Wednesday Mashup Part Two (6/30/10)

Former Senator Man-On-Dog offered the following today in the Philadelphia Inquirer – from here (and Part One, also featuring PA’s former senator from Northern Virginia, is here)…

…blue-state Republicans have a new role model when it comes to fiscal responsibility: the Jersey Juggernaut, Chris Christie.

Gov. Christie has gained YouTube fame with his Jersey straight talk. He's been taking on the state teachers' union and the Trenton press corps. And in the face of deficits amounting to more than a third of projected revenues, he has stuck to his guns about not raising taxes, and he actually cut business taxes.

I think this prior post addresses Christie’s typically draconian Republican budget priorities, so I’ll try not to rehash that old ground.

Only in a conservative house organ like the Inky, though, could someone like Little Ricky actually be considered an expert on public sector fiscal policy. This tells us some of his most notorious votes on this subject…

Voted YES on prioritizing national debt reduction below tax cuts. (Apr 2000)

Voted YES on funding GOP version of Medicare prescription drug benefit. (Apr 2001)

As former Reaganite Bruce Bartlett tells us here…

Recall the situation in 2003. The Bush administration was already projecting the largest deficit in American history — $475 billion in fiscal year 2004, according to the July 2003 mid-session budget review. But a big election was coming up that Bush and his party were desperately fearful of losing. So they decided to win it by buying the votes of America’s seniors by giving them an expensive new program to pay for their prescription drugs.

Continuing…

Voted YES on $350 billion in tax breaks over 11 years. (May 2003)

As noted here…

Some 53 percent of all U.S. households — or 74 million — will receive a tax cut of $100 or less in 2003 from the bill. Additionally, 36 percent of households — or 50 million — will receive no tax cut whatsoever in 2003, while tax filers who make $1 million or more per year will receive an average tax cut in 2003 of $93,500.

Continuing…

Voted YES on $86 billion for military operations in Iraq & Afghanistan. (Oct 2003)

The Afghanistan part I can see back then, but definitely not Iraq of course...

Voted YES on permanently repealing the `death tax`. (Jun 2006)

Voted YES on supporting permanence of estate tax cuts. (Aug 2006)

As noted here, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that ending the estate tax would cost the United States Treasury $1 trillion over 10 years (and C&L reminded us of the tale of Texas billionaire Dan Duncan who passed away in March, and whose heirs will have to pay no estate tax whatsoever, a travesty which has taken place against the backdrop of congressional Repugs refusing to extend assistance to unemployed Americans).

Oh, and by the way, the New York Times tells us the following here today…

Democrats charge that, despite his rhetoric, Mr. Christie has actually driven up taxes at the local level. He cut deeply into a property-tax rebate program and cut aid to schools by more than $800 million, prompting many districts to ask for more from their residents.

The governor deflected blame by encouraging voters to reject local school budgets, which they did in record numbers, and by blaming teachers in most districts for not accepting pay freezes. He also shifted focus to his proposed constitutional amendment on the property tax.

The state budget for the fiscal year that begins Thursday is almost $3 billion smaller than the one passed last year, and more than $5 billion less than the peak spending year, 2007-8. It closed a deficit that the governor’s office had projected at $11 billion.

For months, Democrats assailed Mr. Christie for opposing a “millionaires’ tax” on high-income residents, saying that he wanted sacrifice from everyone but the rich. But the measure would have raised about $700 million, a small fraction of the deficit, and Democrats decided not to go to the mat over the issue and risk a government shutdown. They passed it as a stand-alone bill, which the governor vetoed.

It may have been a “small fraction,” but it would have been better than nothing. But Heaven forbid that either Christie or Little Ricky countenance any inconvenience to the “pay no price, bear no burden” crowd (and you can also consider this similarly infamous moment to be part of that mindset also).

Also, a story has been making the rounds (originating from Drudge, of course) that the Obama administration had only recently accepted overseas help in trying to clean up the mess from BP in the Gulf. This is not true, and Media Matters has the details here.

Finally, that walking, talking, methane-dispensing BS factory known as Marc Thiessen tells us the following (here)…

In the Washington Post this morning, sports columnist Sally Jenkins complains about the lack of popular outrage over America’s elimination in the World Cup: “Why is it that Americans expect to win in every sport we compete in except for soccer? How is it that a nation so obsessed with games seems abnormally lacking in ambition when it comes to the most popular one on the globe?” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, New York, is shutting its doors. According to the Journal, the place never had more than 17,000 visitors a year, and “the hall’s passing seems to have gone almost unnoticed. The local newspaper barely covered its demise.”

The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.

There are a lot of directions I can go with this; for starters, this tells you about the country of Ghana, which eliminated the U.S. from the World Cup. Ghana happens to be a constitutional democracy; its president is John Atta Mills, and the country’s vice-president is John Dramani Mahama.

And my opinion (for what it’s worth) is that soccer hasn’t really caught on in this country because we have a whole bunch of other sports-related distractions that fill up the time. I should note, though, that the latest attempt to bring big-league soccer to Philadelphia, the Union, just won its debut game (and I’m old enough to remember the Philadelphia Atoms, just to let you know).

Also, I got a kick out of this from Thiessen…

Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.

Tell you what, Marc – come on up to “the Linc” to watch the Iggles play the Washington Redskins this year (if you can get tickets) and make sure you wear a bright burgundy Number 5 jersey for your team’s new starting quarterback. And make sure you draw lots of attention to yourself.

I guarantee you that, if you do, you’ll find out for sure what hooliganism truly is.

Update 7/13/10: Oh, according to this, Thiessen was only joking about soccer being a socialist sport (hard to know, then, when Thiessen's posts are intentional or unintentional ones).