More Questions for Congressman Goodlatte: You Can Ask Him Monday at 7PM.
on August 5th, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Bob Goodlatte.
Congressman Goodlatte will be answering questions at a Republican Forum at the Roanoke County Administrative building Monday evening at 7PM.
Our previous post postulated a lot of questions that Congressman Goodlatte needs to answer.
Donna Holt, President of Campaign For Liberty just sent out a scathing letter on this issue that sums up the utter failure of Goodlatte and the rest of the Republican Congress. I reprint it unedited…thanks Donna for caging your rage so eloquently.
August 5, 2011
Dear Patriots,
I think often about the predicament our country is in, and every now and then I feel a fury rising inside of me.
This week’s “Debt Ceiling Deal” was a betrayal of the American people on many levels.
Do you remember when the Grand Old Party took control of the House just a few short months ago? One of the first bills they passed required a bill to be posted online for 3 full days before it could be voted on.
Congress broke its own “three-day rule” and had a floor vote on the hastily thrown-together bill the day after it was introduced. But that is the least of it.
Never shy to spend our money, the government blew nearly 60% of the immediate debt ceiling increase in just one day after final passage. But that is not the worst of it.
They created a “Super Congress” appointed by Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell–all bitterly opposed to everything you and I have been trying to do–to ram future taxing and spending through the Congress.
In a shocking procedural end-run around the Constitution, the U.S. Congress will not be permitted to filibuster, amend, or debate proposals from this “Super Congress.” But even that is not the worst of it.
The politicians gave themselves a larger line of credit, and the stock market, seeing right through the “solution,” went sailing downhill, the Dow losing a whopping 500 points the very next day.
But, believe it or not, that is not the worst of it.
This deal adds 7 trillion dollars to the debt, with a budget that will NEVER balance.
What does this “deal” sound like to you?
They’ve heaped mountains of debt on our children, ignored the will of the people, violated their oaths of office–this might be the worst single aspect of this massive taxpayer heist.
They sold you down the river.
What infuriates me more than anything else is that Republicans who overwhelmingly supported this deal are now going to go back to their districts and lie to their constituents.
They are going to claim that they “cut” spending.
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Congress was slated to increase spending every year until the economy reached the breaking point. The only “cut” in this arrangement is a slightly lesser increase in future spending that continues to escalate and NEVERbalances.
The establishment’s talking heads call this a “victory for the Tea Party,” but don’t let them take you for a fool.
If Tea Party members count this as a success, they are one step away from undermining all the work they’ve done over the past few years.
The Boehner deal was nothing more than a bauble to placate the Tea Party movement into believing that the Republican Party is “doing its gosh-darn best” to turn things around if only those gosh-darn Democrats didn’t have a majority in the Senate.
They are flat-out lying to you.
Accepting the lesser of two evils, or the lesser of two unbalanced budgets, is what got us into this nightmare in the first place.
Republicans claimed to have taken our concerns to heart in November, but this deal proves they learned absolutely, positively nothing.
It’s one thing when a liberal tax-and-spend politician votes for a liberal tax-and-spend bill. It’s quite another when a politician tells you they are fiscally conservative, then lies to your face and sells you down the river.
Yet that is exactly what 70% of the Republicans in Washington just did.
And it’s time that they feel the heat at least as much as you and I fear for our children’s futures and our ability to feed our families.
So, who sold you and your family down the river?
Here’s our great State’s Republican Hall of Shame, who voted to bury our families in debt:
| Rob Wittman (R—1st): | 202-225-4261 |
| E. Scott Rigell (R—2nd): | 202-225-4215 |
| Robert Hurt (R—5th): | 202-225-4711 |
| Bob Goodlatte (R—6th): | 202-225-5431 |
| Eric Cantor (R—7th): | 202-225-2815 |
| Frank Wolf (R—10th): | 202-225-5136 |
The Democrats were split because many of them were holding out for even MORE taxes and spending, so it goes without saying where their interests lie.
But where Republicans voted for this debacle, then it is up to us to expose them:
- Call them and let them know how you feel about their vote. Tell them you know that they lied to you and they sold you and your family down the river and handed the statists exactly what they wanted on a silver platter.
