During the debate on the minimum wage, the good Senators from the right have made as much as a minimum wage earner earns in four months. That's elitist.

The Meme and the Minimum Wage

Today the Senate voted to end debate on the measure to increase the minimum wage to $7.25 over the next two years ending a week of debate in which Senator Ted Kennedy pointed out that every Congressman made as much money as a minimum wage earner will earn in four months. And naturally, the GOPers found a way to get their elite constituents a piece of the pie by saddling the bill with tax breaks for business.

Here's the GOPer meme: "Raising the minimum wage will cost some jobs," Al Hubbard, the director of the president's National Economic Council told reporters aboard Air Force One Tuesday. "We think it's important to counter that with tax breaks that will replace those jobs."

It never has in the past and if the economy is as strong as Tony Snow and George Bush keep saying, can't it absorb the cost? And it's worth pointing out that the pay increases for lawmakers alone over the past couple years outstrip anything a minimum wage earner makes in a year. Democrats have a chance to strip out the GOPer business welfare provisions from the bill in conference committee and I hope they do. And I hope we rub every GOPer nose who votes against raising wages for America's working poor in their own doo-doo for the next eternity. Our new meme can then be that the Republicans hate the poor.

The Deferred Tax Increase

Amid the usual Bushit of the State of the Union speech, one nugget reeked particularly like GOPer. The masterpiece of Bush's current "blame it on the next guy" strategy was the proposal to tax the fortunate few of us who have health care plans costing us AND OUR EMPLOYERS together more than $7,500 per year. And I have the reddest of fishwrappers, the Houston Chronicle, to thank for pointing this out to me.

Here's how it works. Say your employer pays three-fourths of your health care and you pay $100 per month, or $1,200 per year. You're safe - the total cost of your health care is $4,800 per year. Now when health care, unrestrained and unregulated by GOPer philosophy, doubles in cost again in five years, the next President's term, you'd be paying $9,600 together, meaning that now you are paying taxes on $2,100 in additional income. So either you are now paying taxes on your health care, a de facto tax increase hidden as a measure that, just five years ago, looked like a tax-the-rich scheme is now taxing you.

Sound like the Alternative Minimum Tax to anyone?

There's no guarantee that the taxes collected would go to universalize health care, either, only the guarantee that, under Bush's plan, your taxes go up when, inevitably, the routine cost of health insurance goes through the artificial ceiling that will never be raised.

That, friends, is a back-door tax increase that does nothing, kind of like the Republican President who proposed it.

How GOPers Support the Working Poor

The following Senators, all GOPers, voted against cloture on the Senate measure to increase the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour:

NAYs ---43 Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO) Bennett (R-UT) Bond (R-MO) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Craig (R-ID) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hagel (R-NE) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Kyl (R-AZ) Lott (R-MS) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Murkowski (R-AK) Roberts (R-KS) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Smith (R-OR) Stevens (R-AK) Sununu (R-NH) Thomas (R-WY) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH)

We the people (remember us) of Colorado voted to enshrine a fair minimum wage into our State constitution in the Great Republican Rejection of 2006. Note Allard, our not-too-soon to be retiring Senator and lover of torture, voted against the will of Colorado. Otherwise the usual suspects are in the list including Man of the People, John Blowin' in the Wind McCain.

These guys have truly lost touch. Try living anywhere in this country on $7.25 per hour. My bet is they'll say they're in favor of increasing the minimum wage, but only if we can decrease Paris Hilton's tax load on her inheritance (Bill Gates referred to the Inheritance Tax as the Opportunity Reallocation Tax, a much more descriptive label of the social function of the tax). So if you want the person waiting your table or cleaning your latrine to get a pay raise, you have to give the Hilton heiresses millions.

Supporting the poor, one millionaire at a time. Today's GOP.

If Illegal Immigrants were Cows....

Today I got one of those stupid e-mails stating implying that the Department of Agriculture, since it can find one cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) from all the millions in the country, they should be allowed to search for the millions of illegal immigrants.

I had seen this BS so often I was fed up. I hit reply-all and replied, if you're willing to assume the civil rights of a cow, you'd be traceable, too. Problem is, the ones you want to find won't take that set of civil rights. You wear an ear tag from birth, you can be bought and sold at will, you can be bred or castrated at will, milked, slaughtered, moved, silenced, all the wonderful rights and privileges we afford our bovine companions (and the GOPers would like you to have). Meanwhile, those you'd find have all the freedoms you have today because they know one thing:

If every American were as easy to find as a cow with BSE, the bad guys would still be invisible in modern society.

