At Austin’s suggestion I attended the candidates debate for the 8th Congressional District put on by the Conservative Coalition of Montgomery County. It was, to say the least, an interesting experience. As he mentioned the audience was a modest collection of about fifty people. The two candidates were critical of Kevin Brady’s leadership and felt that he hadn’t been a reliable conservative leader. Both agreed that Brady was mistaken for voting for the TARP ‘bailout’ of the banks last fall. This is an issue that has split both political parties, but it’s generally regarded as the more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans who have been critical of TARP. The two candidates who showed up were Tyler Russell and Scott Baker. Both candidates seemed like amicable fellows, with records of service in the Air Force and a few years of experience in the business sector. Tyler Russell often seemed to be put on the defensive by Mr. Baker who characterized him as not being realistic in what could be achieved. (While both were ultra-conservative, Mr. Baker more readily admitted the need to compromise to achieve some level of progress on their issues. Mr. Russell characterized that sort of stance as being more of the compromise with progressives that he believed had damaged the Republican-brand name under Bush.)
The format for the debate was actually quite good because most of the questions came directly from the audience members themselves. The first question was from Conroe ISD school board member Chris Irish, who asked what, besides the TARP bailout, did the two candidates present find lacking in Brady’s leadership in Washington. Tyler Russell stated that Brady had been supportive of the creation of the Medicare Part D (the Bush Admin. Prescription Plan). Conservatives have long been critical of the Republican Party’s creation of this program. There is a lot that’s lamentable about the program. (The mandate that the government not negotiate drug prices, the cost of hiring private programs to administer it, the donut hole, etc.) The conservative position has been that the government should never make any attempt to make medical care affordable for our nations’ citizens. When asked the same question Scott Baker said that he wished Brady would sponsor H.R. 227, which would declare the government was taking the position that life begins at conception. (He made the claim that the Supreme Court stated in Roe that if the Congress would make a declaration on the issue it would nullify the decision.)
The fireworks began when an audience member asked the candidates what role they thought the Federal Department of Education should play. Scott Baker stated that it should do very little besides educate people about the Constitution. I realized this would be an unpleasing answer for the crowd who had a very specific idea in mind. Tyler Russell served them the red meat when he stated that we should abolish the Department of Education (for being unconstitutional) and asked what good it would be to teach people about it if the government refused to abide by its limits.
The two candidates radical ideas came into particularly sharp focus when the debate turned to economic issues. A woman in the audience asked what should be done with the inheritance tax, which she considered theft or stealing. The two candidates were quick to reply that they both thought that the tax was unconstitutional (as well as a form of theft) and should be repealed. When it came to the income tax Tyler Russell said that it should be ended and replaced with a sales or consumption tax. This is a particularly extreme position on taxes that will never be implemented. Sales taxes are strongly regressive and hit the middle/working class very hard because they are more likely to spend a greater portion of their income. When Governor Huckabee endorsed a version of the ‘fair tax’ for his campaign last year it was revealed that the effective rate of sales tax imposed would be somewhere around 30 percent. Defenders of the program often say that the government could counteract the regressive nature of the tax by offering a program of quarterly sales tax ‘rebates’ but such a plan would probably require a tremendous bureaucracy t o administer. (Since a basic argument for the implementation of the sales or ‘fair tax’ is the elimination of the IRS one would have to wonder what the point would be when this problem is factored in.)
Scott Baker took the more ‘pragmatic’ approach by saying that while he supports a consumption tax he’d prefer to start with a ‘flat tax’ whereby everybody is taxed at the same ‘flat’ tax rate instead of the ‘marginal’ tax rates that are assessed on different levels of income. Mr. Baker stated that until the 16th Amendment is repealed it would be best to defer a consumption tax so as not to risk a ‘double taxation’ of income. The most basic problem with the creation of a flat tax is that the authors who first wrote a book popularizing the subject in the 1980’s admitted that it would raise the tax rate of people with middle-class incomes while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Even as it did so it would still fail to raise the current level of revenue and result in larger budget deficits at the very moment Mr. Baker is expressing concern about the size of our budget deficits.
Both candidates expressed the wish to shut the border. Mr. Tyler expressed the desire to arm Predator drones with missiles, thereby creating a military situation resembling the covert Pakistan War along the border with the United States. Mr. Baker sensibly stated that he didn’t want the military involved in police work on American soil. ( Posse Comitatus) He then went on to suggest such extreme measures as the withholding of Federal money from ‘sanctuary cities’ and suggested that the Constitution is misinterpreted as meaning that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen when he believes that was never the intention of the Founding Fathers.
