The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 9)
Will Rogers has a great quote that I love. He noted, “Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago”(Paula McSpadden Love,The Will Rogers Book,(1972) p. 20.)
This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but from a liberal.
Rep. Emanuel Clever (D-Mo.) called the newly agreed-upon bipartisan compromise deal to raise the debt limit “a sugar-coated satan sandwich.”
“This deal is a sugar-coated satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see,” Clever tweeted on August 1, 2011
Tonight, I voted against the Budget Control Act. It leaves real cuts in federal spending to another day. We don’t need congressional super committees and triggers to do the heavy lifting for which Members of Congress were elected.
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Nunes favored the bill below:
Cut, Cap and Balance Statement Debt Limit Plan
Washington, Jul 20 – Congressman Nunes issued the following statement on passage of the Cut, Cap and Balance Act:
“The Cut, Cap and Balance Act is not a perfect bill but it is certainly one that under any other circumstance would have garnered the unanimous support of conservatives across America. It contains a spending cap that would inoculate us against spending excess, while forcing budget reforms to ensure the federal government lives within its means. Leading up to the debate, I joined critics who desired more immediate spending reforms, including to our nation’s entitlements, and sought to have those reforms included. However, I ultimately sided with 233 of my Republican colleagues in supporting Cut, Cap and Balance recognizing the debate is not over. The bill will be considered in the Senate on Saturday.”
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min
I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me.
T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION
I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought
A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.
1. Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.
2. Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.
3. Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.
4. Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.
B. Fragmentation.
1. Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.
2. Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.
3. Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.
C. Retreat to absurdity.
1. Dada , and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd.
2. Art followed philosophy but came sooner to logical end.
3. Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.
II. Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought
A. Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.
1. Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.
2. Direction and influence of Debussy.
3. Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.
4. Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.
B. Cage: a case study in confusion.
1. Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.
2. Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.
C. Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.
1. Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.
2. Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.
III. General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought
A. Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.
1. Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon
compared; the drift of general culture.
2. Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.
3. Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.
B. Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.
1. Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.
2. Cinema and the leap into fantasy:
The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits, The Last Year at Marienbad.
3. Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage): Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.
IV. Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely
Questions
1. Explain what “fragmentation” means, as discussed by Dr. Schaeffer. What does it result from? Give examples of it.
2. Apart from the fact that modern printing and recording processes made the art and music of the past more accessible than ever before, do you think that the preference of many people for the art and music of the past is related to the matters discussed by Dr. Schaeffer? If so, how?
3. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Emerson wrote this over a century ago. Debate.
4. How far do you think that the opinion of some Christians that one should have nothing to do with philosophy, art and novels is a manifestation of the very fragmentation which is characteristic of modern secular thought? Discuss.
Key Events and Persons
Beethoven’s last Quartets: 1825-26
Claude Monet: 1840-1926
Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise: 1885
Paul Cézanne: 1839-1906
The Bathers: c.1905
Claude Debussy: 1862-1918
Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944
Arnold Schoenberg: 1874-1951
Picasso: 1881-1973
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: 1906-7
Marcel Duchamp: 1887-1969
Nude Descending a Staircase: 1912
T.S. Eliot: 1888-1965
The Wasteland: 1922
John Cage: 1912-1992
Music for Marcel Duchamp: 1947
Jackson Pollock: 1912-1956
Karlheinz Stockhausen: 1928-
Sartre’s Nausea: 1938
Beauvoir’s L’Invitée: 1943
Camus’ The Stranger: 1942
Camus’ The Plague: 1947
Resnais’ The Last Year at Marienbad: 1961
Bergman’s The Silence: 1963
Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits: 1965
Antonioni’s Blow-Up: 1966
Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf: 1967
Buñel’s Belle de Jour: 1967
Further Study
Perhaps you have seen some of the films mentioned. You should try to see them if you haven’t.Watch for them in local art-film festivals, on TV, or in campus film series. They rarely return nowadays to the commercial circuit. The sex and violence which they treated philosophically have now taken over the screen in a more popular and crude form! Easier of access are the philosophic novels of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir. Read the titles Dr. Schaeffer mentions. Again, for the artwork and music mentioned, consult libraries and record shops. But spend time here—let the visual images and the musical sounds sink in.