So cut the bull.

A Great Argument for Curtailing War Funds

One of the best arguments I've heard in a long time for curtailing funds for Bush's war in Iraq came today during a debate over stem cell research. I believe it was Senator Lugar who was bloviating against funding the research, stating he was not only voting his own belief, he was voting the belief of millions of Americans. He felt it was patently unfair to ask millions of American taxpayers to fund research that violated their fundamental belief....

Okay, Senator. This war violates my fundamental beliefs, as well as those of millions of other Americans. I find it unfair that you want us to pay for it.

Think that little gem will have any effect on our GOPer friends? They're willing to cut off funds to support the Fundies, how about to support the millions of pacifists? I highly doubt it. Were we to raise the argument on the Senate floor that millions of Americans oppose the war; therefore, we shouldn't fund it, the GOPers would call the argument specious.

Shouldn't the same apply to their objections to stem cell research? Just asking....

Allard on What's Important

We have two Republican Senators from Colorado. Ken Salazar is a GOPer-lite who voted for Bush's torture and deny habeas corpus law, a gutless Republican wannabe who wouldn't stand up for the principles our country stands for. The other Colorado Senator, Wayne Allard, is a true-red old school GOPer whose idea of the most important thing facing this country is the immortalization of Ronald Reagan.

Come on, Wayne! El Paso County has already named I-25 the Ronald Reagan Expressway, what more does the ur-neocon need? The only differentiation between him and the dividers that followed is that Reagan was eloquent and I speak as a Reagan-Republican who later saw the light. Allard, one of the Great Dividers, now wants "bipartisanship" from the Democrats. I believe he should be given exactly the same "bipartisan" treatment his party gave the Democrats for the last twelve years - none. He believes the spirit of "bipartisanship" will move his meaningless tribute while his GOPer buddies wouldn't budge on it in the last congress. I hope our Democratic majority will move on more meaningful legislation and let Allard's go where Allard himself should - right down the political toilet.

Meanwhile, Republican-lite Salizar says In the next two years, "the politics of division, of the past, are politics we will be able to transcend." With his record of voting for torture, for drumhead tribunals and for denial of habeas corpus and suspected support of spying on American citizens without a warrant, I'm sure our GOPer-wannabe will be one of the first to reach across the aisle. I hope Congress can pull it together and find some statesmanship, God knows we need it to solve some of the problems we face but rather than forwarding a GOPer-lite agenda, I'd rather have the GOPers and GOPer-lites treated exactly the way the GOPers treated us for twelve years - ignore them.

A Republican Tax Cut

I'm sure somewhere someone promised a tax cut. Somewhere someone underestimated the amount required to do a job only Government can do and instead of finding a bathtub to drown Government in, the GOPers in charge of Arapahoe County chose a storm sewer. Maybe it was a gift to developers, maybe an undercollection of property taxes but for some reason, I got a card in the mail informing me I was about to be assessed for stormwater management.

Apparently it's for $76 million in stormwater improvements - read necessary drains to support the cancerous development in our area - and for unfunded Federal mandates. Okay, so we didn't fund the mandate at the Federal level, doubtless to make one of Bush's hoodin rob tax cuts (rob from the poor, give to the rich) square with the outlay. So that's been passed down to, ultimately, the county level. Instead of making the developers (and future homeowners) pay for the needed upgrades, they're passing it on to me.

The definition of impervious surface is an interesting one, too. My roof is an impervious surface although all storm water runs off into my yard, into my soil to nourish my grass. Yet that will be included in the assessment. The agency assessing the fee performed the analysis to determine how much of my property is "impervious". My patio never drains anywhere except into my yard. I'm sure that's in my assessment.

Long story short, this is the result of GOPer tax cuts - the bill gets passed down. The party who claims to support individual initiative is now passing the costs of development on to me, living in an area that's been developed for fifteen years. Government, reduced to a size capable of being drowned in a storm drain, is no longer capable of meeting its bills with the taxes it takes in; therefore, the cost gets passed from developers and McMansion owners to, well, me.

By the way, I don't own the sidewalk. Bill Arapahoe County for that one.