What was most noticeable about the debate, from my perspective, is the types of issues that were not addressed. While the candidates addressed the question of the country’s addiction to foreign oil there wasn’t a single question directed at the candidates on the issue of global climate change. I suspected that I knew why this was the case, and I feel that my suspicions were confirmed when a member of audience handed me a pamphlet from the Eagle Forum whose headline article stated that the purpose of the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen is the creation of “One World Government.” The author of the piece was Jerome Corsi who’s probably most famous for getting caught lying about John Kerry’s war record in 2004. When the subject of health care was raised Mr. Baker stated that Texas had made great progress by reforming the tort laws. Apparently the continued double digit percentage increase in the price of health insurance and the nearly one in four Texans who are uninsured (the highest level in the nation) are unimportant. I’m guessing results don’t matter to this crowd. After walking away from the event I realized that I had witnessed a very special kind of debate: one involving ideologues discussing theories. My guess is that several years from now both of these gentlemen will still be ideologues….discussing theories.
The format for the debate was actually quite good because most of the questions came directly from the audience members themselves. The first question was from Conroe ISD school board member Chris Irish, who asked what, besides the TARP bailout, did the two candidates present find lacking in Brady’s leadership in Washington. Tyler Russell stated that Brady had been supportive of the creation of the Medicare Part D (the Bush Admin. Prescription Plan). Conservatives have long been critical of the Republican Party’s creation of this program. There is a lot that’s lamentable about the program. (The mandate that the government not negotiate drug prices, the cost of hiring private programs to administer it, the donut hole, etc.) The conservative position has been that the government should never make any attempt to make medical care affordable for our nations’ citizens. When asked the same question Scott Baker said that he wished Brady would sponsor H.R. 227, which would declare the government was taking the position that life begins at conception. (He made the claim that the Supreme Court stated in Roe that if the Congress would make a declaration on the issue it would nullify the decision.)
The fireworks began when an audience member asked the candidates what role they thought the Federal Department of Education should play. Scott Baker stated that it should do very little besides educate people about the Constitution. I realized this would be an unpleasing answer for the crowd who had a very specific idea in mind. Tyler Russell served them the red meat when he stated that we should abolish the Department of Education (for being unconstitutional) and asked what good it would be to teach people about it if the government refused to abide by its limits.
The two candidates radical ideas came into particularly sharp focus when the debate turned to economic issues. A woman in the audience asked what should be done with the inheritance tax, which she considered theft or stealing. The two candidates were quick to reply that they both thought that the tax was unconstitutional (as well as a form of theft) and should be repealed. When it came to the income tax Tyler Russell said that it should be ended and replaced with a sales or consumption tax. This is a particularly extreme position on taxes that will never be implemented. Sales taxes are strongly regressive and hit the middle/working class very hard because they are more likely to spend a greater portion of their income. When Governor Huckabee endorsed a version of the ‘fair tax’ for his campaign last year it was revealed that the effective rate of sales tax imposed would be somewhere around 30 percent. Defenders of the program often say that the government could counteract the regressive nature of the tax by offering a program of quarterly sales tax ‘rebates’ but such a plan would probably require a tremendous bureaucracy t o administer. (Since a basic argument for the implementation of the sales or ‘fair tax’ is the elimination of the IRS one would have to wonder what the point would be when this problem is factored in.)
Scott Baker took the more ‘pragmatic’ approach by saying that while he supports a consumption tax he’d prefer to start with a ‘flat tax’ whereby everybody is taxed at the same ‘flat’ tax rate instead of the ‘marginal’ tax rates that are assessed on different levels of income. Mr. Baker stated that until the 16th Amendment is repealed it would be best to defer a consumption tax so as not to risk a ‘double taxation’ of income. The most basic problem with the creation of a flat tax is that the authors who first wrote a book popularizing the subject in the 1980’s admitted that it would raise the tax rate of people with middle-class incomes while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Even as it did so it would still fail to raise the current level of revenue and result in larger budget deficits at the very moment Mr. Baker is expressing concern about the size of our budget deficits.
Both candidates expressed the wish to shut the border. Mr. Tyler expressed the desire to arm Predator drones with missiles, thereby creating a military situation resembling the covert Pakistan War along the border with the United States. Mr. Baker sensibly stated that he didn’t want the military involved in police work on American soil. ( Posse Comitatus) He then went on to suggest such extreme measures as the withholding of Federal money from ‘sanctuary cities’ and suggested that the Constitution is misinterpreted as meaning that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen when he believes that was never the intention of the Founding Fathers.
What was most noticeable about the debate, from my perspective, is the types of issues that were not addressed. While the candidates addressed the question of the country’s addiction to foreign oil there wasn’t a single question directed at the candidates on the issue of global climate change. I suspected that I knew why this was the case, and I feel that my suspicions were confirmed when a member of audience handed me a pamphlet from the Eagle Forum whose headline article stated that the purpose of the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen is the creation of “One World Government.” The author of the piece was Jerome Corsi who’s probably most famous for getting caught lying about John Kerry’s war record in 2004. When the subject of health care was raised Mr. Baker stated that Texas had made great progress by reforming the tort laws. Apparently the continued double digit percentage increase in the price of health insurance and the nearly one in four Texans who are uninsured (the highest level in the nation) are unimportant. I’m guessing results don’t matter to this crowd. After walking away from the event I realized that I had witnessed a very special kind of debate: one involving ideologues discussing theories. My guess is that several years from now both of these gentlemen will still be ideologues….discussing theories.