Listening patiently to Cage and Webern, for example, will tell you more than volumes of musicology.
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (many editions, usually in collections of his verse).
Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961).
H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970).
Still of Alan Alda, John Candy, Kevin Pollak, Rip Torn, Michael Moore and Rhea Perlman in Canadian Bacon
Michael Moore is a liberal movie director and his films have been pitiful. However, I did enjoy the movie “Canadian Bacon” which was very funny. Above is a clip from that movie.
On his Twitter feed Monday, the Oscar-winning film director also blamed the 2008 economic collapse on Standard & Poor’s — apparently because it and other credit-ratings agencies did not downgrade mortgage-based bonds, which encouraged the housing bubble and let it spread throughout the economy.
“Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Mr. Moore wrote.
Standard & Poor’s, one of three key debt agencies, stripped the U.S. federal government of its AAA status Friday night and reduced it to AA+ for the first time in the nation’s history.
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I don’t think that Standard and Poors did anything wrong and I think they would have been wrong if they did not act because of all the political pressure they were receiving from the Obama administration. My views are much closer to those below.
The GOP‘s cadre of anti-Obama presidential candidates are hammering their nemesis for the first credit downgrade in U.S. history.Late Friday night, following months of bruising, rancorous debate in Washington over the debt ceiling and America’s future deficit, the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s sterling AAA credit rating to AA+. The other two major ratings agencies — Moody’sand Fitch — maintained the nation’s AAA rating.”America’s creditworthiness just became the latest casualty in President Obama‘s failed record of leadership on the economy,” said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in a statement.
“Standard & Poor’s rating downgrade is a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama. His failed policies have led to high unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, and now, the unprecedented loss of our nation’s prized AAA credit rating.”
The Obama administration slammed the credibility of the analysis S&P used to downgrade the nation’s credit rating, insisting there was a $2 trillion error in S&P’s calculations. The ratings agency conceded the error, but did not alter its conclusion.
Tea Party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann — who voted against the debt-ceiling deal — also laid into Obama, declaring that the “President has destroyed the credit rating of the United States.”
Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman described the downgrade as a result of a “lack of leadership in Washington,” adding that “for far too long we have let reckless government spending go unchecked and the cancerous debt afflicting our nation has spread.”
“I understand the U.S. Treasury is going back to Standard and Poor’s to say that a two trillion dollar mathematical error by S&P contributed to the downgrade,” he said. “So, in addition to blaming President Bush for all of its problems, now the White Houseis blaming S&P – but this happened on the President’s watch – and he has to deal with it.”
With President Obama on the top of the ticket in 2012, I just don’t think that Bill Halter can beat Representative Tim Griffin. Red Arkansas seems to agree with me:
You see, Mr. Halter has caused two looney leftie bloggers to get all ver clempt over the mishegoss that he might unseat Rep. Tim Griffin in 2012.
To wit, we offer the pie in the sky ramblings of the Blue Arkansas Blog:
I don’t see why a strong Democrat couldn’t run a competitive race outside of Pulaski and into Perry, Van Buren, Conway, and even Faulkner. Halter would be that sort of Democrat for sure, and with the kind of fundraising he could manage and grassroots excitement he could generate he would definitely be a major threat to Tim Griffin.
We’d like to offer a slight edit to BAB’s post by changing the phrase “grassroots excitement” to “union-financed smurfturfing.” Furthermore, we’d also like to point out the following 2010 AR-02 election results from “Perry, Van Buren, Conway, and even Faulkner” counties:
We guess Joyce Elliott would not be considered a “strong Democrat” by the BABlers. That’s got to sting a little bit.
Now we move on to the left-headed stepchild at non-content partner Talk Business, former Halter staffer Michael Cook. Mr. Cook writes that “Bill Halter can beat Tim Griffin,” adding:
I’m told by multiple sources, outside of the Halter camp, that recent polling shows Griffin is beatable and weaker than many realize.
Of course, the new go-to liberal blogger for DPA (read: consultant) oppo-dumps and talking points offers no proof to back his claim. (Hey, didn’t he moan about a similar lack of proof recently?)
