February 20th, 2009
OMG! Illinois House Democrats are looking at increasing the motor fuel tax anywhere from 16 to 23 cents per gallon! So sez TheCapitolFaxBlog.com
Why is it that Democrats want to punish the poor with taxes that hit them hardest? Think about it. A 20 cent increase in a gallon of gas won’t affect the $100,000 year people, but it sure will hurt folks making $20,000.
Also on the front burner: an income tax increase. Illinois has a low, flat tax of 3 percent. I don’t know if there will be any graduation in the increase, but Gov. Quinn has in the past promoted higher taxes on higher income earners, along with a token $200 reduction in property taxes.
What we don’t yet know is what, if any cuts are coming in state services.
All of this is to reduce the hole in the budget estimated at $9 billion.
February 20th, 2009
I’m appalled at the idea of turning western Winnebago County into a gigantic wind farm, which is what a Minneapolis based company wants to do.
Not only is this an inefficient way to generate electricity, it creates horrible sight and noise pollution. It’s bad for the environment — windmills kill birds, millions and millions of them. Why aren’t environmentalists outraged?
Eventually, after we have have wasted billions on exotic and inefficient electricity generation technologies like wind, solar and ethanol, Americans will begin to turn again to nuclear plants.
Nukes like the one in Byron do not pollute, the emit no greenhouse gasses. So, their “carbon footprint” is invisible. If Americans would adopt the French method of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, we would not have a storage problem, even though we do have a safe place to put it — Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The only impediment is political: Harry Reid, Senate majority leader from Nevada.
France generates most of its fuel from nuclear power. Germany, by contrast, is turning its countryside into a huge, ugly mass of solar panels and windmill farms. Result: France still looks like France. Germany is beginning to look like another planet.
February 20th, 2009
I just heard “Carl,” a regular talk show caller on WNTA, talking on Doug McDuff. As he often does, Carl called with his Republican Talking Point of the Day, saying that massive government spending in the 1930s did not extract the country from the Great Depression.
There’s truth in this Talking Point, but it’s not the whole story. Although economists will forever debate the worth of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, FDR remained a capitalist at heart. He practiced Keynesian economics (deficit spending) in an effort to prop up capitalist enterprises. But the economy failed to fully recover, not because he spent too much money, but because he spent too little.
Carl and other Republicans say — as did my Marxist professors at the University of Illinois — that only World War II brought us out of the Great Depression.
Well, of course it did. The war was the most massive government spending program in the history of the U.S. Unlike the New Deal, in the war, Uncle Sam took total control of the economy, commanding manufacturers and railroads to produce and transport products for the war, not only for the U.S. but for its allies.
In 1942, everyone who wasn’t put in the Armed Forces went to work in the factories, making everything from bullets to B-17s to battleships for the government. There was so much competition for workers that for the first time in history, companies began offering fringe benefits like employer-paid health care and vacations. If you like your employer-provided health care, thank World War II.
So, to revise Carl’s point: The New Deal did not cure the depression, and may actually have prolonged it, not because it spent too much money, but because it didn’t spend enough.
The government-imposed socialism during World War II gave the economy the jump start it needed to ensure prosperity for more than half a century after the war’s end in 1945.
That was the point my Marxist professors were making way back in the 1970s. Socialism saved capitalism. Hate to say it, but it’s an inconvenient truth.
Another inconvenient truth: In World War II we paid for the war effort by selling war bonds. Everybody bought them as part of their patriotic duty, and yes, that meant they sacrificed to do it. There was food and gasoline rationing, signs that said “Is this trip necessary?” and not much to buy in the stores. The boy and girl scouts organized scrap metal drives, and people were urged to grow “victory gardens” and provide their own food.
Nowadays, we think you can buy a war on credit and not demand sacrifice from the home front. That’s a false assumption, as we’ve learned the hard way by spending $1 trillion on an unnecessary war in Iraq while we doubled the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion under the administration of George W. Bush.
I wish I were a “neoconservative” like talk radio blowtorches Rush and Sean, who get their Talking Points from the Heritage Foundation, the same Talking Points repeated by Caller Carl and many, many others.
See, if I were a “neocon,” I would never again have to think for myself. I’d just plug in my daily Talking Point and repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it.