- Ask your local GOP and Tea Party organizations to pass resolutions condemning the debt deal, and any future debt increases.
- Write letters to the editor of your local paper, decrying the deal and exposing your legislator for his liberal tax and spend ways.
- Those who sold us out will be hosting Town Halls from now until Labor Day in-District. Call their office and ask for a schedule, and watch for announcements in your local paper. Take your friends and family with you and make your voices heard loud and clear.
- Forward this email to your contacts, and ask them to do the same.
Don’t allow your legislators the pleasure of “explaining” away their traitorous votes.
We are done listening to their lies.
In Liberty,
Donna Holt
Executive Director
Virginia Campaign for Liberty
Donna Holt
Ms Holt, “Right Again”.
Where did you get that 26 trillion figure? It seems a bit too high to me…
What would a sensible compromise be on the debt deal? Would you rather there have been no vote at all and had the USG not pay out SS or default on debt obligations?
Have you been watching the markets? Forget America, the incompetent congress just sold the entire world economy down the river. This is not a partisan issue. Neither party came up with a big enough plan. We need to seriously raise taxes & seriously cut spending if we are going to have NAY chance of servicing this debt over the next 15 years. We need 4 trillion in cuts and another 2 trillion in revenues.
WE HAVE TO RAISE TAXES. There is no other option. I don’t understand how the tea party thinks we can pay this debt down without raising taxes, cutting entitlements, and deeply cutting defense spending. What are your solutions?
Burt
B.A in Economics,
University of Chicago,
Class of 2010
Burt…
I would expect that your Econ BA would have made clear to you the distinction between tax rates and tax revenue. We clearly need to increase revenues, but that is quite a different thing than tax rates.
It has been suggested that creating a tax holiday on repatriating business income earned overseas would bring in a large, immediate infusion of revenue. That sounds like an excellent idea, unless the idea of a wealthy person getting to keep more of their income is a primary objection.
That would be an exercise in ideology.
John
Based on the baseline budget, that would be the approximate budget deficit…I have seen estimates from $20 – 27 trillion…depending on how you work the math. Since we tend to do worse than expected on these things…I used a higher estimate. If it is $20 trillion isn’t that to high anyway?
The only compromise would have been one that significantly cuts the budget this year. Any promises of future cuts are unlikely to matter, based on history. Which is one of the stated reasons for the S&P downgrade. Our current debt obligations are less than 10% of the current budget. That could have been paid with enough money left over for social security, military payrolls and medicare/aid payments as we bring in about 60% of the budget in revenues (and borrow the rest)
I would have suggested not raising the debt limit and forcing status quo politicians on both sides of the aisle to make actual cuts to the budget. If you spend 40% more than you make, isn’t the best idea to cut spending? I would have stood on priciple and not budged an inch. Compromising on these issues is the process that got us in this mess to start with.
As for the standard line of raising taxes…that won’t work….I quote the WSJ
“Consider the Internal Revenue Service’s income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000—paid 38% of taxes. But assume that tax policy confiscated all the taxable income of all the “millionaires and billionaires” Mr. Obama singled out. That yields merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25% as a share of the economy, a post-World War II record.
Say we take it up to the top 10%, or everyone with income over $114,000, including joint filers. That’s five times Mr. Obama’s 2% promise. The IRS data are broken down at $100,000, yet taxing all income above that level throws up only $3.4 trillion. And remember, the top 10% already pay 69% of all total income taxes, while the top 5% pay more than all of the other 95%.”
That is why the tea party thinks this way. We surely need to cut all of the things you speak of….but raising taxes and borrowing more money is insanity.
The RTPs stated solutions are simple.
Have the Federal Government stop violating the Constitution and stop providing services that it has no Constitutional mandate to provide. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution is a to do list for the government. Once you see the difference between what the Feds are supposed to do and what they are doing….there needs to be a plan to end this madness…shift the burdens and the funding for these items back to the states and get back to the limited federal government that the Consitution provides for.
That is the root cause of the issues at hand.
Chip Tarbutton
Master Of Arts in History
Old Dominion University
Class of 1988