Mr. Cook also spins a creative story as to how “ticket-splitting is ingrained in our political culture.” He cites the following examples as proof:
In 2004, John Kerry lost the 2nd Congressional District, but Vic Snyder cruised to victory over a well-funded opponent. In 2002, Arkansans voted out Republican U.S. Senator Tim Hutchinson, but re-elected Republican Governor Mike Huckabee. In 2000, Al Gore lost Arkansas, but Mike Ross defeated Republican Congressman Jay Dickey for Congress.
Funny how that, according to Mr. Cook’s view, the only ticket-splitting occurs when Republicans are on the top of the ticket. We’ll put the fact that Mr. Beebe won the Second District 66%-32% while Mr. Griffin won 58%-38% out of our minds then. (BTW, it sure looks to us that there were a few Democrats who dared to stray from Da Guv–no telling what they’d do when Da O is atop the ballot.)
2002: Do we really need to get into Tim Hutchinson’s marital issues and that Mark Pryor traded on his daddy’s name?
2004: Vic Snyder raised $891,220. Marvin Parks raised $576,854. (By comparison, Mr. Griffin raised $1,855,578 in 2010.)
That was fun.
Since Mr. Cook likes to toss out info with nothing sourced, we’d like to follow suit by adding that–according something we heard from some guy–Mr. Halter’s “big donors” indicate that he may take a pass.
We’re not real sure if that is in reference to local donors or if it means Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO will not be spending another $4.5 million in independent expenditures on behalf of Mr. Halter like they did in 2010.
President Obama really believes that we must raise taxes in order to balance the budget. Nevertheless, conservatives argue that the bloated federal spending should come down to a level where he can balance the budget. Take a look at the excellent article “Unbalanced,” by Michael D. Tanner
Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and coauthor of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.
During his brief media appearance on Monday responding to S&P’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the subsequent stark market plunge, Pres. Barack Obama once again renewed his call for a “balanced approach” to debt reduction, combining modest entitlement reform with tax increases. This was the same formulation repeated endlessly by the president, Democrats in Congress, and much of the media throughout the recent negotiations over raising the debt ceiling.
But beyond raw ideology, there is no reason to believe that coupling tax hikes with spending cuts would solve our debt problems.
President Obama usually couches his call for tax hikes in terms of fairness. How, he asks, can we cut programs that help people without also asking the wealthy to “sacrifice” something as well? Setting aside the fact that this formulation establishes a false moral equivalence between giving less to people who have not earned it and taking more from the people who have, this ignores the fact that the wealthy in America already pay a disproportionate share of taxes.
The richest 1 percent of Americans earn 20 percent of all income in America but pay 38 percent of income taxes. The top 5 percent earn slightly more than one-third of U.S. income while paying nearly 59 percent of income taxes. At the same time, roughly half of Americans pay no federal income tax. One might suggest, therefore, that the wealthy already pay their fair share, and then some.
Of course other taxes, such as payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and the like, tend to be more regressive. But even if you include all types of federal, state, and local taxes, the wealthy pay a considerably higher proportion of taxes than their share of income would warrant.
Others less prone to moral posturing argue for including tax hikes along with spending reductions on the grounds that it is “impossible to balance the budget through cuts alone.” But the evidence strongly suggests that cutting spending alone may be the only way to really balance the budget. Indeed, by including tax hikes, we slow economic growth, thereby making it harder to balance the budget.
Simply look to those European countries today that have adopted such a “balanced” approach to debt reduction. Britain, Greece, Portugal, and Spain have all included major tax hikes as part of their austerity packages. The result across the board has been anemic economic growth and scant progress toward debt reduction. Britain, for instance, imposed a new 50 percent top income-tax rate, hiked the capital-gains tax rate from 18 percent to 28 percent, and increased the VAT rate from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. The result: During the first quarter of 2011, the British economy grew at just 0.5 percent, barely enough to offset the 0.5 percent decline during the last quarter of 2010.
Paul Krugman and others have argued that it was the spending cuts, not the tax hikes, that slowed economic growth. Others more plausibly have suggested that the continuing shocks that are buffeting the world economic system have reduced economic growth generally and made it difficult to judge the effectiveness of any particular policy or group of policies.
