Dr. Frankenlynch will probably never get a chance to run lighting through this beast—not that he’d seriously consider it if it even made it to his corner laboratory--but the Republican budget does have a feature which demonstrates both an underlying commitment to the idea of ‘local control’ and self responsibility—two pillars of conservative thinking.
It requires agency heads, the people paid by taxpayers to run the departments, to make the hard choices when it comes to saving those same taxpayers money in a down economy.
Concord Monitor
For their part, House Republicans unveiled a budget plan of their own that they heralded as "truly balanced," which they said would increase no taxes and maintain $123 million worth of aid to cities and towns not included in the Democratic budget, $83 million of which is school building aid. There was just one catch: Republicans called for more than $300 million worth of cuts to the budget without specifying what should go, instead calling on the leaders of most state agencies to figure out how to institute 13.5 percent across-the-board spending reductions.
They stick to their no tax increase promise, offer a budget that spends as much as 24% less than their opponents, actually reducing the budget instead of raising it again, and give the same agencies that have no trouble finding ways to spend revenue increases an opportunity to prove they can manage their business when there is less to work with; much like what many responsible taxpayers in the state have been doing their entire lives.
The tax and spend progressive lefty leadership—who appear to live to regulate and legislate behavior and income from Concord—will call this a cop-out; they’ll squawk about Republicans being unwilling to make the hard choices. Sorry. Wrong again. We on the right believe that everyone is capable of making the hard choices, and that the person closest to the actual spending is better equipped to make those choices, even in government; empowering responsible people with the freedom to do so will produce the best possible results.
When it doesn’t work out those closest to the spending are the ones who pay the price. It should be true of the private sector, and that much more so in government.
It is not the job of Concord politicians to find more revenue. It’s their job to limit government not just to the ability of the people to pay for it, but to make it do more with less at every--single--opportunity.
The democrats, for their part, have--for the last three years--simply spent wildly, trying to force us into allowing them to take more revenue from us. That's because money is like a drug to the lefty liberal progressives. They are addicted to the Benjamins. And every time they think they have satisfied their addiction, every time they tell us that next new tax will be enough, the next budget cycle finds them wanting more.
No amount of taxes will ever be enough, so before they spend us into poverty, the only prudent course is to cut them off and send them to rehab and get the tax and spenders out of office.
In the mean time, while the Republican budget is probably imperfect, as are most budgets often are, at least it asks the state to look reality in the face, and roll back the expansion. It offers an alternative to the spendaholics on the left who can neither project revenue, nor control how they spend it. And it tries to keep more money in the hands of those who can make the best possible decisions about how to spend it. The taxpayers.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 07:19AM