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Nice coverage of the debate, but not sure why you make the assumption that double digit health care costs are unimportant to either the audience or the candidates. While both candidates are somewhat immature and committed numerous errors in both debate procedure and matters of fact and logic, I saw no evidence to justify the conclusion that health care costs are unimportant.
ReplyDeleteWhere's the "None-of-the-Above" choice on your health care reform vote?
ReplyDeleteWhat about elimination of the medical monopoly? Monopolies take price control away from consumers and usually always result in higher prices. I had to go to Mexico to get treatment that would and should have been readily available in the US.
What about legalization of drugs? Why should anyone need the approval of a doctor (and be tracked by the attorney general) in order to use penicillin?
What about the elimination of all subsidized medicine (e.g. Medicare etc) which drive up costs? For example, procedures that aren't covered by medicare (e.g. lasik surgury) have been dropping in price for several years.
You've made good points, Joanna. I like the idea of removing the exemption from federal anti-trust laws that our medical insurance companies have. Some states have 80-90% of the people covered by one company. I disagree that all subsidized medicized has resulted in cost shifting to other people. The medical industry will never function as a market with 'pefect competition' and like other markets that are nearly monopolized the government can help control prices/costs. Other countries with universal health control manage to cover all the people at half the cost, and yet their life spans are longer than ours.
ReplyDeleteAren’t the current officeholders practicing their theories, and aren’t they disastrous? Social experimentation at every level, government intrusion into everyone’s life, etc. etc. Crime is up, prisons at above capacity, STDs up, abortions up, dropout rates up, and so on. You call these theories successful? You refer to the debaters as immature, is that a bad thing? Scott Baker referred to returning to the ideas that our constitution sets forth, what is wrong with that? Didn’t we stick pretty close to the constitution for almost 150 years before European socialist moved here and started to bring their theories (theories that have failed completely for centuries) into our schools, and our government, and didn’t it work pretty well? It may be theories to you, but as a history and government teacher for many years, it seems that history proves that it worked well. We did, after all, become the most prosperous and successful, the most powerful, and the most generous nation in the history of the world. And, by the way, the most free. My question is simple, “Why did we move so far away from something that worked so well?” We made mistakes, but we admitted them, then we proceeded to find ways to correct them. We freed the slaves, we gave everyone the right to vote, and we corrected legislatively civil rights issues. Have we gotten everything right so far—No, but we are still young as a nation, by historical standards. The “theories” you refer to have worked in the past, and there is absolutely no reason they cannot work in the future. Get government out of the picture, and let people succeed or fail, and let them resume responsibility for themselves, and they will be the winners every time, and so will America. If we simply return to the moral and ethical standards we started with, (John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”) we can be great again. God bless America Again. A Great Grandfather
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting Raymond. I appreciate your comments. I think the U.S. is an awesome nation that has pioneered many of the things that work wonders in this world. We created the first modern republic, a system of federalism, etc. Many of these things have been tried in other countries with a great deal of success as well. I'd have to disagree on several points. John Adams was less religious than you're painting. He was a Unitarian, and didn't believe in the Holy Trinity. He wrote that in a letter to Jefferson, who also fit that description. He also signed a treaty that stated that the United States government was not based on Christian principles. I believe that capitalism has raised the standard of living for people in the U.S. and the world, but things were hardly better in the eighteenth, nineteenth or early twentieth centuries than they are now. Since the creation of Social Security and Medicare we've managed to cut the povery rate of senior citizens in half. The environment is much cleaner today than it was in the 1960's-1970's due to the governments more stringent environmental regulation. I believe that there are examples of modern government involvement that have improved our lives. My defintion of freedom isn't a nearly complete lack of government intervention the the economy. The truth is that in the past the government was very much involved in the economy. In the eighteenth century the government put up protective tariffs to keep imports out while American business grew. The government also helped the railroads by providing them with land and financial resources. Government has always involved itself in our economy. The only questions are what form of involvement it takes.
ReplyDeleteIt just occured to me and I might add that since 'The Great Depression' the United States hasn't suffered another prolonged period of economic pain on the same scale. The unemployment rate hit 25% and GDP shrank by something like 1/3 over the period of three or four years. This kind of economic problem was far more common before the types of government intervention that we've embraced since The New Deal. The economic panics of 1873, 1893 and 1907 hit the nation particularly hard. The one that occurred in the 1890's is believed to have resulted in something like a five and a half year contraction in the economy as compared to the three or four year contraction that occured in the early 1930's. There is absolutely no way that I'd rather live in that supposedly libertarian utopia than I would at present.
ReplyDelete