But the body of evidence from outside the current economic crisis tends to confirm the hypothesis that additional taxes would slow economic growth, making it harder to reduce the debt. For example, a study by Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at more than 100 debt-reduction efforts in 21 countries between 1970 and 2007. They found that a combination of spending cuts and revenue reductions was actually more likely to result in debt reduction than a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases.
History shows us that countries as divergent as Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Slovenia successfully reduced the size of their governments relative to their economies and lowered their debt burden substantially. They did so by controlling spending, not by raising taxes.
In this country, look to the end of World War II. The U.S. government cut spending by nearly two-thirds, from $84 billion in 1945 to just $39 billion in 1946. While the country ran a budget deficit of nearly 21 percent of GDP in 1945, it was running a surplus by 1947. At the time, many economists predicted that cuts of that magnitude would destroy the U.S. economy and bring about Depression-era levels of unemployment. Instead, civilian employment actually grew, and an era of economic expansion began that would last throughout the 1950s.
All this implies that we should find a way to cut spending. And that brings us back to President Obama’s press briefing. At the end of his remarks, the president once again laid out his plans for the future, and called for more spending: more spending on education, more spending on unemployment insurance, more spending for an infrastructure bank, more, more, more.
Perhaps that, and not a mythical “balance,” is what really lies behind his calls for higher taxes.
And now, an embarrassing debt ceiling debate that resulted in our country losing its sterling credit rating while China justifiably wagged its finger in our direction. It’s time for voters to get their pink slips ready.
It was embarrassing because THERE ARE NO MEANINGFUL CUTS IN THIS DEBT DEAL. THIS MEANS WE WILL BE WHERE GREECE IS NOW IN A FEW YEARS!!!! If nothing is done about entitlements then federal spending could consume as much as 50% of economic output by the time the Baby Boom generation is fully retired. In 2001 it was 18.2% and currently it has risen to about 25%.
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute rightly noted:
The hard-core conservatives are upset that the deal is mostly smoke and mirrors on the spending side and that there may be a tax-increase trap on the revenue side.
Take a look at this excellent article:m “The Next Greece” by Daniel J. Mitchell
Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a think-tank based in Washington.
Added to cato.org on August 4, 2011
This article appeared in National Poston August 4, 2011.
America is on a path to becoming a Greek-style welfare state. Thanks to the Bush-Obama spending binge, the burden of federal spending has climbed to about 25% of national economic output, up from only 18.2% of GDP when Bill Clinton left office.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because of a combination of demographic forces and poorly designed entitlement programs, federal spending could consume as much as 50% of economic output by the time the Baby Boom generation is fully retired.
One symptom of all this excessive spending is that Washington is awash in red ink. The United States is now in its third consecutive year of trillion-dollar deficits and the politicians just had to increase the nation’s US$14.3-trillion debt limit.
But it wasn’t easy getting there. Just as happened with the “government shutdown” debate in March, Republicans and Democrats had fierce disagreements over the right approach. They bickered until the last minute and then finally agreed to more than US$900billion of supposed spending cuts and the creation of a “super-committee” charged with proposing another US$1.5-trillion of deficit reduction.
So which side won this fight? Republicans are bragging that they got spending cuts today, a promise of spending cuts in the future, and no tax increases. Democrats, meanwhile, are chortling that they took the debt issue off the table until after the 2012 elections, protected their favourite programs and created a super-committee that will seduce the GOP into a tax increase.
Ignore that bragging. The easy answer is that politicians of both parties were the victors and taxpayers are the ones left in the cold.
In other words, the budget deal was a victory for the political establishment.
Here’s why Republicans are winners. They get to tell their Tea Party activists that they forced Obama to cut spending. It doesn’t matter that federal spending will actually be higher every year and that the cuts were based on Washington math (a spending increase becomes a spending cut if outlays don’t climb as fast as some artificial benchmark).
They also get to tell their anti-tax activists that they held the line. Perhaps most important, the super-committee must use the “current law” baseline, which assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. But why are GOPers happy about this, considering they want those tax cuts extended? For the simple reason that Democrats on the super-committee therefore can’t use repeal of the “Bush tax cuts for the rich” as a revenue raiser.
This means that most Republican incumbents are well-positioned to win re-election.
Here’s why Democrats are winners. Thanks to the magic of government math, despite all the talk of budget cuts, discretionary spending will be more than US$100-billion higher in 2021 than it is this year. And since defence spending in Iraq and Afghanistan presumably is winding down, this means even more money will be available for domestic programs.
In addition to telling the pro-spending lobbies that the gravy train is still on the tracks, they also get to tell the classwarfare crowd that there’s an improved likelihood of higher taxes for corporate jet owners and other “rich” people. Notwithstanding GOP assertions, nothing in the agreement precludes the supercommittee from meeting its US$1.5-trillion target with tax revenue. The 2001 and 2003 tax legislation is not an option, but everything else is on the table.
This means that most Democratic incumbents are well-positioned to win re-election.
It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t mean all Republicans and all Democrats are happy about the deal. The hard-core conservatives are upset that the deal is mostly smoke and mirrors on the spending side and that there may be a tax-increase trap on the revenue side.
The hard-core liberals, by contrast, are angry that there are any spending cuts, even ones based on Washington math. Moreover, they want higher tax rates on upper-income taxpayers today, not a super-committee that may or may not follow through on soak-the-rich policies in the future.
One group of people, however, unambiguously got the short end of the stick in this budget deal. Ordinary Americans are caught in the middle. They’re not poor enough to benefit from the federal government’s plethora of income-redistribution programs. But they’re not rich enough to have the clever lobbyists and insider connections needed to benefit from the highdollar handouts like ethanol subsidies and bank bailouts.
Instead, middle-class Americans play by the rules, pay ever-higher taxes, and struggle to make ends meet while the establishment of both parties engages in posturing as America slowly drifts toward a Greek-style fiscal meltdown.
The Tea Party members in the Republican Party voted against the debt deal and have even claimed that the debt deal did not cut enough out of the budget and that is why the USA got a downgrade in the credit rating. Below I have the comments on the downgrade from two of those representatives.
First, I want to call attention to one of our local candidates. Yesterday Tom Cotton who is a Republican who is running for the congressional seat being vacated by Democrat Mike Ross commented on the debt deal. Here is a portion of the article concerning that by Jason Tolbert:
Tom Cotton, who is currently the only announced candidate for the Fourth Congressional District open seat for either party, appeared on KARN’s Dave Elswick show yesterday afternoon where he answered questions from listeners for over an hour
Responding to one question, he said he would not have voted for the final legislation voted on last week regarding the compromise to extend the debt ceiling while making around $2.3 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years. All four Arkansas Representatives and both Senators voted for the final bill.
Cotton explained that he would have supported the Cut, Cap, and Balance proposal passed by House Republicans before being defeated in the Senate, but that he had serious concerns over the details of the final debt compromise and could not have vote for it. He pointed to the many closed-door, back-room meetings that went into the bill and said he would want to see a more transparent process. In addition, he said the structure of the spending cut triggers have the potential to cause too many cuts to defense spending that could weaken our military.
Cotton said if he is elected, he would want to see not only spending cuts, but structural changes to the way the federal budgets are implemented.
WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Jeff Landry (R, LA-03) issued the following statement after Standard & Poor’s (S&P) lowered the United States’ long-term credit rating:
“It should come as no surprise, that after Washington has recklessly spent, borrowed, and bailed out everything under the sun with taxpayer money, America’s credit rating has been downgraded. For the first time in 70 years, the United States is not the world leader in financial investment. And with the S&P slashing our credit rating from AAA to AA+, our markets are sure to be tested and our neighbors could face interest rate changes to their mortgages, credit cards, and car loans.
As I said when I voted against it and the S&P acknowledged when they made the downgrade, the Washington debt deal initiated by the Senate and signed into law by the President did not do enough to end the government’s addiction to spending. It is evident that Harry Reid and his Senate Democrats were wrong and should have followed the House’s lead with Cut, Cap, and Balance.
Making deals to continue kicking the can down the road is not the answer. We need a plan that cuts spending, simplifies and decreases the tax rates, reforms entitlement programs, and sends a Balanced Budget Amendment to the states; anything less will not solve the real budgetary problems Washington faces nor return our AAA rating.”
(DODGE CITY, KAN.) – Congressman Tim Huelskamp issued the following statement when Standard & Poor’s announced Friday evening that it had decided to downgrade the United States’ AAA credit rating:
“In April, I said that the threat of downgrade should be a ‘wake-up call’, but unfortunately not everyone agreed,” Congressman Huelskamp said. “Now, the decision of the majority of Washington to hit the snooze button on Standard & Poor’s alarm will have major ramifications not just for Washington, but for the entire economy.”
“S&P gave Washington plenty of warning that lawmakers needed to deal with the debt, yet the warning went unheeded. Big spenders in Washington decided to interpret the markets’ warnings as an instruction to borrow more when instead the markets wanted Washington to stop the reckless borrowing and unchecked accumulation of debt.”
“This is embarrassing, but it certainly was preventable. Washington has known all along that markets needed a strong solution to deal with the country’s long-term spending and borrowing habits. The ‘Cut, Cap, Balance’ Act was just such a plan with appropriate short-term cuts and caps on future spending the rating agencies said were needed. Yet, Washington produced a politically-expedient plan that was an insufficient answer to the real problem, a plan that tackled the need to borrow, but ignored the even greater need to reduce spending.”
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 8)
Will Rogers has a great quote that I love. He noted, “Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago”(Paula McSpadden Love,The Will Rogers Book,(1972) p. 20.)
This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but from a liberal.
Rep. Emanuel Clever (D-Mo.) called the newly agreed-upon bipartisan compromise deal to raise the debt limit “a sugar-coated satan sandwich.”
“This deal is a sugar-coated satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see,” Clever tweeted on August 1, 2011
August 1, 2011. This act increases the debt limit by between $2.1 and $2.4 trillion, the biggest explosion of debt in American history. It allows the government to avoid spending reductions for the next two years while squandering our last best hope of averting a sovereign debt crisis.
I am opposed to this measure for the following reasons:
1. The purported cuts, even if realized, are far below the $4 trillion deficit reduction that credit rating agencies have warned is necessary to preserve the Triple-A credit rating of the United States Government.
2. It blows the lid off the House budget passed in April by more than a half-trillion dollars over ten years.
3. It makes no significant spending reductions for at least the next two years, essentially freezing spending at an unsustainable level. While the debt increase occurs this year, deficit reductions are to be spread over many years and could be reversed by future acts of Congress.
4. The spending caps are easily circumvented by declaring appropriations to be an emergency, a response to a “major disaster,” or necessary for the “Global War on Terror.”
5. The balanced budget amendment provisions are illusory because the amendment is completely undefined.
A Ronald Reagan radio address from 1975 addresses the topics of abortion and adoption. This comes from a collection of audio commentaries titled “Reagan in His Own Voice.”
I just wanted to share with you one of the finest prolife papers I have ever read, and it is by President Ronald Wilson Reagan.
I have a son named Wilson Daniel Hatcher and he is named after two of the most respected men I have ever read about : Daniel from the Old Testament and Ronald Wilson Reagan. I have studied that book of Daniel for years and have come to respect that author who was a saint who worked in two pagan governments but he never compromised. My favorite record was the album “No Compromise” by Keith Green and on the cover was a picture from the Book of Daniel.
One of the thrills of my life was getting to hear President Reagan speak in the beginning of November of 1984 at the State House Convention Center in Little Rock. Immediately after that program I was standing outside on Markham with my girlfriend Jill Sawyer (now wife of 25 years) and we were alone on a corner and President was driven by and he waved at us and we waved back.
My former pastor from Memphis, Adrian Rogers, got the opportunity to visit with President Ronald Reagan on several occasions.
Take time to read this below and comment below and let me know what you thought of his words.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While president, Ronald Reagan penned this article for The Human Life Review, unsolicited. It ran in the Review‘s Spring 1983, issue and is reprinted here with permission.
The 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators — not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973 is a good time for us to pause and reflect. But the consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nation’s wars.
Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court’s result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. Shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, Professor John Hart Ely, now Dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that the opinion “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a “right” so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born. Yet that is what the Court ruled.
As an act of “raw judicial power” (to use Justice White’s biting phrase), the decision by the seven-man majority inRoev. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court’s decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead,Roe v. Wadehas become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.
Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: “. . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life. We saw tragic proof of this truism last year when the Indiana courts allowed the starvation death of “Baby Doe” in Bloomington because the child had Down’s Syndrome.
Many of our fellow citizens grieve over the loss of life that has followed Roe v. Wade. Margaret Heckler, soon after being nominated to head the largest department of our government, Health and Human Services, told an audience that she believed abortion to be the greatest moral crisis facing our country today. And the revered Mother Teresa, who works in the streets of Calcutta ministering to dying people in her world-famous mission of mercy, has said that “the greatest misery of our time is the generalized abortion of children.”
Over the first two years of my Administration I have closely followed and assisted efforts in Congress to reverse the tide of abortion — efforts of Congressmen, Senators and citizens responding to an urgent moral crisis. Regrettably, I have also seen the massive efforts of those who, under the banner of “freedom of choice,” have so far blocked every effort to reverse nationwide abortion-on-demand.
Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart. This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade. At first, only a minority of Americans recognized and deplored the moral crisis brought about by denying the full humanity of our black brothers and sisters; but that minority persisted in their vision and finally prevailed. They did it by appealing to the hearts and minds of their countrymen, to the truth of human dignity under God. From their example, we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply engrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed. But the great majority of the American people have not yet made their voices heard, and we cannot expect them to — any more than the public voice arose against slavery — until the issue is clearly framed and presented.
What, then, is the real issue? I have often said that when we talk about abortion, we are talking about two lives — the life of the mother and the life of the unborn child. Why else do we call a pregnant woman a mother?I have also said that anyone who doesn’t feel sure whether we are talking about a second human life should clearly give life the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.
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I remember when President Carter and candidate Reagan debated in 1980 and the subject of abortion came up. Reagan said that if you were on a dusty area and you found someone laying down would you bury him without knowing for sure if he is alive or not? It is the same with the case of abortion.
Let’s also remember a critical reason for this expansion was our decision to reduce taxes in 1981. I’m sure many of you know it was very difficult getting this through the Congress, although with your help we achieved it. And despite all the predictions of high inflation from our opponents, our tax cuts not only fueled our expansion, they had a benefit that surprised some people: Far from reducing the amount of money the Federal Government collected in tax revenues, over the long run, those collections actually increased due to the economic activity sparked by the tax cuts. In fact, tax revenues from 1981 to 1987 actually went up $255 billion. Of course, this meant we had enough to pay for our defense buildup and some left over to help get our deficit spending problems under control. But instead of using new revenues to cut the deficit, the Congress decided to spend even more.
In 1982, for example, TEFRA, as it was called, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, raised taxes by $131 billion over 4 years, with Congress pledging to slash spending by $3 for every dollar of increased revenue. Instead, 4 years later, taxes had gone up the expected $131 billion, but spending over this same period had risen by $244 billion. In fact, every dollar in increased revenue since 1980 had been matched by $1.25 of increased spending.
Now, 3 days ago, I called on the congressional leaders to meet with me early next week to outline our deficit reduction plans. And as we move toward a budget settlement, it’s good to remember that there’s a fundamental difference here inWashingtonon one critical issue. I’m proud that since 1913 my party has reduced taxes 10 times and increased them only once. And that’s why I hope members of the Democratic Party will follow President Kennedy’s lead of some years ago and remember that lower taxes mean higher growth.
But the simple fact is that all sides must contribute to this process if it is to succeed and if a package is to be developed that keeps taxes and spending as low as possible. This effort must also address the flipside of our twin deficit problem. I mean, here, our trade deficit, a problem that would only be worsened by protectionist legislation. So, let’s keep the stock market healthy and sound, and let’s do it by avoiding protectionist legislation and by keeping taxes and spending down so we can keep interest rates and inflation rates low.
Until next week, thanks for listening, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 12:06 p.m. from Camp David, MD.
The Daily Hatch 